The Body Keeps the Score

Continued…

These images show an in-between place, a (so-called) liminal landscape, somewhere between states, a place that mirrored my own state of numbness. It felt very much like the waiting room of grief. As anyone who has lost a loved one will know, you don't really know how to react. There's no road map.

The title of my miniature project comes from a book I found on my mum’s shelves as I cleared the house. It’s about how pyschological trauma is internalised and written onto and into the physical body, and as I digest it properly now, nearly a year later, I’m realising it was a good fit, for reasons I hadn’t foreseen as well as ones I had. Although it’s several years old, Bessel van der Kolk’s multidisciplinary examination of mental health became a bestseller all over again during the Pandemic – hardly an accident. Even a year ago, it felt appropriate, a nod to my mother's career as a psychotherapist and to the game of chance that creativity can often be. I think our job in the first instance is just to be open, and let the work unfold. It also seemed to fit with the marginal places shown in these photos, which spoke to me about how we story our landscapes, and how those stories show their marks on the body of the land itself.

Our bodies and our landscapes are linked, of course. We inhabit both, and both are fragile and mutable. Death is a change of state, and when someone close to you dies, you think a lot about frailty and mutability - theirs and yours. Like many thousands of others my mother had been shielding and had become very lonely and isolated on the new build estate to which she had recently moved. In the suburbs, the past is flattened along with kinship. Neighbours try their best but are nuclear. These seemingly endless mazes of little boxes are for people to eat, sleep and watch TV in, in between shift work. There are no local shops, everyone drives to get anywhere. Our local topographies are designed for profit, not for life.

A few minutes away from her house and through barbed wire topped gates, a few willows weep on, protected from impending ‘development’ with security fencing. A traditional wooden footpath sign is fenced in, too. On my twilight visits, a dissonant chorus soundtracked this waiting place; the mellow warbling of wood pigeons mixed with ambulance sirens while two woodpeckers duelled absent mindedly on either side of a muddy trench. Built on reclaimed land close to the sea, the old tree nursery grounds are boundaried to the north by Black Ditch, an ancient (likely Norman) drainage channel. Our right of way joins a tree lined lane with a World War two pillbox at the junction of three fields. It's only dirt, but whose? I slip back through the fence and find temporary refuge in the rubble.

This edge land is caught between states, a border between history and a sort of never-ending ever-present-day capitalist horror story. But the right of way, the dyke and the Holloway will eventually be assimilated, and their time will be erased. Similarly, van der Kolk’s book examines how trauma victims disassociate from their everyday present as they relive the traumatic event over and over.

At the same time, you work with what you have – even marginal land feels like a respite, if it’s on the edge of a sea of identikit housing. The ex-tree nursery recollects another in-between place I would escape to as a teenager close to the family home on the edge of another town. In the middle of an abandoned brickworks, I could leave limited horizons behind. I would shimmy through a hole in the fence and smoke menthol cigarettes under an unboundaried sky. This new place was the same as the old – a reprieve in the margins, an escape from the food and civic desert of little England's new build estates. Van der Kolk explains how his patients would return to the familiar, even if that meant a return to trauma, because it's where they felt fully alive. Was there an element of this in my return?

So, there's a few dissonances wrapped up in this for me, especially around changing states and memory, which were emphasised by photographing what is effectively a building site - somewhere not conventionally beautiful - but shot during a few days of calm, high pressure winter conditions.

Aside from my pictures and some thoughts about urban planning, which may or may not interest you, what might be interesting about this project?

Like many of us, I’m interested in the idea of returning, and the role of photography in folding time, in co-creating memory, and the related idea that the resultant photos were made over only a few days, but that they could not have been made without all my prior experience to that time – including the teenage brickworks, the dogwalks without the camera, an urban growing up, a rural adulthood. What’s interesting to me is that you just never know how time is going to fold back on you, and which experiences will become relevant later. Do you know when you are looking? I made pictures here before, studies, but they were homeless until such time as they emerged as studies in retrospect. Perhaps the photos are just a by-product, a way of us working out how to live with each other and ourselves. I’ll let you be the judge… but I do think it’s worth considering how we might be engaging with place even when we don’t have an image recording device with us. I’d even go so far as to suggest that the camera isn’t the recording device. We are.

Secondly, if the camera gives us an excuse to explore without judgement, to ‘stalk’ a place and discover what’s interesting about it for us, then it’s important that this is, at least in part, a nonverbal exercise. The old tree nursery was a 3D model that didn’t need me to voice what were, frankly, unspeakable feelings of loss, even horror, at my mother’s changing state. It mirrored my own feelings of being in between states (a waiting room for grief, for which there is no map) and provided objects and topography through which to move.

I had no way of knowing, when I picked the book off the shelf and borrowed the title for myself but van der Kolk explains how our brain physiology inhibits linguistic function under extreme stress, and that physical movement (yoga, breathing… walking?) can aid healing where the talking cure sometimes falls short, simply because trauma causes the verbal part of the brain to shut down. The brain under stress communicates at a base level – in taste, smell, auditory and visual snapshots, and narrative collapses into a series of nonlinear flashbacks. For me (and please pardon the pun), this speaks to walking with a camera as a dynamic, exploratory, and nonverbal process. The irony of attempting to write about this is not lost on me.

It's also ironic that the place is a building site in waiting. Extending the metaphor to the place (alongside use of a camera) providing materials with which to build again might be a stretch, but... ‘you work with what you have.’ It’s not even a compromise from an artistic point of view - it’s interesting, rich, to bricolage in this way. As someone who grew up at the city's edge, this is instinctual. It’s how humans make meaning in an environment undergoing permanent revolution.

Does this kind of work have a place in a magazine like ‘On Landscape’? Again, I’ll leave you to be the judge. I can only say that I'm at peace with the idea that all places exist on a continuum, that we make our landscapes, and they make us. Black Ditch is a man-made drainage channel but will appear as 'natural' to most who view it. Native peoples helped create Muir and Adam’s ‘Range of Light’ through controlled burning and grazing, capitalism put microplastics in our glaciers and effluent in our rivers. Take your pick.

Besides, there was peace in my old tree nursery. It was an imperfect, caveated kind of rest, but nevertheless, there it was, a space that wasn’t yet commodified, given over. A space in which to be frail. It is somewhere that doesn’t exist without its 'other', but I don’t think its value resides solely in its difference to the housing estate next door. There’s a little beauty in the rubble, if you want or need it, and so be it.

Originally written for On Landscape magazine