Time, Art, Land - Ireland's Sculpture in the Parklands

•  John K. Grande

 

Earth specific sculpture, actually in the landscape, with traces of the industrial, all this in an era where sustainability and new initiatives to build links with the land are taking place…, Engendering a new relation to the land, Bord na Mona, Ireland's national peat harvesting company founded in 1946, generously offered 50 acres of its cut-away bog lands to initiate Sculpture in the Parklands with sources for sponsorship coming from Offaly County Council, The Arts Council, West Offaly Partnership and Lough Boora Parklands Group. Peat has been harvested in the Lough Boora area since the 1940s as a source of fuel and electricity production for the people of Ireland. Harvesting was completed in the late 1990s in the Lough Boora area, and an alternative use plan has since been adopted. Sculpture in the Parklands founder, Kevin O'Dwyer's inspiration for land-based sculpture produced the first symposium at Lough Boora in 2002, whereupon artists were invited to respond to the industrial and environmental heritage of the region. Eight large scale, site-specific works were added in each subsequent year. The industrial sculptural aesthetic that permeates Sculpture in the Parklands carries echoes of history and of the re-use and recycling of industrial materials. This heritage combines with a growing nature presence as the land regenerates, redefines its character, and provides the public with a place where recreational fishing, model airplane flying, education, and nature walks are but part of the picture.

Bord na Mona's action plan enacted in 2010 designates areas for nature conservation. Established in the 1940s and 1950s to develop Ireland's peat resources, Bord na Mona now owns 7% or 80,000 hectares of Ireland's lowland bogs. For decades since, a source of fuel, the bog areas that provided the peat were also habitats for a great range of bird species and the increasingly rare grey partridge. Whooper swans, snipe, lapwing and golden plover are among the bird species visitors can interact with while visiting the sculptures on site along the trails. Nesting birds of concern to conservationists include the Snipe, tufted duck, little grebe, skylark, black-headed gull. The flora of the parklands includes Phragmite reeds, water horse tail water mint, march bedstraw, marsh arrow grass, bramble, hard fern and the bog cotton that contrasts the back of the peat landscape so beautifully. Scots pine, aspen, willow and Dowry birch predominate as tree species in the region.

Rehabilitation of the lands includes management of the hydrology; draining, damming, blocking outfall, planting of species receptive to the specifics of this environment, generating reed beds, scrub and invasive species clearance, and woodland management, and alternative energy development in the form of willow tree harvesting, and new energy initiatives that include a wind farm.

Sculpture in the Parklands is part of this new initiative to redefine the land sue at Lough Boora. Art links to sustainability, and nature links to the human condition just as we humans have altered, adapted, and used nature, we must now manage, cultivate new uses and potential for re-use in nature, the house out of which all economies are dependent. The artists working at Sculpture in the Parklands come from a variety of places in the world. Each has a particular way of working with nature, of expressing their art. Each brings their own specific cultural experience and this plays a role in the way their art manifests itself. It can involve aspects of dance, of music, of design, of ideation, or any number of innovations that can evolve this new paradigm of an art that integrates with nature, land topography, climate and place in general. There is an awareness of the incredible versatility and variety of nature and its forms and manifestations. Many of the ideas initiated by artists working with nature today are seized on by “professionals” in others fields - landscapers, designers, architects, horticulturists, educators, and craftspeople. This gives a sense of how relevant an art that deals with the experience of nature really is, even more so in a world where new technological innovations are increasingly pulling us away from direct experience, the tactile world, into a parallel experience indulged on, and produced by the micro-screen technology.

