Robert Macfarlane questions Abigail Reynolds
on ShapeShift; landscape in motion

RM
You’ve described the work to me as ‘a huge
extinction wave’. Can you tell me more about
this image?

AR
The work is in itself a sort of massive energy wave.
A huge amount of energy goes into the fabrication
– it’s strong but rough. To build it a team of
people worked flat out for thirteen days. The
reverberations of this energy linger in the work.
When I was thinking about this sculpture I
remembered those banks of slides in amusement
parks – each slide is a different colour but they
form a solid wave. You can’t slide down the
ShapeShift sculpture but it has this sense of
kinetic energy. I am a bad surfer, so I frequently
get buffetted in the shore-break, which
has given me a very physical sense of the terrifying energy of waves. The physical impact and energy of the sculpture is essential to its meaning.
There are many waves across the length of the
sculpture, with one huge waterfall-like drop.
These literally map sea-level changes and the
effect of this on biodiversity. I think of each
one as a struggle by living things to evolve and
proliferate in constantly changing conditions.
Each rise is a surge of energy and optimism
that’s then pushed down again. I suppose this
extinction curve – as the waves drop – is more
poignant for me than successful generation.

RM
Why have you used recycled materials to create
the strata of the piece?

AR
It would have been much faster to use new material
to build the sculpture, because then you can just
call a supplier and get precisely what you want.
This not only saves a lot of labour in collecting and
processing, it also means that you don’t have to be
as creative. Mending and making-do is a genuinely
creative activity, and used to be our pervasive
attitude to objects. Contemporary economic
conditions such as globalisation, oil abundance and
cheap labour means we’ve superseded this attitude
in the UK. Everyone just buys a new thing and
chucks the old thing into landfill. To work exclusively
with recycled materials is an environmental decision
and a social comment – because we are creating
whole landscapes of landfill across the globe I
am reluctant to add more to the pile. When the
exhibition closes, the sculpture will be dismantled
and all the materials will return to the centre they
came from for recycling.
Sculpturally, using recycled materials means that
everything already has an embedded time and
narrative – they are complex materials – they’ve
been somewhere. We have processed everything
into small bits, which removes them from what
they were, but previous use tends to linger. The
sculpture contains bed-heads, chairs, kitchen
cabinets, coffee tables, even parts of old fencing
from Durlston Country Park. One section we are
using as a support still has a notice on it from its
previous life as a gate. It reads ‘Leave the flowers
for others to enjoy’.

RM
Is scale as significant as shape in this work?

AR
The scale I’ve chosen is aggressively room-filling
to achieve that crucial sense that it overwhelms
any individual in the room with it. The work
exactly fits the reception room of Durlston
Castle, and you can view it from many different
angles; you can walk over it in one place, under
it in another, you can view it from the height
of a platform or at floor level. The sculpture is
like a huge body – like Gulliver in Lilliput or a
dinosaur skeleton in the Natural History museum;
something unfamiliar that you want to get a
sense of from all directions.

RM
Has working on this piece sharpened or
threatened your sense of yourself?

AR
That’s also linked to the scale of the sculpture:
at this scale the work stops being personal.
It’s not one person’s making, it’s the work of
many hands. That’s important to me. As well
as the team that built the sculpture, the work
is also a collaboration with two scientists and
also involved a group of local people who love
this coast line. The sculpture is a vision of a
collective situation rather than my interior world.
Culturally, we are encouraged to be self-obsessed
individuals, which I find increasingly tedious,
even in art works where you sort of expect it.
I am more interested in placing the individual
in the wider picture.

RM
One of the effects of deep time, in my
experience, is to abolish ethics. Seen in the
context of the Cretaceous, present-day human
actions become negligible. You understand that
homo sapiens will pass, given time, of which
there is an abundance. Do you recognise this
effect? Does it concern you?

AR
It’s rather calming to have your individual person
negated in the way you describe.

RM
Is this sculpture as warning, or sculpture as elegy?

AR
Hmm… can it be both? Ideally it would be both.

RM
You are fascinated by layers and layerings,
for example, in your earlier work Mount Fear.
From where does this interest come?

AR
We’re always looking at the top surfaces of
materials and in fact the edges of them are
often more curious because they are less familiar,
so I sometimes like to build only out of edges.
In common with ShapeShift, Mount Fear tries
to suggest an accretion of events over time, and
the only way to visualise that sculpturally is by
layering. Mount Fear is an accretion of violent
human interactions. Similarly, the whole premise
of ShapeShift is that tiny increments (numbers of
microfossils, gradual changes in temperature etc)
have massive effects when they are added up.
When you make an object by layering each layer
makes only a small difference, but when that action
is repeated and repeated over time you achieve a
massive effect. In this way the making itself mimics
the source, as well as the final surface.
If you were to look at almost any rock, as you
walk along the beach below the castle from
Peveril Point, you would see that it is comprised
of countless fossilised bodies – usually of snails,
oysters and mussels. The surface is beautifully
complex and layered. This is another reference
for the sculpture.

