Chapter 5. A Pattern of Islands

In Chapter 2, I reviewed theory and practice relevant to my method and discussed the context in which I move—the land and ideas of place. In , I presented and discussed three works that together explore how it is that I know the world as a sensate embodied walker. In Chapter 4, I presented seven replicated walks, walks made more than once in the same place. Begun in order to consider time they led me to work with a place beyond that defined by geography, place defined by biological phenomena or socio-cultural coherence.

In this final chapter my ideas from Chapter 3 and Chapter 4 combine as I consider the further interplay of my embodiment and place, and think of ideas of scale. I present a series of works that bound place within the context of a human scale, more specifically, my human scale. Over the course of these works, I experimented with ways of working with a place and these evolved into a method where I daily walked from, and back to, a single common point over a series of days. This built from my ideas of replication but came to be over considerably longer periods of time, and often involved where I was living during the creation of the work—echoes of Tilley’s locale’s (1994).

In early works I was on real islands, walking circumferential routes, and routes defined by chance procedures across a necessarily bounded space. From this practice of walking in a place, and at a scale that emerged from my own embodied limits of walking in a day, I realised that I was working with islands of a certain size and that I could create imaginary islands, places that could be bounded, circumscribed, contained, and edged by my embodied walking, rather than by the sea. I could also explore the metaphor of the island and its associated ideas; this became place-ness as island-ness.

5.1 Island-ness

Islands are sources of fascination generating attempts to visit them (Clarke, 2002; Francis, 2020), and to catalogue them (Schalansky, 2012). I share the fascination, and I seem to end up on islands ... a lot.1 I enjoy being on islands with their proximity to the sea; I enjoy crossing water to get to them. There is something about a ferry ride that invokes a sense of having travelled, to arrive, and to have reached somewhere different. Brinklow writes of this sense of island enjoyment as being ‘islanded’ and goes on to claim that artists can make work on islands that they cannot on mainland—for psychological, spiritual and practical reasons (Brinklow, 2013). Brinklow suggests, that for artists, ‘the smaller the island the better’ (Brinklow, 2013), in that on a small island they can experience ‘an intensity of island living’ a sense of ‘boundedness and connection, isolation and community’.

Artists have worked with islands. They have created works specifically located on or inspired by islands; writers have explored, and sought to extend, the nature of island poetics (Graziadei et al., 2017a; Graziadei et al., 2017b); artists have created imaginary islands and at a delightfully literal (and littoral) level, they have made islands.2 Alongside my visits to islands and thoughts about their scale, ‘the island’ is interesting as a metaphor; I start with some thoughts on a definition.

5.1.1 What is an island?

Island definitions can be as simple as ‘a naturally formed area of land, surrounded by water, which is above water at high tide’ (United Nations, 1982), or can incorporate the idea that the land should be able to sustain inhabitants. The 1861 UK census defined an island as ‘any piece of solid land surrounded by water which affords sufficient vegetation to support one or two sheep, or is inhabited by man’. Others have suggested that an island needs to sustain a fresh water supply (Berry, 2009, pp. 6-10) and thereby be of a larger size than one without such supply. These definitions focus on the land and its attributes; other definitions draw more from the sea. To be an island, the Vikings needed only such sea passage between it and the mainland, that was possible to navigate in a ship with its rudder down, a definition based on moving across the surface of an island’s surrounding sea.

No matter how they are defined, islands are points of conjunction—earth with water, land with sea, stasis with flux—and, in this conjunction, they are bounded. Islands are bounded geologically, formed predominantly of harder rocks that have weathered more slowly than those around them and thus they remain. They are also bounded biologically with examples of divergence in mammal species (mouse) and birds (wren) across the Hebrides (Berry, 2009). Such boundedness is written into the definition of islands—bounded by the sea, they have an edge, they stop, they have a limit beyond which you cannot walk.

5.1.2 Ideas of island-ness

Islands are associated with myth. Some are mythical, in the sense that they represented an idea. Ultima Thule is a mythical place considered to be ‘the northernmost land’; Atlantis only existed in a morality tale—an island of riches and plenty whose mortal inhabitants became lazy and greedy, angering gods who then destroyed the island—though its fabled riches have spawned efforts to find it going back centuries. There are also islands that are mythical in the sense that, as the results of navigation and mapping errors, whilst they existed on charts, they have never existed in reality (Brooke-Hitching, 2016).3

Within literature, islands have been loci of magic, sites for the exercising of magical powers and experiences—as in Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Shipwrecked and stranded through family treachery, Prospero, with his magical powers, rules the island. A coloniser in conflict with his island host (Caliban, made suitably monstrous—islands as homes to mythical beasts), he is also a prisoner. Similar literary de facto island prisons feature in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

The literary island prison is mirrored in the real world. Alcatraz off San Francisco, and Robben Island off Cape Town, are rock island prisons, each surrounded by a treacherous sea—water as warder of the land. The Andaman Islands hosted a tropical island prison and had a different balance of land and sea, stasis and flux. As a low-lying archipelago this was land at threat of inundation, the threat of being overwhelmed by the sea—water as destroyer of the land. Islands of shipwrecked sailors become unintentional prisons. While Defoe’s Crusoe is stranded on one of the best-known English literary islands the story is based on the life experiences of a Scottish sailor—such island prisons constrain, threaten, intimidate their inhabitants.

An alternate to the island prison is the island utopia. Initially described by Thomas More (More, 1516), this could also be portrayed as the vision of Tahiti to which Gaugin sailed, or the vision of England in Shakespeare’s Richard II ‘this sceptred isle ... this other Eden, demi-paradise ... this little world, this precious stone set in the silver sea ...’. But both examples are illusory; there is no island Eden, and every island is Janus-faced with both the utopic and the dystopic.

Finally, islands can be seen as places of solitude. There is a lineage of monastic figures that use islands as places to achieve contemplative solitude. Local to my home in the northeast of England, was St Cuthbert who, having founded the monastery on Lindisfarne eventually withdrew to the solitude of the Farne Islands. So, island-ness offers places that are bounded, edged, touched with magicality, isolation and solitude, and the potential to be seen as a utopia or a prison, a heaven or a hell.

5.2 Walking at my Island Scale

My works in this chapter are interwoven and emergent. There is a progression within these works in that the earliest works were based on real islands—Papa Westray and Fair Isle—with the latter the location of the first of my sequence of random (island) works. This was followed by Four Northumbrian Rants, which I came to recognise as an important intermediate work. On a different, larger, scale to its predecessors, it led to the realisation that I wanted to work on a smaller scale (echoes of Brinklow’s ‘the smaller the better’ (2013)) and from this my island on the edge of the Cheviots, bounded by my embodied walking, was imagined into being. Through the process of creating that first imaginary island I started to think more about islands and this all fed into my creation of Contención Island.4 This is the sequence of artworks that I will describe and discuss in this chapter.5

The works can be grouped into three ‘types’ though, as with other bodies of work that I have described, there is often more than one idea being explored in a work so works could have figured as more than one type.

• (a)round island works—Around the Wind; Beàrnaraigh

• random (island) works—Fair Isle Reels 4x2 (after John Cage), 4 Island Reels (after John Cage), Four Northumbrian Rants, four rants for the summer solstice (after John Cage, 1977)

• imaginary islands—Alnay, Walking Contención Island

On to 5.3 (A)Round Islands 

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