The sculptures evolve, integrate, even return to nature over time. The ephemeral takes over. Nature takes its course and art adapts. Nature itself is a conduit for the human creative impulse. The challenge is in sublime integration, and the intuitive creative response to site and materials. At the entranceway to the trails that extend some 20 kilometres through the parklands, Caelan Bristow has designed and produced a pavilion to commemorate the ancient enclosures and animal habitats from earlier times. Using disused machinery and recycled materials Bristow integrated one shelter into the embankment while the other stands adjacent to Patrick Dougherty's walk-through woven willow Ruaille Buaille (2008) landscape nature sculpture. Nature is recycled, wrapped onto, and the architecture of the trees Dougherty weaves around are part of the art. These spaces reference habitat, yet are dynamic, with actual living trees into the forms. The willow weaves its way through out with North Carolina-based Pat Dougherty's help. He is a fine branch fitter who senses where to place and work with a nature space, as he moves through the sculpture as a process in progress. Dougherty's has a vernacular style that challenges traditional and avant-gardist art making attitudes simultaneously. There is no dogma to his approach. The art involves and is life itself. With the help of 20 professional craftsworkers, local artists and community volunteers Patrick Dougherty built this cavernous woven willow environment of swirling chamber-like spaces and walkways that open up and narrow as they wend their way through the Alder forest they are ever so subtly set in to. Using over eighteen tons of willow from the region, Dougherty's piece is hands on, a real time environment that engages the viewer for its animated lines of willow drawn in space it grew out of, Ruaille Buaille, is also one of Pat Dougherty's largest outdoor sculpture works ever created. This is not the purist landscaper's aesthetic, nor is it the object-based minimalist's terrain. An art about life, very ephemeral, it will inevitably disintegrate and return to the earth it grew out of. There is no museum, no container, and no display case necessary to justify Pat Dougherty's art form.

 

Naomi Seki's Boora Stacks invokes memories of the industrial, and recombines it all, recycling steel cylinders from the Bord na Mona yards, a stone's throw away from this site. The industrial becomes a home for re-growth, as evidenced by the replanted heather and birch. Though apparently minimal in conception, Boora Stacks combines notions of regeneration and the multi-layered history of these parklands.

A Tree in a Sculpture is a second Seki piece that visually challenges with its upward reach of sketch-like line of wood. A Birch tree native to the region planted with the piece, is Seki's own thought out gesture, and a living one enacted for some future scenario, when that Birch tree “grows through” the hole in the flat planar angle of wood that is part of A Tree in Sculpture's conception and reality. The challenge is one that takes time, for eventually the tree will surpass the human-made art, and eventually a harmony and balance will resonate between the natural and the man-made elements that exist as a duality in the piece. Organic will resurge in the form of the tree, and the geometries of Seki's eight metre high structural three-dimensional drawing will exist in tandem with the tree as a living icon of perpetual change.

 

Marianne Jorgensen's The Secret Garden has the word HAPPINESS inscribed in the peat rich landscape surface. Jorgensen invokes signology, and an imagery of the land by cutting and scripting her way into the land surface. Like so many of the sculptures realized at the Parklands, Jorgensen's was achieved with the help of Bord na Mona

Workers. The workers' actions become a kind of writing on the land, just as nature has unconsciously “written” its diversity into these ancient lands over the millennia. And now we have a simple action, ephemeral by nature, that will change as a result of nature, enacting the words WAR, PEACE, LOVE, WAR and HAPPINESS (a state one can achieve by recognizing our place in nature's systems, and the freedom that accompanies living in the moment, in physical tactile space). Just as these words have eroded due to nature's actions, and the physical space that combines with human perception to build language, words, grammar changes, so the cross cut into the peat by Jorgensen has now vanished as a part of the process…. The actual sacking for The Secret Garden was brought over from Denmark, filled on site with peat and hand stitched together by the artist using embroidery thread.

 

Jorn Ronnau's contemplative and time based triangular Meditation Space gives the visitor a place to sit down and appreciate the landscape from within. Made up of 4,000-year-old yew and bogwood that has been stacked like firewood to form the walls of the piece, Ronnau's art lets the landscape peers in through the openings in these ancient and temporal nature walls. Nature becomes the membrane for our conscious perception and sensibility just as nature is the art of which we are a part.    … Ronnau's welcome stepping plate at the entrance to Meditation Space has a snake engraved in relief. You see it as you enter and exit the piece. It could be a tribute to the ancient cultures we originate from as peoples, or the serpent could be threatening. It could also be a friend or guardian for this quiet contemplative place. Framed in iron at its edges, and with a seat made of yew inside, Ronnau's sculpture is as site sensitive a response to the horizon and expanse of Lough Boora as one could find. There is something monumental, and temporary to it.

 

Caroline Madden's Cycles (2006) results from the artist's sensitive understanding of the unique character of the Lough Boora Parklands, a place where the industrial, the primordial, and the natural exist as a multi-layered pot pourri of traces, tracks, diverse growth forms and peat layerings on clay. Just as this ancient place was once covered by waters at the end of the ice age, it still holds water due to the clay layerings beneath the peat. And Madden's is the most feminine of sculptures, with its red seeds that extend out of the spirals atop the piece, symbolic of flame, of growth, of passion, and the fruit of a new life that will emerge as these Lough Borough land return to a variety of land uses that will generate biodiversity. The twelve plough blades forms rise up from the ground, a memento of the old peat harvests, while the regal red colours atop Madden's sculpture are suggestive of a decorative crown, something that references the early Kingships of Ireland who would have traversed these lands.

