“HERE” : A JOURNEY ALONG THE HUMBER ESTUARY
Rich Industrial Shadows, oil on canvas, 41cm x
51cm
NEW SERIES
As I have said in my Artist's Statement, I
am interested in the cultural landscape of my area; the way human activity and
the environment interact and develop. Industry, housing, and leisure impose themselves onto an evolving landscape, and where human intervention has taken place, it often harmonises with nature. In the Humber Region forces of nature, the power of the sea
and the flow of rivers are vital in understanding its evolution. I have been capturing these ideas in photographs, sound and video recordings sketches and paintings as I have travelled around and walked along the banks of the Estuary. My final series of paintings will lead to a solo exhibition.
Ideas about the way geography
and a particular “sense of place” affects us reminded me about the poem Here, by Philip Larkin (1922-85). Larkin is one of the most highly respected British poets. He spent
much of his career as the chief librarian at the University of Hull, moving to
Hull in 1955 and staying for the rest of his life. He came to appreciate the
city and the surrounding area, especially its physical location and remoteness.
His poetry therefore resonates with my work about the Humber Estuary and its
fading industrial heartlands. Larkin's poems have a great sense of “place”.
Over recent months Here has acted as a source of inspiration for a series of works. The poem envisages a journey which follows a route from the “rich industrial shadows” of West Yorkshire along the banks of the Humber through to Hull and beyond to the North Sea and “unfenced existence”.
I have therefore come to use the poetry of Philip Larkin as part of my toolkit to explore what is fascinating and distinctive about the Humber Region. Some of the titles of the paintings I have made refer to words from the poem and are descriptive of the place, others refer more broadly to concepts expressed in the phraseology.
HERE, by
Philip Larkin, 1961
Swerving
east, from rich industrial shadows
And
traffic all night north; swerving through fields
Too thin
and thistled to be called meadows,
And now
and then a harsh-named halt, that shields
Workmen
at dawn; swerving to solitude
Of skies
and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,
And the
widening river’s slow presence,
The piled
gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,
Gathers
to the surprise of a large town:
Here
domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster
Beside
grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,
And
residents from raw estates, brought down
The dead
straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,
Push
through plate-glass swing doors to their desires –
Cheap
suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,
Electric
mixers, toasters, washers, driers –
A
cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling
Where
only salesmen and relations come
Within a
terminate and fishy-smelling
Pastoral
of ships up streets, the slave museum,
Tattoo-shops,
consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;
And out
beyond its mortgaged half-built edges
Fast-shadowed
wheat-fields, running high as hedges,
Isolate
villages, where removed lives
Loneliness
clarifies. Here silence stands
Like
heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,
Hidden weeds
flower, neglected waters quicken,
Luminously-peopled
air ascends;
And past
the poppies bluish neutral distance
Ends the
land suddenly beyond a beach
Of shapes
and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:
Facing
the sun, untalkative, out of reach.
As I researched Larkin, I read more about his life to place
his poetry into context. There are some uncomfortable aspects
about Larkin’s views which should be acknowledged. However, despite the criticism of some of his views,
“His poems – scrupulous, precise and ascendingly lovely –
are true and wise: they speak to us of the big things, of birth, marriage and,
above all, death.”
(Cooke, 2010)
