Projects → Constructs

Constructs

2015 -

An ongoing project about World War II constructions in Shetland. My work with both drawing and photography explores connections between ideology and depiction of space in images; utopia and war, decay, the role of landscape in art and changing meanings of the sublime.

‘Skaw I’ December 2019 | graphite pencil on paper, 10.5 x 14.8cm

‘Sumburgh’ December 2019 | graphite pencil on paper, 10.5 x 14.8cm

‘Skaw II’ December 2019 | graphite pencil on paper, 10.5 x 14.8cm

2019 -

Perspectives

Drawings from Shetland's war ruin sites

Continuing an interest in exploring linear perspective through Shetland’s war ruins, these graphite pencil drawings are all in two-point perspective. This ‘corner-on’ viewpoint allows for views beyond and through in images, and can also give a greater sense of expansive realism. In these concrete war-constructions however, stark walls enclose interior spaces, and corridors often lead nowhere or stop suddenly. Drawing these spaces is mostly about rendering blocks of tone - considering how areas of light and dark contrast and relate to show depth. The sense of order this creates in the images, the feeling of planes of space fitting together like a puzzle, is disrupted by small elements of decay that are included. Cracks, stained walls, or rusty metal-work tell of the passage of time, and remind us of the more sinister purpose of these constructions, which can at first sight easily resemble Modernist architecture.

2017

Tracing Patina (Landscape Formations)

Group show : Gillian Bridle, Jeanette Nowak, Vivian Ross-Smith (and myself)

Working together with the other three prizewinners of 'Black & White : Shetland Open 2016', we all made responses to the theme 'Traces'. Our shared interests and connections included paths and patterns in nature, decay and preservation, traditional skills, and lines as potentially expressive of impermanence and the layered-ness of time. I'd first started exploring imagined landscapes in the 'Ruins of Skaw' drawings in 2015, and wished to continue for ‘Traces’. I wished to explore landscape-painting tradition further, and also to research how how depiction of space and use of perspective in images can potentially be expressive of different world-views or ideologies.

In making work for 'Traces', I also took inspiration from a Leonardo da Vinci quote where he suggests looking at patina of decay as way for artists to invent landscapes for their work. He describes a way we can creatively see new worlds and forms in the chaos of the world around us. More than simply a useful device for artists, it seems that da Vinci is almost describing a world view, that chaos and decay are actually desirable - and perhaps even necessary.

To explore this further, I gathered together photographs of decaying walls I'd taken at RAF Garth's Ness, a former NATO LORAN A radio navigation station located in South Shetland. Active from 1961 to 1978, this site gave crucial aid to ships and aircraft crossing the Atlantic - and allegedly may also have been involved in Cold War listening activities [1]. In tracing shapes and lines in sections of decay-patterns found on the walls at RAF Garth's Ness, I was able to generate imaginary landscapes, translating the small into the large as I drew formations of islands, hills and shorelines. These landscapes were as though viewed from an aerial or 'floating' viewpoint. This oblique perspective put the viewer in a position of floating in time and space also, of being 'everywhere at once', and so outside of time's linear progression - in some kind of ruin-landscape.

In Shetland, war ruins like RAF Garth's Ness can be found scattered all across the island's otherwise untouched and wild-seeming landscape. Encountering them makes us realise that 'nature' and an idea of its pure sublime beauty is an increasingly fragile notion in a post 20th-century-war world. In the 'Tracing Patina' drawings, I hoped to evoke an ethereal, wild kind of ruin-landscape (one before/after human habitation). In this deceptively 'natural' drawn landscape in-fact being generated from patina found in war-ruins, it contains hidden darknesses. I

1. Archaeology Shetland.org. 2016.

2015 - 2017

WAR RUINS OF SHETLAND

A series of drawings from Shetland's war ruin sites.

In these works, I was interested in creating a tense sense of space and depth using strong perspective, with the vanishing point placed in the centre of each drawing. Together with using tracing paper, this approach gave an eerie atmosphere, the image seeming to draw the viewer in, yet also seeming forever 'beyond' in its translucency.

2014 -

RUIN PHOTOGRAPHS

Images from Shetland's war ruin sites.

