After a recent Climate Museum UK meeting, I was invited by Mark Banks of Glasgow University to bring Queer River to Glasgow as part of The Dear Green Bothy – ‘hosting creative and critical responses to climate emergency‘ – in the lead up to the COP26 climate talks.
Queer River, Wet Land will take place in Glasgow on 9th and 10th of September, and will see me walking and making with Minty Donald, Artist and Professor of Contemporary Performance Practice at the School of Culture and Creative Arts.
Minty has a wealth of experience in working with rivers in her own practice, in particular through Guddling About ‘exploring humans’ interrelations with rivers and other watercourses‘ www.guddlingabout.com and Erratic Drift ‘a project by Minty Donald and Nick Millar, in collaboration with the rocks, stones, and silt of Glasgow‘ www.erraticdrift.org.
Mute Swans on the Salisbury Avon
On the second day Minty and I will be joined by three more collaborators:
Rachel Clive – Theatre practitioner, writer, facilitator/teacher and researcher. Rachel’s art/science research interests include hydrofeminist practices and flood-risk management.
Cecilia Tortajada – Professor in Practice – Environmental Innovation at the School of Interdisciplinary Studies, Glasgow University. Working at present on complexity of water, environment and natural resources policy and management.
Ingrid Shearer – Archaeologist, Heritage Engagement Officer for the Glasgow Building Preservation Trust, and a previous collaborator of Minty’s.
Walking Pages (detail)
Queer River, Wet Land will focus on the interrelationship of land and water, and involve walking, making and dialogue with human collaborators and the rivers Kelvin, Clyde, and Molendinar Burn.
I’ll share documentation and reflections from the two days of walks here on the Queer River blog, and artwork that develops from them. Minty and I also plan to create a performance score as a result of the walks (new to my work but an integral part of Minty’s practice), which will support others (nationally and internationally) to collaborate with us remotely in Part 2 of the project. An online event will then follow in October/November in order to share the project and the work of our collaborators more widely (date/details tbc).
Canal Reflections
There’s so much about this project that I’m excited about, and so much that I know will grow from it, not least an exploration of the relationship between my walking/ecological practice and contemporary performance, and new working relationships with people carrying out such relevant and important work.
I’m thankful to Mark, Minty and the other collaborators for agreeing to join me and share their knowledge and experience, in a Queer River exploration of Glasgow’s waterways.
More to follow soon…
(The featured image for this post is titled River Clyde from Glasgow to Clydebank: Map of the river Clyde from Glasgow to Clydebank, and was created by the Clyde Navigation Trust in 1960)
On Friday I joined other artists exhibiting in the Queer Constellations exhibition, at The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL) in Reading, to see our work, meet each other for the first time ‘in the flesh’, and take part in workshops/discussions relating to the subject matter of the exhibition, namely queerness and rurality.
Queer River: Boat and Body (James Aldridge)
Daniel Baker
Epha J Roe
Gemma Dagger
Emma Plover
Claye Bowler
Artwork in the exhibition
As part of the day I ran a workshop sharing my Walking Pages process and inviting the artists, exhibition coordinator Joe Jukes and Queer Rural Connections originator Timothy Alsopp, to layer their experiences of the MERL’s garden, onto printed photographs. The intention was to give people a chance to explore how we can document queer experiences of place, and consider how these might differ from mainstream representations.
“Why do I have to watch Brokeback Mountain or God’s Own Country to see a slither of queerness in nature?” he asks, regarding the overarching portrayals of queer people in gritty cityscapes. “It’s obviously not the case, and I wanted to spotlight the people, the pioneers and explorers, making the countryside work for them.”
You can watch Ned’s film here:
There’s a lot for me to process from the day, but there’s a few key things that stand out for me that I’m thankful for and left focusing on. Firstly our diversity – we are all different, our work is all different and we each have the capacity to evolve and change within that. It’s definitely not one size fits all, despite all that we share. We don’t all run away to the bright lights of the big city, and even if we do, many of us return to settle in rural areas. Whilst rural spaces can give us the freedom to be ourselves, they can also mean that we have to ‘come out’ again and again.
