I arrived at Cove with no project in mind, which felt both scary and exciting. I just knew that I needed to unpack my art head and pursue whatever emerged.
So, I was free to start by tuning in to the site. Swimming on my first evening, I realised that Loch Long is tidal… the water’s edge and what’s exposed on the beach is ever changing. I pondered the odd hybrid of inland water which rises and falls twice a day, leaving seaweed on the beach.
Once I’d figured out the low tide mark, I tried to imagine the spot at high tide, with 3 metres of water above it. And pictured a structure standing at that spot with a vessel holding water at the high tide level. Playing with time and place – lifted water – the height of water at that place but not at that time.
High water as a working title
3 metres was a daunting height to construct – plus its water would be invisible to all but giants unless the vessel was transparent… I was thinking on my feet and wanting to make something with whatever I could find or had brought with me.
Meanwhile I was learning about Trident, and realising that the whole of UK’s ‘nuclear deterrent’ lay within a couple of miles of where I was reading in deep silence and apparent obscurity. That set me thinking about power, immensity and concealment. About when power is on show and when it’s hidden.
In the face of this, my structure would be a ‘pathetic object’, lashed together from sticks, in ignorance or defiance of any technologies of the modern age.
It turned out that the beach was scattered with branches from who knows where, along with useful bits of rope.
It also turned out that my lashing skills were pretty pathetic, and needed to be reinforced with 21st-century screws… after which the thing seemed as if it could stand a chance in the sea. For the perched vessel I used some thin brass sheet I had brought, folded into shape without any extra fixings.
‘I’m dancing on the lip of failure and humiliation, & that’s important cos it’s about my life as a so say skilled maker, always expecting myself to be right, to succeed and to perform well enough to pass the judgement of others’
I was walking the line between making roughly and making badly, wanting the former but not the latter. Abandoning finesse but relying on function. I needed it to be able to withstand the rise and fall of at least one tide.
‘The tide movements will make it under/over; seen/not seen. Like Trident. Though its fragility is in stark contrast. Thinking about Greenham Common and the teddy bears on the fence – tiny playthings in the face of a nuclear arsenal. About what garners respect; strength, style, size, inscrutability, money.’
I carried High water down to the beach for the evening’s low tide, feeling scared and self-conscious at the prospect of making public work as an incomer. Alexia had also mentioned that the MOD might be interested, and not in a friendly way, by anything left on the beach overnight, so I had printed off an explanatory notice to hand out if necessary.
Here it is on the low tide line, well anchored with rocks on the lower cross braces… I had no idea what the forces of water would be and whether I would ever see it again.
Writing this some time later, I’m surprised at how emotionally intense the project was.
‘I watched for over an hour until her feet and lower cross braces had disappeared, & the evening water was silver behind and around her, then I couldn’t bear to watch any more in case she started to move or topple. And now the studio seems empty without her & extra silent.’
The next low tide was at 5.35 the following morning. Since that’s the only time I could approach her and check for high tide water in the dish, I needed to be there.
‘Completely windless and a clear sky. Loch like a millpond. Dawn chorus going all round. Light but before sunrise. Lovely to be out. Cold. And there she was, exactly where I left her, dripping wet and with a piece of seaweed draped over one leg. Not such a low tide as last night’s so her feet were in shallow water. I had to wade in to check whether there was water in the dish, which there was. It was very exciting.’
That day I remade the dish from tracing paper, folded into shape and waterproofed with PVA; it was translucent and would show its held water from below. (High water was only 1.6 metres tall, about my height, well below the height of the tide, but still I couldn’t see the water.)
I took the new dish down to that evening’s low tide and fixed it in place, leaving High water for a second night and a third tide. This time with no worries as she hadn’t moved an inch so far.
6.20 the next morning, low tide. Once again the loch completely still. Nothing to see but the boulders which had been ballast, and a roving swan. High water had gone about her business, to borrow a phrase from William Golding. Surely the swan was not responsible? More likely the MOD.
I walked the whole length of the beach in both directions, looking for debris or some sign, but there was nothing to be found. Only the mystery of a lost object, out in the world somewhere unknown to me.
‘Pangs of recrimination that I didn’t sit on the beach all afternoon yesterday and watch her emerge from the water after the lunchtime high tide. A timelapse photography record, or even a little movie, of the whole thing, would have been great. As it is I have to imagine those sights.’ – TD
March 2023 / Cove Park residency, Loch Long, Argyll & Bute, Scotland Vintage Classics paperback edition of ‘Life and Fate’ by Vassily Grossman, pritstik, whipping twine, timber, aeroply, steel screws, plastic waste pipe 213 x 24 x 34 cms Watch Launch Party, a video by Roger Suckling.
I only read Life and Fate because I was stuck at home for a week with covid. It had sat on my bookcase for a couple of years looking dauntingly fat.
It’s an extremely dark book by Vasily Grossman, published in 1960, set around the battle of Stalingrad and describing the horrors of trench warfare as well as the building and operation of Nazi concentration camps.
I must have read it in a state of detachment because when I started again from the beginning I was more shocked than I had been first time round. So for some reason I started underlining all the passages describing food. I don’t know why, except that food provides a poignant yet concrete focus which avoids the major horrors. Mostly it’s quite abject food; a piece of sausage or a crust of bread brought out of a pocket and dusted off, or some mouldy potatoes and kasha.
I just started at Cove Park by cutting pages out of the book and then slicing out all the text except the food passages.