Experiencing Shetland and its ruins can be compared to experiencing a kind of 'chronotope', a place which "allows movement through time and space simultaneously"[1]. Geological landscapes and areas of wilderness are to be found, largely unchanged over great spans of time. And ruins, both ancient and more recent, have been left to their slow decay, allowing us to sense the layered-ness of time. Here I’ve collected together photographs of Shetland's war-ruin sites taken over the last few years. Each ruin is different, affected by processes of decay in different ways and inhabited by their own unique and strange atmospheres. But together they give a sense of Shetland as a kind of ruin-landscape, one where we feel time continually unfolding in its many layers, making us conscious of a more ethereal present which is fleetingly captured in the photograph.

1. NORFOLK, Simon (discussing ideas of Mikhail Bakhtin). 2015. 'Afghanistan: chronotopia'. Simon Norfolk [online]. Available here.

2014 - 2015

RUINS OF SKAW

Work from Shetland's war ruin sites, 2014 - 2015.

In this body of work, I became interested in how depiction of space and use of perspective in images can potentially be expressive of different world-views or ideologies. Throughout the project, I moved between both photography (so dominant in modern-Western society) and drawing, and so was led to explore the fixed mechanical ‘eye’ of the photographic image and its single-point perspective in contrast with other more fluid techniques of depicting space in drawing. In particular, research into the ethereally beautiful landscapes of traditional Chinese art led to a focus on using oblique perspective for Shetland’s war ruin drawings. This ‘floating’ viewpoint, conveying a more cyclical understanding of time, strangely seemed also expressive of the atmosphere found at these sinister ruin-sites. Seeming almost ‘outside of time’, these war-ruin structures are eerily futuristic despite being in states of decay, belonging to both a war-scarred past and a vision of a possible future. As relics of the failed ideologies of the 20th century, these sites remind us that in striving for an idea of continuous ‘progress’, and understanding time as a linear progression of ever-increasing growth and achievement, the utopia we seek will always lay in the future, at an ever-unreachable point which, like the vanishing point in linear perspective drawing, is the location of an infinitely distant place in time and space.

2015

pOSTCARDS (FOR TOURISTS OF DECAY)

 'War Ruins of Shetland', Set of 8 viewcards from photographs taken in Shetland, August 2015.

At many of Shetland’s war-ruins sites there can be found ‘lookouts’ and pillboxes from which military personnel would have defended crucial locations nearby. The windows in these lookouts frame parts of the environment outside, landscapes often largely unchanged since the sites were occupied. When we stand and look through these vantage points we can see the world much as it once has appeared to another person in a another time – in many ways an experience comparable to the viewing of a photograph. We can imagine servicemen in wartime waiting and watching here, a lookout window or pillbox loophole almost like the viewfinder of a camera, offering a contained viewpoint through which to see the vast landscape outside. 

It seems we have many ways to establish ‘lookouts’ or viewpoints for ourselves from which to see the world. The photographic image for instance, an invention of modern times, has allowed us to capture and also try and make sense of our complex modern environment, a place where developments in scientific understanding have not only led to innovative technologies, but also to new forms of weaponry and warfare. Photography has continuously advanced along with the progress of our modern and more recently digital age, and older forms of traditional film photography are now often viewed with wistfulness and nostalgia for old technologies.

 In the ‘War Ruins of Shetland’ postcards seen here, I artificially evoked qualities of old photographs using photo-editing software, giving my digital images a nostalgic sepia tone in disconcerting contrast with their more sinister subject matter. Nostalgic emulation of the past, as discussed by Paolo Magagnoli in his essay ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester’ (2011), need not always be a regressive or ‘rose-tinted’ approach, but can alternatively tell us something about our present. Magagnoli talks of the progressive potential of nostalgia to “become a strategy to defamiliarise the present and to open up a space for utopian imagination” [1]. During visits to Shetland’s war-ruin sites, it often seemed that the present was a little ‘less familiar’. These ruins were futuristic despite being in states of decay, simultaneously seeming to belong to both a war-scarred past and an apocalyptic version of the future. At these sites, the chronology of history seemed less certain - and the ‘present’ suddenly something more strange and ethereal.