Workshop in the MERL gardens
What I took away from my workshop was the focus on multi-sensory experience, as people included scent and texture in their pieces, reponding to experiences of lavender, the wind or the shape of the chicken run. I was interested in how 2D images were folded, cut, rolled, and queered. Semi transparent layers were placed over the top of the ‘official’ photographs of the Museum grounds, holding text that related to experiences of childhood gardens. Others had holes punched through them, or were drawn on to explore the unseen reality beneath the surface.
Ned Botwood
Laura Büllesbach
Workshop in the MERL gardens
It’s been a big leap for me to start exploring my sexuality/gender identity so publicly in my work. Now that I am, it can feel a pretty solitary experience. I make the work, write or talk about it to an audience, or send it out into the world (either online or by post), unsure of the reception that its going to get. This exhibition and artists’ gathering has been the first opportunity I’ve had to exhibit and share my work within a specifcally queer context. I’ve been thankful for the opportunity to come together and share both our practices, and our thoughts and feelings about being queer in the countryside.
I’ve hung onto everyone’s pages from the workshop (not something I usually do), in a box I put together for the purpose, and will share them as a collection when I exhibit more Queer River work in the future. I hope to keep in touch with everyone from the exhibition, and to be able to come together to continue our conversations in the future, as I feel that I’m learning a lot.
A box full of pages on my way home
The Queer Constellations exhibition continues at MERL in Reading until September:
‘Queer Constellations is an exhibition that poses the question as to whether there is queernessin rural life. It brings together artists from around the UK and Ireland, including Epha J Roe, James Aldridge, Emma Plover, Gemma Dagger,Eimear Walshe, Claye Bowler and Daniel Baker, to delight in the strangeness of rural life and to feel its enough-ness. We invite users to trespass the space, explore the margins, and to join us in queering the countryside...’
Ideally these initial experiments would lead to me coating my whole body in chalk on the riverbank, before immersing myself in the river. But that’s for another day…
‘Queer Constellations is an exhibition that poses the question as to whether there is queernessin rural life. It brings together artists from around the UK and Ireland, including Epha J Roe, James Aldridge, Emma Plover, Gemma Dagger,Eimear Walshe, Claye Bowler and Daniel Baker, to delight in the strangeness of rural life and to feel its enough-ness. We invite users to trespass the space, explore the margins, and to join us in queering the countryside.
The exhibition also features a collection of MERL objects that represent the lives of historical gay men with rural occupations. Though found through criminal conviction records, we aim to show that these men were more than just a conviction…’
I’ve always had an interest in shapeshifting, in the ability to switch between bodily forms, or to exist as a human/animal hybrid. But I’d not really thought about it from a Queer perspective, so this post is very much a beginning.
Of course, we are animals, and the animal/human divide is a false one. In Queer River I’ve looked at where the river ends or begins, where the land and water meet, above and below the surface, and the urban and the rural. All divisions or boundaries that we are familiar with in word and idea, but which dissolve away through the embodied experiences of the more than human, watery world.
Shapeshifting 1 – Collage c.2010
When I first Googled Mermen images (the main watery human/animal hybrid that I could think of) a lot of homoerotic imagery appeared. Muscular, wet, beardy mermen on t-shirts and other merchandise, catching the eye of the viewer and attracting the attention of the pink pound.
In reading about mermaids and sirens, I discovered that their role was often to seduce male sailors with their beauty and lead them to their death.
“Historically I think we have always cast mermaids’ freedom and sexual power as something dangerous [luring men away from home, dashing ships on rocks] and harmful to communities…Mermaids were an object lesson to young girls, teaching them that pursuing their appetites and desires is selfish and destructive. Nowadays there is such a movement to reclaim women’s sexual agency that it makes sense we are also reclaiming mermaids at the same time.”
Which left me wondering about the role of Mermen, and their links with gender and sexuality. What’s on offer for the queer sailors? And what happens in rivers? Are there river based mer-people too?
‘…mythological creatures inhabiting the stretch of water between the northern Outer Hebrides and mainland Scotland, looking for sailors to drown and stricken boats to sink… The blue men swim with their torsos raised out of the sea, twisting and diving as porpoises do. They are able to speak, and when a group approaches a ship its chief may shout two lines of poetry to the master of the vessel and challenge him to complete the verse. If the skipper fails in that task then the blue men will attempt to capsize his ship.’