My first thought was to make the cut pages into a standing concertina, but they’re far too flimsy to stand. I was working quicky and a bit roughly because of the 850 pages ahead of me, using Pritstik to join the edges. I started by hanging it between 2 trestles using thin battens as a support, then substituted waxed thread as it’s more minimal.
I realised that I’d need to build a structure to support the dangling threaded pages, and so the final object gradually emerged. I used timber and skinply which I’d brought with me, really enjoying the challenge of construction with minimal materials.
Once it was finished I was shocked to see that I’d made an elegant and rather enigmatic object, without remotely having planned it, and for some reason I could barely look at it for a while.
I also realised it could be some kind of ship. This was the closing of a circle – I had come to Cove Park wanting to make something site specific which engaged with Loch Long or the Clyde. And that’s what I had done.
The work is clearly about secrecy, redaction, concealment of the major facts. Whose power does that enhance?
I thought about Trident, moving under the sea anywhere in the world, its power boosted hugely by invisibility.
The Clyde as a trade route, bringing food to the UK from all over the world without its origin stories. It sits on supermarket shelves as its fresh and shiny self, silent about the brutalities or deprivations which ripened it.
The next thing which shocked me, far more deeply than the aesthetics of the piece, was that I had just erased all reference to atrocities, genocide or violence of any kind. The remaining subject was largely sausages. A wave of shame passed over me.
What are the ethics of remembering and forgetting? How do they function as survival strategies?
My partner sent me an article by David Reiff, called ‘The cult of memory: when history does more harm than good’. He quotes George Satayana saying’ those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. He then goes on to argue for the virtues of forgetting as an alternative to being perpetually embittered by ‘the sores of history’.
I’ve now wandered into a huge arena…
Maybe I’ve created a memorial to things that have been allowed, or forced to be forgotten…
Returning to the work, I needed to make it seaworthy, or at least ‘lochworthy’, hence the added crossbars, and then the outrigging using 50mm wastepipe, which would make sure it floated even though they’re a bit makeshift and don’t really relate to the rest of the work.
The launch party was a lovely thing; all the other Cove resident artists wanting to share in the trip and see the launch. Much nicer for me than going alone. It’s a beautiful walk down the road to the loch and across the shore, and we’d picked a calm dry morning after days of rain.
Even so, the pages raced from end to end in the slightest breeze, reminding me of the huge difference between inside and outside.
She did sail very nicely on the calm water, but the incoming tide and an onshore wind meant that she didn’t try to pull at her rope and head off towards the Clyde, so the launch felt quite tame. I would really like to let her go and watch her disappear towards the horizon, but does that constitute littering? – TD
• Roger Suckling was a fellow resident at Cove Park that week; he made a lovely video of the launch party. https://rogersuckling.co. uk
Late March 2024 – I’m back at Cove Park for the third time, the third spring, the third carload of assorted materials and a head swimming with ideas which I will hope will not tie me down.
Wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, just for starters.
In the face of which I want to fly a white flag on Loch Long; to build a raft for it to sail on.
Under the nose of Trident, the submerged heart of Britain’s nuclear arsenal. Proof that we are still one of the great powers, or want to be. We still have the brocade and the medals and we want to punch above our weight.
Coulport naval base at night.
The white flag is the ultimate subversion, isn’t it?
I surrender. Don’t shoot. I’m a civilian. Save my body and my life.
Is a flag a nation?
Whose job it is to defend itself and its citizens?
Is this the nation of pacifists?
Would it let evil roll over it without resistance?
Is it the weakest and most despised of nations, allowing the worst to flourish unchecked?
I’ve sat squirming with all this.
But the white flag also just says STOP IT, ENOUGH NOW.
So, how to start? I wanted her to be very minimal, a sketch of a raft.
Oak, mainstay of British sailing ships which powered the empire, here reduced to the scrapings, the thinnest of laths.
40mm grey plastic waste pipe…..ubiquitous material of the late 20th century. The business end, the petrochemical oak of now.
Birch for the flagpole, humble pioneer timber of marginal land and the north.
Cotton. Of which no more needs to be said? Except that, as my Cove Park neighbour Morwenna Kearsley remarked, it’s torn cotton, a sheet repurposed for escape. Ripped, then stitched tightly onto the birch so that the texture of its bark reappears in a white fabric version of itself.
I know nothing about boats or floatation, so I’m working on hunches about weight and surface area, and hoping for a steady wind.
Here she is on dry land outside the studio, overlooking the loch, and here’s the launch party… Morwenna videoing; Kseniia Kari and Martin the party, making it a wonderfully playful adventure.
How beautifully she sailed. The rainbow was either corny or absurdly perfect; either way, it appeared while we were filming.
Maybe I’m working up to a flotilla of vessels; a series of short stories or one act plays on the loch.
Life and fate (2023)
High water (2022)
Exciting to corral the projects of these three years and start to think about how they speak to each other and where they might lead.
So many thanks to all at Cove Park for helping me reach this point.
When I was 16, I stopped sleeping in my bed and began to spend my nights in a sleeping bag on the floor. It was one of those silent acts of rebellion by a non-confrontational person. It infuriated my mother; my best friend’s parents told her I must be a communist and she should be wary of me.
I used this episode from my youth to launch an exploration of sleep as an act of dissent, as one of a dwindling number of refuges from the imperatives of modern life.
During a bad patch, trying to ignore or rise above my low spirits, I had the urge to crawl into the cupboard under my sink and be contained in its small abject space. This urge seemed so shameful that it was some time before I allowed myself to act it out for the camera.