When photographing Shetland’s austere war ruin sites, my images often strangely seemed to have ‘picturesque’ qualities, for instance in the way landscape featured – in grasses softly framing bunker entrances, or in views of the sea giving dramatic backdrops to cliff-top lookouts. I often considered tourist picture-postcards, a nostalgic tradition which has allowed visitors to send home snapshots of their travels since Edwardian times [2]. Postcard images tend to of course avoid the unsightly or dilapidated, capturing instead scenic locations. In using my images of war-ruins to make a set of postcards, I was interested in creating a kind of alternative ‘scenic tour’ around Shetland. Although usually overlooked on the visitor-trail, these more austere parts of the landscape are reminders that in-amongst the picturesque parts of our natural environment are often relics from more sinister events in history. 

1.     MAGAGNOLI, Paolo. 2011. ‘Critical Nostalgia in the Art of Joachim Koester’. Oxford Art Journal, 34 (1), 97 – 121. 

2.     HUDSON, Norman. 1992. Souvenir Postcards from Shetland: Shetland in Picture Postcards. Lerwick, Shetland: The Shetland Times Ltd.


RAF GARTH'S NESS

Folding photobook using layered tracing paper. Images taken at RAF Garth’s Ness, Dunrossness, Shetland, August 2015.

  • RAF Garth’s Ness is a former NATO LORAN A radio navigation station located in south Shetland. Active from 1961 to 1978, this gave crucial aid to ships and aircraft crossing the Atlantic [1]. Now however, all military activity is long since gone, and the site has been left to its slow decay.

    When walking around the ruins here, the visitor encounters a surreal and still atmosphere. Remains such as still-intact light-bulbs or left behind machinery are still to be found, bringing the past tangibly close. Some quarters are identifiable, for instance former bathrooms or kitchens, but the purpose of other strange and dark rooms is unintelligible. Secrecy still seems to linger at RAF Garth’s Ness and a visit to these eerie and solitary remains reveals little about their alleged additional role as a ‘listening station’ in the Cold War [ibid] .

    Richly coloured patina of moss, rising damp and peeling paint is everywhere, signs of nature’s decaying forces, yet strangely beautiful in this sinister place. The combination that we find at RAF Garth’s Ness of mystery, time and decay can be said to evoke a powerful sense of the sublime. Yet this site is very different from picturesque or grand gothic ruins, often described as ‘sublime’. The “…new meaning…” that seems to inhabit buildings as they start to decay, as discussed by sociologist Georg Simmel in his essay ‘The Ruin’ (1911), one where time’s logic seems to bring together human will and “…the working of non-conscious natural forces…” in a “…common root” [2] no longer seems to quite fit with the sinister new ruins at Garth’s Ness.

    In fact, in these remains from our recent war-scarred history, the will of nature and the will of humans almost seem at odds. As our own potential for destructive behaviour through war (and ever-increasingly environmental damage) only seems to grow, it can be difficult today to imagine an idea of nature’s innate reason like Simmel’s - one where our actions are ultimately fleeting and part of a much larger and all-encompassing progression of nature and time. The developments in science and understanding in the last century, as well as driving the creation of modern and technologically advanced societies, have also advanced warfare. Conflicts can now be fought across huge distances through the invention of technologies such as radar and satellite navigation, and nuclear weaponry has introduced a form of destruction which involves the very atoms which make up our physical world. It is said our actions over the last centuries will leave a radioactive footprint in the earth’s geology, evidence of what may become know as the ‘Anthropocene’ era, or ‘Age of Human’ [3]. These new and chilling kinds of warfare and destruction affect our complex physical environment in many more ways than we can immediately see, and it seems we are only just beginning to understand the full implications of some of our destructive actions.

    This modern world of both advances in understanding and increasing levels of chaos has also brought with it new and more complex ideas about the nature of reality and time. For example, philosopher Henri Bergson in his book ‘Matter and Memory’ (1908) proposed how a deeper understanding of differences between past and present was key in understanding the nature of matter and our perception of it. Bergson understood reality as an ‘‘…aggregate of ‘images’..." [4]. Our perception of the present moment was, he argued, largely informed by memory and past ‘memory-images’, making the present something continuously created anew by the past - continuously “an accumulation of the past in the present”.