‘The legends said that mermen were shapeshifters, able to transform themselvesinto different shapes as quickly as sunlight reflecting in water. Contrary to more modern versions of the mermen scantily clad, legendary mermen often appeared in full dress attire playing the violin in rivers and waterfalls or materializing as an animal, especially as a river horse. Scandinavian names for the mermen like Naack and Nokk came from the old Norse nykr, which means “river horse.”’
‘He dwells in swamps, lakes, rivers, and even in aquatic environments that routinely drain during the dry season, like waterholes and billabongs. Although he is typically considered to be an aquatic creature, he has been sighted lumbering over land as well.Originally (it) went by a different name in each indigenous tribe: the Wowee-wowee, the Yaa-loo, the Kianpraty, the Dongu, and more. When Europeans got their hands on these various monsters, they united them under the single most popular name: Bunyip.‘
Right now I’m exploring what happens in the meeting of homoerotic imagery of same sex attraction, and stories that blur the line between human and animal/elemental. It’s made me think of the categories in gay slang/subcultures, which draw on body shape/type, and link them with the names of animals. The bear, otter, or cub for example (the giraffe was a new one on me).
‘The term ‘bear’ was popularized by Richard Bulger, who, along with his then partner Chris Nelson (1960–2006), founded Bear Magazine in 1987. There is some contention surrounding whether Bulger originated the term and the subculture’s conventions. George Mazzei wrote an article for The Advocate in 1979 called “Who’s Who in the Zoo?”,[2] that characterized gay men as seven types of animals, including bears.’
I guess there’s a danger that by using this kind of terminology we move from the queerness of freedom from categorisation, back into stereotypes. I prefer the freedom to be me that identifying as queer provides, rather than the need to fit in that gay culture sometimes seems to demand. But there’s also a positivity that comes with being able to feel a sense of belonging, to be a bear among other bears for example (I’m too tall to be a bear but don’t fancy being a Giraffe).
I’m more attracted by the hairy animality that being a bear or otter suggests, and the kinship with wild animals that implies, rather than the glitteriness of a cartoon influenced, rainbow coloured, mer-person. Similarly the attraction for me of animal/human hybrids is visceral, it’s about skin and sinew, seaweed and salt, becoming half-wild.
So my interest in this area isn’t about the grouping of people into ‘types’, but about the thinning of the cultural/perceptual barriers that have been set up (in contemporary Western culture at least) between people and (other) animals, so that we can start to slip between the two. As with everything Queer River, this strand of research aims to both explore and go beyond the lines that we draw between us, and I’ve started some collages to help me do that.
Merman Collage, July 2021
Ways of making that combine together disparate imagery and materials seem appropriate to exploring Queerness. Collage lets me bring elements together that ‘shouldn’t’ coexist. Multiple exposure photographs and layered video resist the viewer’s urge to define and categorise. Through them I can create a world where we become both this and that, human and animal.
Several conversations recently have directed me towards chalk as subject matter and material, from my recent walk with Ecologist Tim Sykes discussing chalkstreams, aquifers and neolithic monuments, back to the very first walk with Geo-Archaeologist Claire Mellett, and current plans for future collaborations exploring the use of natural pigments, silts and chalks.
The ‘Quarry’ at the Top
Today I took a rolled up length of black card, some black paper, white crayons, white pencils and a white pen, out for a walk, from the bottom of the Pewsey Vale to the top of the Downs.
Half Way Up
While I walked I noticed light and shadow, white flowers and objects, and thought about the chalk beneath my feet. I wanted to explore how to record a walk with light on dark.
At the top there was a small quarry which gave me access to the chalk itself, to play, make marks and coat my hands and feet.
Flint
Here’s a short video which shows the walking pages in full and gives a sense of the shape of the surrounding chalk downland, with the Pewsey Vale and the River Avon below.
Yesterday I took a walk with Tim Sykes along the River Kennet from Avebury. Tim, an ecologist who works for the Environment Agency, contacted me via Twitter (@RiversAndPeople) in connection with his doctoral research with Southampton University, into people’s relationship with and perceptions of chalk stream winterbournes.
