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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014 |
When I was a
child, my family periodically gathered at the house of an Aunt and Uncle. The ritual often involved an extensive slide
show of photos from their most recent holiday and, whilst I enjoyed the sense
of occasion, (carousel loaded, - remote control ready, - lights out…), I now
suspect that the numerous similar images of my relatives aboard a canal barge,
on various sections of Britain’s canal network, would have only limited appeal
to anyone outside our immediate family. Time, (and technology), move on, but I have
the occasional suspicion I just might be involved in an online variant of the
same process.
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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014. My Rented Cottage Is Part Of The Terrace At Upper Centre. |
So, I apologise in
advance to anyone already tired of viewing images from my recent Cornish sojourn. This post includes a miscellany
of shots that could be said to fit into a number of categories, but mostly just
seem to relate to my ramblings in one way or another. Hopefully, those observations and meditations
elevate all this a little beyond the level of simple holiday snaps. I guess it’s in the nature of any blog to be
slightly self-indulgent, and these posts have at least reflected some of my most
recent trains of thought. I do believe
that any meaningful creative practice is a way of life rather than merely an
occupation, and it all feeds back into my artwork eventually, however obliquely. We’ll be back to urban road systems, peeling
posters and Midlands grey before long, - I promise.
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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014. Anyone In Need Of A Pint Could Do Much Worse Than 'The Ship Inn', (Centre Right). |
It’s impossible
to spend any time in a village like Mousehole without becoming keenly aware of
the acutely mediated nature of the whole ‘Cornwall Experience’. It is a classically characterful, ‘traditional’ fishing port, complete with a small harbor, a maze of narrow
winding streets, and several quaint folk traditions. It also contains numerous small commercial
gallery/gift outlets, refreshment opportunities, rented cottages and second
homes. There is just one remaining shop
where one might purchase anything resembling life’s essentials, but several
smart restaurants and an over-priced specialist deli. (£3-plus for a
pasty?!). There’s a perpetual procession
of contractor’s trucks negotiating the narrow streets on their way to refit/upgrade
yet another cottage and, usually, a small cluster of window shoppers around the
estate agency, (no longer a post office though, I note). Don’t get me started on the numerous big
Mercs. and Chelsea Tractors that often overwhelm the limited parking
facilities.
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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014 |
Of course, I realise
this is all rank hypocrisy as I’m merely another occasional visitor in search
of rest and respite from the routines of city life. Despite all of the above, I didn’t choose
less favoured accommodation in the workaday suburbs of St Austell or Redruth and
can still happily claim a great affection for Mousehole as a place to idle away
my down-time. Could I live there? - I
doubt it. Could I afford to? - Definitely
not. Could a young local native on a low
to average income, (assuming they could find paid employment)? - Silly
question; the proportion of rentable accommodation and second homes, and
resulting hike in property prices, long since passed any tipping point
sustainable by an impoverished local economy.
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| Pendeen, Cornwall, February 2014 |
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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014 |
What Mousehole is, in ‘reality’, is a microcosm of Cornwall’s essential dilemma. With it’s traditional industries long dead or in serious decline, fragile infrastructure and remote(ish) location [1.], it is left with little on which to trade beyond miraculous scenery, a climate that alternates between the benign and the dramatic, history, and numerous opportunities for the comfortably-off to escape the humdrum. Its identity becomes extruded through increasingly stylised filters of turquoise water, suspiciously clean fishing nets, Breton stripes and short crust pastry. This is a situation in which most of the conventionally attractive or heritage-laden parts of Britain, (or indeed, the whole world?), increasingly find themselves. Put a fence round the Lake District and you’d have a serviceable leisure/heritage compound for the Gore-Tex and poetry set. The older quarters of most cathedral cities increasingly resemble a perpetual Renaissance Fayre. Ever been to the ‘perfect’ Cotswolds town of Bourton On The Water? – It’s second only to Las Vegas in its hyperreality.
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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014 |
Meanwhile, deprived of viable local employment opportunities, - the indigenous Cornish population find themselves relocating to Plymouth, Bristol and points beyond, in search of work, while their fictitious ancestors inhabit the atmospheric quaysides of memory in numerous gallery-window depictions. Some may find piecemeal employment servicing the tourism, leisure and lifestyle industries that now proliferate, although I suspect the most enterprising expressions of that are often the brainchild of marketing-savvy incomers or regional outposts of some bigger chain.
And that’s before
we really start on Art. The idea of the
artist heading South West, (however sincere their motives), just sounds like
another cliché as soon as you say it, - doesn’t it? And, however carefully one tries to distance
oneself from tourist-friendly predictability, it’s incredibly difficult to escape
the pull of that particular, distilled visual experience we see in generations
of the Newlyn and St. Ives Schools. You
can’t escape that ever-changing light, that tendency of the rugged landscape to
abstract itself into Hepworthian forms, or the sea and sky to rationalise
themselves into parallel blocks of pure atmosphere. The clouds part and Heron’s saturated colour
vibrations emerge unbidden. A squall blows in, and legions of visitors seek shelter in The Tate.
