r u r a l r e c r e a t i o n

Water acts as a liminal zone, a place of transition from known to unknown, a place of embarkation, a mirror, and a place of tourism and recreation thanks to the Romantic landscape gaze (thanks to the poet Wordsworth, you know you’re in Cumbria if Lakes has a capital letter). Reflecting the land and sky, water can be perceived as a non-space; visually its reflectivity, or sometimes opacity of surface, has made it a place of the other. For some this is a welcoming immersion or submersion as they swim, skim or snorkel, but for many the water is still a place of terror. This was true in the age of the Sublime and has now perhaps come full circle in an age of ecological fear – of climate change, flood and hurricane.

Some artists have tried to tame the water. Robert Smithson, an artist working in America in the 1960’s, thought that landscape could be both understood through art and moulded by it. He used the landscape itself as the subject and substance of his art works, reflecting the great scale of American geomorphology.  The Spiral Jetty (1970) he created in the red algae tinted Great Salt Lake of Utah took 292 truck hours and 625 man hours to move the 6,783 tonnes of rock needed. Conceived as an ironic testimonial to man’s dominance in an unwelcoming and limitless desert, the Spiral Jetty has become something different 40 years on. Tourist attraction and literal and metaphorical datum, it periodically submerges and re-emerges from the lake to chart changing hydrogeology, just as it has charted changing attitudes to environment - from technological mastery to ecological sensitivity.

The shift of opinion weighted in favour of environmentalist thinking opinion over the last 50 years, has been supported by a vanguard of artists who, perhaps unlike Smithson, have felt that we should address our displacement of the rest of the ecological system. This is so much so that artists are regularly co-opted by agencies to translate the science and management of landscapes to a leisured public. Artists even occasionally manage to transcend the usual notice board and trail syndrome. Mick Petts’ work for the Wildlife and Wetlands Reserve at Penclacwydd in (2000), the Heron’s Wing Gateway Hide, consists of a series of human scale swan’s nests, bird boxes and vole tunnels which visitors can enter, encouraging empathy with nature; as Petts says, “reducing people down to a bird’s size so they can experience the environment from their perspective”.

Interpretation is one way of breaking the surface tension between nature and culture; some see visions in the water. Helen Mayer and Newton Harrison prophesy of a drowned Britain; Losing Ground; Gaining Wisdom (2008) takes predictions of apocalyptic sea level rises and models them through computer simulation to propose different strategies of defence and retreat to high ground. The Harrisons also suggest new utopias of high rise buildings for communal living on the mountainous spine of Britain, a use of what are now mostly National Parks that would have Wordsworth in apoplexy. This is not though just an artistic utopia; the project exemplifies the new spirit of inter-disciplinary working with climatologists, ecologists, artists and architects working together to create possible futures outside of the normal framework of environmental management.

What if, instead of retreat, we could envisage the life aquatic, where bathing in the regulated safety of a chlorinated municipal pool becomes the daily commute? Amy Sharrock’s work SWIM (2007) was inspired by the 1968 film The Swimmer starring Burt Lancaster. Based on John Cheever’s indictment of suburban vacuousness, it’s the story of a man who decides to swim home through his Californian neighbours’ luxury swimming pools. Sharrock’s work involved 50 participants in swimming caps and costumes who boarded buses, ran, walked and swam across the city of London through its pools, visiting Tooting Bec Lido, the Serpentine and Hampstead Heath Swimming Ponds.

Whether we wish to control, understand, retreat from, or move through the water to overcome its otherness it seems that we must imagine cultural interactions with water that bring together participation (recreation), ecology, society and even politics. Immersion is a project that aims to do just that. Funded by the Bright Sparks programme set up by Landscape Arts and Network Services this research project took as its supposition the idea that leisure, usually painted as a threat to environments, could be used to actually combat ecological degredation.

The research in partnership with the Marine Institute in Plymouth and Childs Sulzmann architects combined themes of invasive biological threats, overfishing and the need for new aquacultural practice. Closely aligned with DEFRA’s new Invasive Non-Native Species Framework Strategy for Great Britain it proposes the regeneration of disused lidos as facilities for the containment of non-native species, aquaculture centres, educational facilities on marine and riparian ecology and functioning as diving and swimming centres. In this way new linkages and relationships have been and will be generated between artists, scientists, land managers and communities that conjoin to form a holistic understanding of land/waterscapes that spans land and water and that can be a fully immersive experience.

 “One’s mind and earth are in a constant state of erosion, mental rivers wear away abstract banks, brain waves undermine cliffs of thought, ideas decompose into stones of unknowing and conceptual crystallisations break apart into deposits of gritty reason.” Robert Smithson 1968