‘I am especially interested in contributions to happiness, well-being, life satisfaction, sense of place, place identity and attachment… I aim to contribute to the public health, blue health and nature connectedness agenda… and inform better Governance of water resources… properly valuing the true benefits & costs of water…’
Tim Sykes
We met at the National Trust car park on the edge of Avebury village, and made our way along the Kennet to Silbury Hill, Swallowhead Spring (one of the sources of the Kennet), and West Kennet Longbarrow.
Avebury is very much a part of my local patch, but as I started this research focusing on the Avon, I hadn’t yet included it or the River Kennet within my Queer River walks. I also hadn’t throught of this stretch of the Kennet as being a winterbourne, despite the act that it disappears during the summer months.
I made my first film and audio work Walking Back to Marden in response to neolithic monuments and their relationship with rivers, and included this area in the sites that I visited, alongside Marden Henge and Durrington Walls. I was also aware from my time working at Stonehenge on various projects in the past, of the role of chalk in the creation of henges and mounds, and of the flint that forms within the chalk in the creation of flint tools, but my knowledge of chalk streams until now has been fairly limited.
I knew that both the River Kennet and the Salisbury (or Hampshire) Avon are chalkstreams, that they are camparatively rare, and often threatened by over extraction of water, and pollution from agricultural run off. I had also begun discussions with artist Jac Campbell about the relationship between our river related practices, and a possible collaboration linked to our local chalk streams (Jac makes work about/with the River Lark in Suffolk) . But I hadn’t got much further than that.
As we walkied I made notes on paper and took photographs with my phone, which I later experimeted with printed over the pages of notes and drawings. As with all my walks, it’s hard to condense all that was discussed and explored into a single post, so alongside an increased awareness of what a chalkstream is, I’ve pulled out three key subjects that we discussed, which will inform and feed into future Queer River work.
Layered notes and images from our walk
Winterbournes – I learned from Tim that a winterbourne doesn’t have a be an entirely seasonal river, i.e. a perennial river like the river Kennet can have a stretch that is a winterbourne, like at Avebury, where the position of the spring head of the river changes with the seasons and weather. I also learned that certain species are adapted to living in/at the site of Winterbournes. I feel like I’ve gone from thinking about a winterbourne as a bit of a sad thing (as if it and all its inhabitants die or fail) to being a special kind of river that I need to know more about.
Aquifers – I guess I always had an image of some kind of underground pool of water when aquifers were mentioned. To be honest I’ve never really thought about them much before, but through talking with Tim now have a much clearer understanding of what they are and how they function, and they’ve really grabbed my imagination. Because chalk is permeable, in areas like mine, much of the water sits below the surface of the land, flowing within the chalk itself.
‘ I do think, when trying to help society become cognisant of aquifers, the messaging might think how to translate these hidden waterbodies into the equivelence of lakes like Loch Ness or Windermere that many people are familiar with – we have our very own Lake District in chalk-dry Wiltshire, its just that like an iceberg we only see it when it spills out to form springs and chalk streams.’
Tim Sykes
Rivers (more specifically chalk streams), and neolithic cultural practices (earthworks, rituals etc) – I’ve not got much more to say about this at the moment, apart from the fact that my walk with Tim really helped to connect this area of my practice, which I’d kind of put on hold, with my Queer River work, and that’s exciting.
The idea that a chalkstream is just the tip of the iceberg, a small part of a much larger water body is really exciting too. In the past I’ve written about the way that rivers are seen as linear, that maps with thin blue lines, and agricultural or engineering practices that restrict rivers by encroaching on them, reinforce our idea of a river as an isolated ribbon of water that runs along the surface of the land, but the idea that a river goes below the ground, as Tim said, literally adds another dimension.
So thank you to Tim for your time, knowledge, and enthusiasm. I can feel a whole new chalky, watery world opening up to me!
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I’m also on the look out for funded opportunities to share my Queer River work with the LGBTQi+ community, through events and workshops that support others to have similarly creative, hands-on experiences of their own local wetlands. If you’re part of an organisation who would be interested in working together on that, or would like to help support in another way, please do get in touch.
At the same time that Queer River evolves to include different wetland habitats, my garden wildlife pond, dug in early April continues to evolve, with diving beetles, pond skaters and various fly larvae arriving. Yesterday I sat by the pond to start to draw some of the plant life, and saw my first damsel fly, a Small Red.
