Úna Hamilton Helle
Title of paper:
‘Stone speak’: Attending to more-than-human temporalities through artistic practice
Abstract:
As part of an ERC-funded research team based in the Geography Department at Royal Holloway University (London), I have been conducting a practice-based Arts PhD within the team’s research area of “imaginary subterraneans”. As the PhD is coming to an end, I will attempt to tie together the two artistic projects that have resulted from my research.
The first is ‘Beneath Clouded Hills’, an exhibition which attempted to excavate the imaginary location of “Deep England”. The notion of "Deep England” is that of an idealised landscape untouched by industrial progress, modernity and globalisation, with a potential to be both radically enchanting and parochially problematic. Through a film, sound installation, podcast and public event, the project explored how such mytho-pastoral images resonate today by engaging with a particular place: Creswell Crags caves in central England. The cave’s archaeological activity indicates migratory multi-species inhabitancy spanning thousands of years, features Britain's only surviving ice-age art and has the largest collection of apotropaic marks in one place. With a rich presence in local myth and superstition, Creswell’s history and geology were an underlying presence in the project, positioned as a lesion in the land where myth-time seeps back into the present.
The second project is ‘Tunsteinen’ (The Yard Stone), a film cycle in four seasonal chapters, based around a stone I have known all my life. It sits in the middle of a clearing on an old farmstead in rural Norway. As part of this research I have been looking to Scandinavian folklore and customs to unearth references that hint towards a previous animist way of life, based on reciprocal relationships with the natural world.
I have attempted to practice this myself, through deep listening, geological ‘timefulness’ and through attentively tending to the stone – with varying degrees of success. Through this practice I have encountered numerous temporalities: folkloric more-than-human beings and spirits embody vastly different time scales depending on the material topographies they live within, as stone, wood or water encourage thinking in ‘petrified time’, deep time or cyclical time; the temporal tension and out-of-syncness encountered when trying to attune, from within the linear rush of a capitalist society, to the pace of a more agriculturally tuned cycle; the temporality of artistic practice, a slow process of making and unmaking, defying definitions of usefulness and productivity; and the temporal distance between us and our animist ancestors, the distortion and disappearance that time enacts upon traditional knowledge and the creative improvisation that has to be invoked in order to preserve, or reinvent, these traditions.
Bio:
Úna Hamilton Helle is a multidisciplinary artist, curator and museum worker currently completing a practice-based Arts PhD in Royal Holloway University’s Geography Department. As an artist and researcher she uses sound, video, artist-made publications and participatory happenings to explore questions around ecology, place, belonging and interspecies communication. She has exhibited internationally, most recently with Bloc Projects, UK. Upcoming exhibitions include shows at BO (Oslo) and USF Verftet (Bergen). She curated the touring exhibition Waking the Witch (UK) and has edited a monograph about the visionary artist Monica Sjöö’s work. She is behind the artist and music publication Becoming the Forest.