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| Peter Lanyon, 'Soaring Flight', Oil On Canvas, 1960 |
Some do manage to
transcend the obvious. Long after his
early death [1.], Peter Lanyon still retains considerable
immersive potential through his scrambling of the elements and aviator’s
viewpoints, somehow. Some of the artists
mentioned in my post on St. Ives’ Millennium Gallery, and even more younger ones, attempt to filter the
landscape through more contemporary contexts or technologies. Karl Weschke brought a typically Germanic
Expressionism to bear upon the matter, and I still remember him exclaiming, “They
all come looking for their subtle light effects, but this landscape kills
people!” [2.]. Despite of figures like that, I sometimes have to remind myself not to
lump ‘Cornish Art’ together, mentally, as a regional style or some other
category of marketable phenomenon.
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| Karl Weschke, 'Body On The Beach', Oil On Canvas, 1977-78 |
I wouldn’t want
all this to sound like I’ve grown terminally cynical about Cornwall. I’ve had plenty of good times there and will
again, I’m sure. Perhaps the habit of
regarding any given location through Psychogeographical eyes has become
too ingrained in me, or else, I just want to have my cake and eat it. Should Mousehole one day become a complete
ra-ra playground, like Padstow or Rock, I might need to find an alternative
venue but, thankfully, we’re not quite there yet.
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| Levant Mine Ruins, Pendeen, Cornwall, February 2014 |
Also, of course, any quest for some imagined sense
of ‘authenticity’ would be the most bogus thing of all. As I now appreciate, (and I’m sure you worked
out long ago), all these contexts and degrees of Post Modern remove ARE
the reality of the situation. When Mousehole’s
harbour was crammed with working boats and fish guts ran down its gutters, the
inhabitants were merely responding to prevailing economic opportunities, just
as the purveyors of fishing smocks and fitters of designer kitchens do
today. The complex layers of meaning and
overlapping frames of reference to be found there are different, but no less
intriguing, than those I encounter wandering around Leicester or Birmingham,
(just under better illumination).
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| Mousehole, Cornwall, February 2014 |
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| Newbridge, Cornwall, February 2014 |
Paradoxically, on
reviewing my photos, I discover that, whatever philosophical agenda I imagine
I’m pursuing, many of them still tend to default to carefully composed
formalism or some other variety of delight in the pure appearance of
things. I start photographing telegraph
polls and power lines on the pretext of commenting on the introduction of fragile
modern infrastructure into a more archaic context, only to find it’s mostly just
the network of silhouetted lines that really engage me. Before I know it, this has opened out into a
general exploration of the visual geometry of miscellaneous frameworks and
linear structures and I’m thinking about how important such features always
seem down there, for some reason.
Elsewhere, amused references to Mousehole’s famous Christmas lights, as
they are stowed away for the year [3.],
become mostly about their juxtaposition with sheets of reflected sunlight. As I so often find at home, it’s the
deliberate inclusion of text elements that offers the most interesting subtextual
clues. Ultimately though, perhaps the
purely sensory really will always overwhelm everything else in Cornwall.
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| Christmas Lights, Mousehole Harbour, Cornwall, February 2014 |
I think it’s time to end all the philosophising now. It was only ever supposed to be a little holiday, after all.
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| Functional Lights, Mousehole Harbour, February 2014 |
Postscript:
As I compiled the
footnotes to this already lengthy post, I realised that, in one way or another,
they all reflect the darker flipside of the Cornish idyll. Is this a reflection of the true nature of
things, or just another variety of Romantic mythology?
[1.]: Very few places in the British Isles could be
regarded as really remote. Or so it
seemed, until high seas washed away the main railway line into Cornwall recently.
[2.]: Painter, Peter Lanyon was also an
enthusiastic glider pilot who died after he crashed his plane in 1964. His experiences in the air had a profound
influence on his perception of topography, and the relationship between land,
sea and sky.
[3.]: Or words to that effect. I’m recalling a conversation I was lucky
enough to have with Weschke as a student in 1982. He was a Volunteer Coastguard on one of the
most treacherous stretches of British coastline, at the time and, as such, was rather more in touch with
existential implications of his chosen situation than most.
[4.]: The illuminations provide a pleasingly cheesy
boost to the town’s seasonal economy, attracting coach loads of visitors every
year. More poignantly, they are also a
solemn reminder of the Penlee lifeboat disaster that rocked Mousehole on 19
December 1981. The lights were initially
left unlit after the tragedy, but reinstated three days later on the request of
Lifeboatman, Charlie Greehhaugh’s widow, Mary.
On each anniversary, they are extinguished for one hour at 8.00 pm, in
memory of the lives lost.