I’m fascinated by this new community of life that I’m helping to create, and the changing shapes, colours, movements, reflections and growth that I observe from day to day, the relationship between the above and below, land and water, man-made and wild.
Pond drawing with paper boat – multiple exposure photograph
Multiple exposure photographs allow me to layer different imagery together, to play with the relections, depth, transparency and interbeing that I notice within different wetland habitats, to (once again) blur boundaries and remove obstacles to a more fluid way of seeing the world.
A couple of Saturdays ago, I met with the botanist Mark Spencer, at Slade Green railway station in south east London, for a walk across the Crayford Marshes (an area of grazing marsh near to Erith) down to the River Thames. I had heard Mark talking about his work on Radio 4’s The Life Scientific (listen again here), so got in touch to let him know about Queer River, and invited him to choose a location for our walk together.
‘Dr Mark Spencer is an experienced and internationally respected botanist. His expertise covers many disciplines including forensic botany, the plants of North-west Europe, invasive species and the history of botanical science. He also works globally as a seasoned writer, public speaker and television presenter. As a forensic botanist, Mark has worked on various missing person enquiries, murders and other serious crimes.‘
I layered printed pages with text and found objects as we walked
Mark has been involved in gay activism and HIV/AIDS activism through organisations such as Act Up, particularly in the early 1990s, which struck a chord with me and my research into the relationship between the AIDS crisis and the Earth Crisis, and was a founding member of the London House of The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence.
‘The Sisters devote ourselves to community service, ministry and outreach to those on the edges, and to promoting human rights, respect for diversity and spiritual enlightenment. The Sisters believe all people have a right to express their unique joy and beauty and use humor and irreverent wit to expose the forces of bigotry, complacency and guilt that chain the human spirit.‘
As Mark and I walked and talked, he shared with me why he’d chosen this place for our walk, and what it meant to him. I asked him questions about the relationship between his work as a botanist, and his identity as a Queer man. We also discussed the impact that the changing climate and sea levels are having on the landscape and its biodiversity, on the value of urban biodiversity in general, and what the likely effects of climate breakdown will be in the future.
River Darent leading down to the Thames
On the way, I made notes of key names, facts and quotes, and gathered different objects from along our path and down by the river’s edge. I recorded the walk using a box of pages that I had put together a couple of days previously, sheets of paper printed with maps of the site and images of previous Queer River walks, overlaid with my notes, mud from the riverbank and the objects that I collected (see the ‘The River is a Guide to the Land’ for another example of how I use Walking Pages to document Queer River walks).
Some of the pages after our walk
We talked about the relationship between botany and colonialism, in the context of museums and collecting. I was interested in what Mark had to say about botanic terminology that enables us to understand when and how plants have arrived in this country, and whether they are seen as native, invasive etc. I was also struck by the relationship between the site’s timeline of historic changes/adaptations, its current industrial uses, and the current/coming impacts of climate breakdown – between what many might see as ‘natural’ forces and man-made development.
Plants which can tolerate salt water are becoming more common as sea levels rise, and seaweeds are gradually moving upstream as salinity increases. Dumps of domestic and industrial waste along the coast are at real risk of being submerged and leaking into the sea as the low lying land is engulfed. As Mark said: ‘This is in many ways a Queer landscape… diverse, weird and at the edges… like our community’.
The edge of the Thames at Crayford
Mark shared how his sense of social justice was informed by his upbringing and his queerness, including being bullied at school. His sense of what is kind and fair is profoundly intersectional and ‘frames how I position myself in terms of how I relate to biodiversity.’
I asked Mark of his thoughts on Rewilding, a useful concept we both agreed, but a word which may now be being ‘corrupted’, or morphed from its original meaning, as people use it for all kinds of acts and projects that, although coming from good intentions in the face of climate fear and grief, may do more harm than good.
For example, tree planting schemes that plant trees onto increasingly rare grassland habitats in urban areas, or too closely together and without thought for the understorey, which is necessary for a healthy, functioning woodland ecosystem. Or the scattering of wildflower seed mixes without an awareness of whether those species are suitable for where they are being scattered (or the impacts upon existing vegetation). Mark, as I understand it, champions the process of ‘minimum intervention restoration’, an approach to landscape regeneration that is sensitive to what has come before.