     In today’s world, it can be said that our advanced technologies provide us with more and more ways to ‘accumulate our past in the present’. Through networks and communication technologies, our daily lives are saturated with alternative realities in places and times other than our own, and photographic images in particular shape our experience of this. Advancing in parallel with progress in science, technology and warfare over the last centuries, the photograph has allowed the modern world to capture, record and repeat itself, firstly through negatives and printed images, and today through our networked virtual environment. This means that now, as well as ‘memory-images’ (as defined by Bergson over a century ago), we now use these networks and images to continuously shape our present, leading to a strange and “double-faced” view of time as discussed by Laurence Scott [5]. In discussing the recent exhibition ‘Borrowed Time’ at Jerwood Space, London, Scott highlights the idea that our technology has led us to a strange age “defined by both innovation and nostalgia” where social media “creates a mood of eternal ‘nextness’” but also encourages us to create continuous archives of our lives –  today it seems “…Our pasts have never been more present” [ibid].

    In taking photographs of Shetland’s ruined yet strangely futuristic wartime sites, I became more aware of these dualistic notions of time. My photographs of the mysterious interior spaces at RAF Garth’s Ness, when collected together, seemed to evoke a feeling of restless journeying through a strange labyrinth of crumbling doorways and corridors. In experimenting with printing these photographs on tracing paper and layering them, I sought to make images with a sense of shifting uncertainty, their contained ‘snapshot’ of reality starting to break apart or fade away in parts. Each printed image here isn't a distinct moment in time – looking through them in their translucency we already see another space unfolding behind whilst the memory of the last image still lingers.  

    The form of a concertina book seemed to add to this feeling of a constantly unfolding reality, leading the viewer to look backwards and forwards simultaneously as they move through the pages and around to the start again.

    A common feature of all the photographs used here, and a thread which runs through the whole book, is a distant window in each image. Illuminated by light, this seemed to give a feeling of a continuously unreachable endpoint, a glowing 'beyond' which is always distant as the viewer travels through the pages. In seeking to evoke pre-digital forms of photography in the slide- or negative-like qualities of the images in this bookwork, I considered also ideas of the strange nostalgia of our "double-faced" era [ibid]. In a world driven by the momentum of progress, it seems our present times, and increasingly our resources and natural environments, are often sacrificed for aspirational futures which are perhaps forever beyond reach, and we are left with an increasingly fragile ‘now’.

    Aimee Labourne, 2016

  • 1. ARCHAEOLOGY SHETLAND.ORG. 2016. 'Site in Focus - RAF Garth's Ness' (online). 

    2. SIMMEL, Georg. 1965. 'The Ruin' (1911). In Kurt H.Wolff (ed.) Essays on Sociology, Philosophy and Aesthetics by Georg Simmel et al. New York: Harper & Row, 259-66.

    3. DAVISON, Nicola. 2019. 'The Anthropocene epoch: have we entered a new phase of planetary history?' The Guardian (online). 

    4. BERGSON, Henri. 1988. Matter and Memory (1908). Translated by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer. New York: Zone Books.  

    5. JERWOOD / FVU AWARDS.COM. 2016. 'Laurence Scott: 'Borrowed Time' (online). 

    // See also: Laurence Scott: 'Borrowed Time', talk at Jerwood Space, 4th April 2016. 

EXHIBITION

  • War Ruins of Shetland | Shetland Museum, Hay’s Dock, Lerwick | 15th - 29th February 2016

Showed seven drawings: Skaw (I), Skaw (II), Inner Skaw (I), Skaw (III), Sumburgh (I), Compass Head, Inner Skaw (II)

Also showed copies of folded book work ‘RAF Garth’s Ness’, and ‘War Ruins of Shetland’ postcards.

TEXT

  • ‘Ruins of War'

    22 pages, 4305 words. Accompanying Essay for Sumburgh Head Lighthouse Residency, 2nd - 29th August 2015