Mesolithic people hunted and gathered for their livelihood at Lough Boora, as witnessed by the old shoreline archaeological site, a beach in ancient times, now simply part of a landscape. Indeed the Mesolithic site on Lough Boora lands, discovered by former Bord na Mona employees Kieran Egan and Joe Craven and excavated by archaeologist Dr. Michael Ryan, had artefacts dating back to 6800-7000 BC, the oldest recorded site of human activity in Ireland. New life, and a gradual transformation all this emblemized clearly and with subtle balance of forms, shapes are what mark Caroline Madden's symbolic sculpture.

 

Johan Sietzema's Bog Wood Road is an altogether different kind of sculpture. Like an army of trees stumps that advance across the landscape, they recreate and recall the ghost forest of oak and yew trees now trapped in the peat lands that can be thousands of years old. Ironically this re-created forest of trees from under the bog, now stand under the original height of the bog. Inside history, inside nature, it is all a cycle that goes on through different changing landscape conditions, geologies, human interventions, and nature interventions. Outside history, outside nature Bog Wood Road, is imaginative, illusionistic. The trees are like people advancing as a group in the land. Bog Wood Road recreates an ancient forest out of those same ancient and reclaimed trees. On a rainy or foggy day, this site-specific installation looks like natural history itself on the march! It's an ongoing event we are ever only partially conscious of, as nature changes so gradually over time, imperceptibly, almost without any of us noticing. The landscape changes, memories of place change, but the physics of site and place always carry a memory of it all.

 

Maurice MacDonagh's Raised Line is closer to being a minimalist sculpture, and its spirit is closer to the works of the 1960s sculptors though nature plays a role in the landscape integration. As a time line, or horizon line, or elongated bucket for harvested peat, this piece alludes to the container, containment, the artificial and the natural, and contrasts are created along the length of this track. With its one hundred metres of galvanized steel, this is a raised line all right, a kind of linear material drawing that contrasts the horizon line of the land behind the piece (at the height of the original bog railway and first harvests). So Raised Line has a sense of time, and of past industrial history, and as a sculpture it stands out in the landscape, something shiny, a linear measuring device or tough-like ruler, a time-based object-based measuring tape in a transferring landscape.

 

Kevin O'Dwyer's 60 Degrees offsets the natural lighting of this textured landscape with a series of three triangular forms, the two outer ones made from disused bog railway track wood from the 1950s, and the central one from railway track, railway sleepers and stainless steel plate. Two wood triangles invoke the industrial activity

of peat harvesting, while the stainless steel triangle references the new use of the cut-away bog for recreation and community. Shadows cast from these forms, which have been scaled so their sizes decrease in size, build contrasts between these three-dimensional forms and the peat lands around them.  Enigmatic, hard edge, Kevin O'Dwyer's 60 Degrees likewise alludes to the past industrial history of the place, as the materials this sculpture is made of all derive from the railways that moved the peat (an essential and life supporting source of heat and electricity for the Irish people in the post-war era) to the Ferbane Power Station.

 

More recently, Kevin O'Dwyer has recycled one of the tipplers used to unload peat. Tippler Bridge has a cylindrical form. O'Dwyer's walking bridge uses a hybrid assortment of recycled industrial materials that included corrugated steel, O'Dwyer's tip of the hat to the Nissan huts made of that material that housed over 400 men for several months each year, when they worked the peat bogs for Bord na Mona in the 1950s. Both shelter and bridge, the Tippler Bridge's view areas inside offer a cropped view of the surrounding lands from inside the bridge that contrasts the expanse and arc of the sky and horizon that predominates over this landscape. A cachet of local history, an industrial aesthetic, and a collaging of these elements with the landscape panorama all come together in O'Dwyer's Tippler Bridge for passers by and visitors alike to experience.

 

Eileen MacDonagh's Boora Pyramid is a popular site for visitors, and offers opportunities to stand at an elevation atop to witness the land surrounds. Measuring eight metres in width and six metres in height, MacDonagh's piece is made from the unmortared glacial stone that exists at a level beneath the lay deposits, and peat layerings, a material that recalls the early geological history of the region. While the pyramid may recall Mayan, or Inca, or ancient Egyptian cultures, it is also a form that ascends, contrasting the flat lands of the peat bogs.