We talked about what it means to be an activist, and why Mark feels the work of scientists such as himself isn’t valued as activism. That his advice is often not sought or listened to when such ‘rewilding’ projects take place, and why it’s the big, visual acts that are often valued, rather than the quieter, slower processes based on research into the site’s ecology and history.
As with all my Queer River walks, there was much more than I could include here. This post is just a beginning. All of our conversation will continue to inform my work both inside and outside of Queer River, and I’m grateful to Mark for being so generous with his time and open with his reflections.
My time with Mark has strengthened my resolve to look more closely at the biodiversity of wetland sites and the relationship between Queer people and wetlands. In recent weeks I’ve been digging a wildlife pond in my garden and have been sourcing native aquatic plants to add to it. I’ve enjoyed being able to spent time focusing on a small scale, newly created, wetland habitat, and watch it change day by day as new organisms such as diving beetles and pond skaters arrive to colonise it. Habitats like marshland, ponds and riverbanks have always captured my imagination with their merging of water and land, their feeling of being on the edges.
Garden pond and River Avon
In the future I plan to take a walk with the geographer, artist and researcher Sage Brice, whose research in the past has incorporated time spent in a range of watery landscapes, and among other things, making use of peaty soil to draw the Eurasian Cranes she found there. Sage also researches trans perspectives on/experiences of the land.
One of the subjects that Mark and I touched on were the changes that are taking place in our landscapes due to the changing climate, including the spreading of new or previously locally rare plant species, and the influx of new bird species such as egrets and herons. (Alongside the reintroduction of Cranes,White Storks and Sea Eagles. Today it was announced that a scheme to reintroduce eagles to Norfolk has been given the go ahead).
Of course its not all about our landscapes being enriched with a new variety of bird and plant life. As our climate changes and bird species move up into the UK from the south, those species that specialise in living in colder, upland habitats to the north get pushed off of the top. Equally, it’s easy for me to lapse into thinking about new species of wetland plants colonising coastlines and estuaries, or shifting from one place to another, but the fact is that sea level rises may be too fast and too high in the future for these areas to exist above water at all, and many coastal habitats, such as Crayford Marshes, precious strips of land sandwiched between the sea and industrial or housing development, may be lost altogether.
Industrial site at Crayford and the River Thames towards Tower Bridge
As the waters rise, will there be anywhere for the plants and animals of coastal marshland to move to? Will we finally stop building on floodplains, and how will we manage the retreat from the edges that will be necessary? What will we do when the floodwaters reach the hundreds of coastal landfill sites, waste dumps and nuclear power stations? And how will we coexist with all the other plants and animals as the land shrinks?
I’m excited to have been invited to share some of the Queer River artwork as an installation at the Yarmouth Springs Eternal exhibition in Great Yarmouth next month.
‘Yarmouth Springs Eternal is an arts, nature and walking project based in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk. It will take place from the Spring Equinox to Summer Solstice in 2021. The overall ethos of Yarmouth Springs Eternal project is about connecting with nature and seasons, with a particular focus on overlooked spaces and everyday interactions. The project will also explore the importance of this relationship on our wellbeing, the feeling of wholeness connecting with nature can bring, and the “awe” of being part of something bigger. Yarmouth Springs Eternal is also underpinned by research outlining the inequality of access to green space in the UK.’
The project has been set up by Artist Genevieve Rudd and the exhibition will be curated by Kaavous Clayton of Original Projects. The exhibition runs from 19th May until 20th June, at PrimeYarc, a former Debenhams store in the Market Gates shopping centre, with a conference on Saturday 22nd May at which I and the other artists involved will be talking about our work.
‘The Yarmouth Springs Eternal exhibition will feature artwork and a co-designed pamphlet created during a series of artist-led community walks/workshops, attended by adults in Great Yarmouth with lived experience of homelessness and migration. The exhibition will also include showcases from guest exhibitors from across UK exploring creativity and the connection to the natural world: Jacques Nimki, James Aldridge, Jason Evans Bill Vine and Company Drinks.‘
I’ll share some images of the full installation once it’s up and I’ve visited the exhibition, in the meantime I’ve included some photographs of work in progress for the exhibition, from a walk along the River Avon (Bristol Avon) near Lacock yesterday.
Queer River 