Dear friends and colleagues
Of volcanoes and gardens.
Last summer for the first time I went walking in Constable country along the Stour past Flatford Mill to Dedham. It was a wonderfully hot day, but with a gentle breeze. Many people were boating on the river or walking alongside it or having coffee and cakes at the National Trust café next to Flatford Mill. Both the buildings and the landscape have been preserved. Perhaps one could see this as symbolic of the continuity of landscape and nature. For Constable this was a loved and comfortable place. This was how the world was meant to be, his garden of Eden, unchanging save for the cycle of the seasons. However, when Constable was aged 18 the natural philosopher James Hutton had published his theory of the earth in which he included an engraving made by John Clerk of Eldon of the nonconformity of the Geology at Jedbergh. People, horses and a carriage gallop through a stable and genteel landscape but underneath them the strata tell of violent upheavals, erosion and sedimentation.
Yes, we all know this now but nevertheless the earth for us – or rather you – in the UK remains a pretty solid and reliable thing, those few earthquakes that occur are rarely detectable except to highly sensitive instruments. When you walk in the countryside, unless it is a beach beneath cliffs, you experience geology only indirectly – it is hidden beneath a coating of plants and foliage. Furthermore, to my knowledge there is no volcano, however small, near Dedham or East Bergholt.
What does it mean when the earth ripples beneath you and your building shakes as it did for me a few weeks back here in Batangas? What does it mean when fissures appear in the earth and cracks appear in buildings, albeit fortunately, not ours? How would Constable have painted Dedham and the River Stour if there had been a volcano nearby and earthquakes regularly shivered the houses of East Bergholt? How does the geology that you grow up with affect your culture? Does it impact on how we make or see art?
Yes, it is true that Turner, Wright of Derby and the Norwegian J.G. Dahl delighted in painting Vesuvius in eruption, but, nevertheless, for those they painted for, those people who bought the paintings, this was something that happened elsewhere, something exotic and rare. It was a spectacle for the wealthy tourist, not an everyday matter. If we look at one of the Vesuvius paintings made by Pierre-Jacques Volaire (and he made thirty or so such paintings – obviously they were a good selling little number in the market then) we can see that the staffage are English or French milords watching and discussing the nature of “The Sublime”, not the refugees, the farmers and their families fleeing with a pitiful few possessions.
Prior to my Taal volcano experience of the last few weeks – a state of exacerbated uncertainty – my main volcano experiences had been, firstly, climbing Etna after a minor eruption – the weirdness of seeing drifts of snow and a few metres away still glowing patches of lava and, secondly, a visit to the top of the crater of Gunung Bromo in East Java. Having climbed the three hundred or so stairs and stared down into the vent I experienced an incredible nausea. I suffer from vertigo and it was a big drop with only a rickety fence in front of me but more overwhelming was the sense that this was an aberration of nature. That this pit, immeasurably deep, with smoke puffing up from the blackness of its depths, was in truth a wound in the skin of Mother Earth. Seeing the Earth so abused I could not but think of the Earth as Gaia – as a near human entity.
Perhaps it was not so much a wound in the Earth’s skin as a monstrous zit or acne erupting or an abscess opening up to void noxious gasses and effluvia – noticeably as yellow pats of Sulphur.
On the day when the Taal eruption began we were at the Pinto museum, a private museum on the outskirts of Manila which has with its restaurants, gift shop and wellness clinic become a popular resort. They had just opened a new extra-large space. We were disappointed: in Spanish colonial style it was an overly fussy space, and overhung with too much lightweight, jokey art.
We spent far longer in the arboretum – or tree garden – adjacent to it that had neared completion.
We found Ronald Achacoso an old friend of Geraldine’s who had supervised its making. Originally a painter he is now mainly concerned with gardening and preserving indigenous trees and plants.
One was struck by the sheer profusion of plants and forms, but the immensity of this space was green and the minutiae were green. There were a few blooms, patches of colour, but the main delight was in the variety of leaf form and the endless convolutions of growth.
Gardens are important: they are one way that we both make sense of the natural world and collaborate with it. I want to carry on next week by thinking about gardens and what they mean in art. In particular focussing on an exhibition about plants curated by the artist Gregory Halili, himself a devoted gardener.
As a horticultural taster here is a picture of a newly blooming jade vine in our garden in Ibabao. Yes, gardens are about growth and profusion, but they are also always about the specimen, the individual plant.
Speak next week
Tony