 

Dave Kinane's Boora Convergence recreates something of the industrial aesthetic and places it in a nature site. The form itself recalls the twin Ferbane Cooling Towers that dominated the landscape. They were all you could see on the horizon in the peat lands, and as the only vertical elements, these enigmatic man-made artefacts of an energy supply system from an earlier, post-war era were a strong and eternal presence in the landscape. Using steel and wood recycled from the old railway, orchestrated into a playful and rhythmic display of wood and steel that recall the cuts, drains and railways that criss-crossed the industrial bog, Kinane's ascending exterior patterning's and tower-like sculptural form contrasts the expanse of skies, and ever shifting weather systems at Lough Boora just as the Ferbane Cooling towers once did.

 

Maurice MacDonagh's Raised Circle of recycled steel recalls the hundreds of miles of narrow gauge railway lines that were line of life for the peat industry. The steel narrow gauge rails enabled the peat wagons to travel through to the power stations, thus facilitating an essential energy supply for the Irish people in the post-war era.  Painted a Bord na Mona yellow on its exterior, a colour associated with all manner of machinery, from the turf harvesters, to locomotives, MacDonagh's Raised Circle hovers above the landscape, and the heather, brush illusionistically. Like a Celtic circle of steel, it brilliantly contrasts the natural with the man-made, the industrial, with the post-industrial natural aesthetic emerging in our times.

 

Mike Buffin's Sky-Train is somewhat nostalgic in its inspiration, and recalls the era of high peat harvesting activity at Bord na Mona when ditchers, ridgers, and trains would traverse the land, moving to and fro on the flat horizon of bright light and dark peat, animating the scene. Curving on the ridge in rainbow-like configuration, and overlooking the visitor's trail the Sky-train moves along its imaginary, no longer extent track along the Lough Boora landscape. Sky-train has a Rustin engine (one of the oldest models) while the wagons are open, creel type, like those creels used to carry turf with the assistance of horse or donkey.

 

Julian Wild's System No. 30 is the result of the artist's gathering scrap like an archaeologist from the Bord na Mona yards nearby. Suggestive of a skipping stone, whose forward trajectory is circumscribed by   curvilinear steel bands, System No. 30 alludes to fifty years of peat harvesting by Bord na Mona for fuel, a removal process that is like skimming the surface of a far greater, and deeper, unseen geological and human history that dates back to the Mesolithic era for us humans, and even further back for the biological and geological history of the Lough Boora Parklands.

 

Alan Counihan has referenced the permanence of land in ancestral cultural identity with earlier in situ sandstone sculptures such as Prayerhouse #2, The Shelter of the Bay (1996-97) set in the Allihies in Country Cork. With Idir Cruaiche is na Carraige (1997) what is revealed is concealed, a multi-layered process, and so we become aware of the way nature procreates its forms, some containers, others open and eroded. The language involves the physics of materials, the way environments, weather, and human culture all intertwine, as the ebb and flow of life's rhythms go on and on.

 

For Sculpture in the Parklands 2009 commission, Alan Counihan created Passage. A poetic landscape specific intervention, Passage is all about the passage of time, our memory of place, and the site sensitive moment in time. Time's arrows leave us with a physical place and the passage is through the peat land. As a passage Counihan's is time bound yet exists as a passage through the matter of the landscape. We move through sharp contrasts of steel and black peat as if this were a tunnel through time, only to discover an expanding landscape beyond as we emerge where three totemic vertical elements stand. The resonance of the three elements reifies our sense of this living, ever changing, natural scene. Passage in a strange way is reminiscent of   German artist Martin Kippenberger's METRO-Net subway entrances set in Dawson City Yukon (1995), and connecting to an island in Greece where a similar subway entrance was built, to thus form conceptual links to varying landscape sites. The difference is that Counihan's in situ art piece is minimal in its editing down of materials to the essential. Like a trench, that passes into a landscape of light, Passage references the material landscape, and its material ecology, something that has shaped our economies, our ways of living in relation to nature, and even the way we communicate in a very specific way, whatever bio-region of the world we live in. The narrow gauge rail tracks on the floor/ground of this “earth bridge” and the sleepers, recycle the industrial remnants and traces that link Bord na Mona to the land. The three rails point to the sky and a trail and path lead backwards into a backdrop of nature.