RM
Finally, what’s an ostracod? And – do you think it
could beat a pterapod in a fair fight?

AR
The team that are building the sculpture now
call any off-cut of wood ‘an ostracod’, as
that’s what we are using for the ostracod line.
Fossilised ostracods can just about be seen
with the naked eye in the rocks on the beach
below the castle – they look like minute bakedbeans
in sauce. They aren’t extinct. They are
still in today’s oceans. And since the notable
fact about ostracods is that the penis takes up
a third of it’s body area, I wouldn’t fancy an
ostracod’s chances in any sort of fight, let alone
with something pronounced ‘terror-pod’.

Abigail Reynolds questions Robert Macfarlane

AR
In your book, Mountains of the Mind, you talk
about our imaginary relationship to landscape,
can you tell me more about this concept?

RM
Our responses to landscape are for the most
part culturally devised. That is to say, when
we look at a landscape, we do not see what
is there, but largely what we think is there.
We attribute qualities to a landscape which
it does not intrinsically possess – savageness,
for example, or bleakness, or homeliness
– and we value it accordingly. We ‘read’
landscapes, in other words, we interpret their
forms in the light of our own experience
and memory, and that of our shared cultural
memory. The anthropologist Franz Boa spoke
of ‘kulturbrille’: culture-spectacles, the lenses
through which, to more or less witting degrees,
we see the forms of the world. It’s important
to remember, however, that there are aspects
to any landscape that are non-negotiable,
uninflected by culture. If you fall from a seacliff,
imagination will not give you wings;
if we are trapped in a cave by a rising tide,
there’s no way of dreaming yourself free.

AR
How important for you is the experiential or
physical sense of landscape?

RM
Essential, politically and aesthetically speaking.
So many forces now warp us away from direct
experience of the land on which we live.
Urbanisation, habits of travel, modern farming
practices, footloose industries, the internet…
more and more people are being prised from
a relationship with the physical aspects of
this archipelago – its scores of rock-types, its
capricious weathers, its tides, seasons, birds,
plants and creatures, its hundreds of rivers,
its thousands of peaks. We experience, as no
historical period has before, disembodiment
and dematerialisation. The almost infinite
connectivity of the technological world, for all
the benefits that it has brought, has exacted
a toll in the coin of contact. We have in many
ways forgotten what the world feels like. And
as we have done so, many new maladies of the
soul have emerged, unhappinesses which are
complicated products of the distance we have
set between ourselves and the world. We have
come increasingly to forget that our minds are
shaped by the bodily experience of being in the
world – its spaces, textures, sounds, smells and
habits – as well as by genetic traits we inherit
and ideologies we absorb. A constant and
formidably defining exchange occurs between
the physical forms of the world around us, and
the cast of our inner world of imagination.
The feel of a hot dry wind on the face, the
smell of distant rain carried as a scent-stream
in the air, the touch of a bird’s sharp foot on
one’s outstretched palm, or the feel of a fossil
beneath one’s fingertips: such encounters shape
our beings and our imaginations in ways which
are beyond analysis, but also beyond doubt.

AR
How do you see our contemporary relationship
to landscape in relation to the past? Has there
been a cultural shift in our attitude?

RM
Generalisations on this topic are difficult and
dangerous. But one significant and relevant
change would be the arrival, in the early
nineteenth century, of the idea of ‘deep time’
with regard to landscape. Geology, in the early
1800s, battled and (to some degree) overcame the
creationist ‘young-earth’ orthodoxy, which held
that the earth had been created in seven days,
only a few millennia ago. Geology, impertinently,
ratcheted back the age of the earth by billennia.
Suddenly, it was possible to view landscape
surfaces, and landscape cross-sections (such as
one gets on sea-cliffs) in terms of vertiginously
ancient time-schemes: this inch-wide stratum was
laid down 250 millennia ago, that inch of chalk
represents the compressed bodies of uncountable
invertebrates, settling down into a limy silt over
the course of thousands of years.

AR
Do you think Immanuel Kant’s ideas of the
Romantic sublime and the Mathematical
sublime are still relevant?

RM
Unmistakably. HD Thoreau spoke of wildness as a
power which allows us ‘to witness our own limits
transgressed’. Sublime sights – those natural
forces or presences that are too big, too fast,
too vigorous, too ancient for us to comprehend
– are chastening. They remind us that we operate
within a world that exceeds us in multiple ways.
Deep time is a sublime energy, or dimension, or
force, or whatever we would call it. Though I’m
also interested in wonder, as potentially a less
crude, more constructive response to landscape,
in that it does not overwhelm, but prompts
desire to save, help and cherish.