In July 2010, American bio-artist Brandon Ballengee spent two weeks engaging the public and researching the rich biodiversity of the bogland area. A large white canvas extended across the landscape along the waterways and path leading through the parklands. Ballengee's Love Motel for Insects used ultra violet lights on the tabula rasa drawing the nocturnal insects into an amazing display exchange between visitors and this outdoor live insectarium. Previously seen around the world in tropical rain forests, inner city bus stops, Brownfield sites, Scottish Highlands, German city centres, and Venetian boats as part of the Venice Biennial, Ballengee's bio-event was an ongoing nighttime performance event at Lough Boora that documented the rich insect biodiversity in the landscape. The last week of the residency included a children's education program and culminated with an Insect Festival and exhibition of artwork and insect documentation over the two preceding two weeks.

 

For the 2010 artist's residency program at Sculpture in the Parklands, Danish sculptor Alfio Bonanno familiarized himself with the grounds at Lough Boora. Initially inspired by the vast dark peat landscape and ancient bogwood forest, upon hearing the sound of running water he recognized a powerfully symbolic site for his environmental project. With a central conical tower structure and a steel inner core made by and referencing the industrial history of the workers at Bord na Mona, Bonanno's “shelter” involved the gathering and collecting of 4,000-year-old bogwood from the peat lands.  The collected bogwood was integrated as a textural and graphic outer wall for the work. A stream from the neighbouring wetlands flows through Bonanno's structure into the centre. The energy and life generated by the sound of water as it enters, flows through and descends to a underground stream establishes links with the surrounding ecosystems of the peat lands. With sound as an animating element, entering into the inner space, and a series of found stones and boulders within, Alfio Bonanno's eight metre high From Earth to Sky references the oldest archaeological site from the Megalithic era in Ireland less then a mile away. In Bonanno's own words, “One of my earlier environmental sculptures from 1982, Granite Environment incorporated stones from ancient burial grounds in an area undergoing redevelopment in Denmark where they were found. I see the present Irish work being made here in Country Offaly as a continuity of this earlier work, in that both reference archaeology and our human links to ancient culture. This piece is an homage to our ancestors and the physical layered landscape of peat, clay and stone they lived upon.”

 

Entering into Bonanno's From Earth to Sky, the landscape surrounds seen through the light sensitive walls of bogwood create dramatic visual contrasts, while the circular ceiling of the structure remains an open sky vault. With the sound of moving water as it enters the heart of the structure, and moving skyscape above, Bonanno's structure is a celebration of the long-standing and eternal cycle of exchange between culture of nature and humanity. 

Art exists within the continuum of life, and working with nature involves, a gradual transformation process, as well as patience and perseverance, on the part of the artist. The landscape at Sculpture in the Parklands is a place that encourages this intertwining of human culture with the culture of nature. Here sculptors can work with, rather than against, nature's essential and endemic energies, to build their site-specific land-based works. The language is about process, and as the artist works with nature, on site, geo-specific prototypes for an art that embraces our creative relation to nature emerges. The ancient archaeological, the industrial Bord na Mona heritage, and the extensive layers of history, both human and natural, encourages a broad range of sculptural responses, as evidenced by the works already in situ at Sculpture in the Parklands. Artists now realize there an implicit part of future oriented expression will inevitably involve aspects of the language of sustainability. The cycle of life can thus be part of the vocabulary of the artistic process. Sculpture in the Parklands' sculptors are now challenging us with earth sensitive works that integrate the ancient, the industrial and the natural in novel ways and there is a sense of that incredibly far ranging history endemic to this place. Using materials that reflect the natural and industrial history of the peat lands, Sculpture in the Parklands is a nexus for that culture environment dialogue that has been going on seemingly since humans walked the earth. It's an experiential exchange with time in the land.

 

 

Author's bio

 

John K. Grande is author of Balance: Art and Nature (Black Rose Books , 1994), Art Nature Dialogues: Interviews with Environmental Artists (State University of New York Press, 2007, ( www.sunypress.edu ) , and Dialogues in Diversity: Art from Marginal to Mainstream, Pari Publishing, Italy, 2008 ( www.paripublishing.com ) ). Recent books include The Landscape Changes (Propect/Gaspereau Press, 2009) and Natura Humana; Bob Verschueren's Installations (Editions Mardaga, 2010) www.grandescritique.com