pee behind a tree / shit in a pot

Alec Finlay for Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape from the Roberts Institute of Art

On the occasion of RIA and Museum Sheffield’s collaboration, Earthbound: Contemporary Landscape from the Roberts Institute of Art we invited poet and artist, Alec Finlay to respond to the exhibition. Earthbound brought together works from the David and Indrė Roberts Collection and Sheffield Museums collection which expressed our various, complex relationships with the earth, understood as our home, as soil and planet, matter and myth.

Alec Finlay, who has made ‘poems for beehives as well as books’, has long situated his poetic practice within the environment, creating works that exist interdependently with the sites and beings with which they and he are entangled.¹ For Alec, poetry is a form of place-making, because it inflects the ways we move through the world, encouraging attentiveness, wonder and care.

¹ Alec Finlay quoted in Alan Rich, ‘Poet Alec Finlay on his battle with coronavirus and finding solace in art’, 13 August 2020, The National.

When we asked Alec to respond to the exhibition, he said he would not be able to visit it physically, partly because of complications arising from Coronavirus. The pandemic forced several institutions — frustratingly late for many who are disabled — to reassess accessibility. They had to engage with forms of access beyond physically entering a space and normative conceptions of how our body-minds can experience art.²

² Body-minds is a term used by Eli Clare. See http://eliclare.com. Last accessed, Thursday 4 November, 2021.

While platforms like Zoom have enabled virtual connections during this time, Alec also reminded us of the many ways we can participate and engage imaginatively and how often these forms of participation emerge, over time, through shared conversations, memories, images, notes, thoughts and our changing moods. He also suggested we invite Sheffield-based poet and academic Ágnes Lehóczky to physically visit the exhibition and write a poetic response. When we publish Ágnes’ text toward the end of this month, the two works will sit side by side to frame the exhibition.

Alec has created a poem that draws on the exhibition’s ideas and images, as well as his own memories of some of the works he had already seen or artists he already knew. The poem is, in this way, a supplement to the exhibition; it adds to and reconfigures it. It is a guide for an exhibition that many of us could not visit and, now that it has ended, will not be able to visit in the future. And yet, his words are a reminder of how the kinds of stories that exhibitions tell are not enclosed in the exhibition room, but can be unravelled and rewound through ongoing acts of storytelling and imagination.

Together with install shots of the exhibition, Alec has compiled poetic signposts for the reader to follow and consider as they journey their way through a landscape filled with works from Etel Adnan to Richard Long, as well as writers and musicians, animals, trees, lichen and light.

Alec Finlay
November 2021

‘The road zig-zagged between dwarf pines under rocks with rugged outlines; all this part of the forest had something muffled, quiet, and solitary about it. It conjured up thoughts of the hermits of old, the companions of the great stags with fiery crosses between their horns, who used to receive with fatherly smiles the good kings of France, as they knelt in front of their grottoes.’

Gustave Flaubert, tr. Robert Baldick, Sentimental Education

‘A gauze bandage wraps the land
…
A series of slaps moulds a mountain.’

Monica Youn, ‘Ignatz Invoked’

*

the storm has passed
what remains are bending grasses

*

easy to imagine the end of the world
easier than to live it

*

(STC)¹

¹ Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

a part of: colourful toys
apart from: dim ashes

*

the climate is throbbing
with the whirly sign

*

(HC)²

² HC: Helen Chadwick, one of the artists in the exhibition.

she peed the corolla
he splashed a whorl of petals

*

he says some things should be separate:
pee behind a tree // shit in a pot

*

being pissed on cures some things
whereas being hit heals nothing

*

taking the piss – with such force
reduced to some froth

*

are we now reduced to the role
of the yellow holes in the snow?

*

the reciprocal needs of skin are
one proof of our living natural being

*

our wilder lives are implicit
in the aims of ecological remediation

*

rewilding is an act of imagination

*

the great restoration ecologists all had ambitions
to change society

*

he was a passionate proponent
of the remilding movement

*

(after Derek Gow we used to say …)

the bucolic farmer plants his fritillaries,
regenerating a landscape of prose cattle
into a wetland poem

*

did that idiot really say:
the fish are back and british and glad of it?

*

(after Harold Rhenisch)

animals are not there to be our animals

*

(MB)³

³ MB: Mirosław Bałka, one of the artists in the exhibition.

foxes
on the railway tracks

doves
in the branches

*

(DB)⁴

⁴ DB: Dirk Bell, one of the artists in the exhibition.

your dream
mine

of landscape
pine

*

the banging on the roof reminds me
how close the sky is

*

(TG)⁵

⁵ TG: Theaster Gates, one of the artists in the exhibition.

lean in to the thorn
stoic

*

down the road:
a blend of blues, tar, and oils⁶

⁶ ‘Down this road’: from statements made by Theaster Gates in an interview with Laura Feinstein, The Guardian, October 2020.

*

just for tonight, our heads are fo choille,
under the wood⁷

⁷ Fo choille: Gaelic, tr., under the wood, suggestive of vagabondage or a wild life spent beyond norms and conventions and, here, a memory of a night spent in Coille Dubh Rainich, The Dark-wood of Rannoch

*

everything’s gone green⁸

⁸ Bernard Sumner of New Order, growing up in Salford, he says that he didn’t see a tree until he was nine years old.

Bernard says he never saw a tree
until he was nine

*

timber can be grown by the tree, the acre,
or care

*

crown shyness is the preeminent example
of natural aesthetics

*

bring back the woods
means walk among the trees

*

my mother explains pruning the Japanese way
first see the tree’s shape, then leave a smooth outline underneath

*

baby pines
what do you want

in among the birches
what do you really want?

*

which is helpless:
the flowing stream, or the seed it carries down?

*

the perfect branch is all elbows and knees
for the perfect nest

*

a little bit of bark kindling falls
from the leaves of my Verlaine

*

our eyes reach out of the land
our bodies fall into the hill

*


almost-human
mostly a person
partly a body
supposedly a man
potentially a being

*

our attempts to reconcile the human with nature
grow ever more minute in their focus – the bubble
worlds of ticks and lichens, honeybee democracy,
flock theory, mycorrhizal networks

*

we seem desperate to give nature a mind so that it can take
the decisions we seem incapable of

*

one cannot know nature without knowing decay

*

one cannot know life without knowing illness

*

(BDB)⁹

⁹ BDB: Berlinde De Bruyckere, one of the artists in the exhibition.

your wet pelt
my dry husk

*

the body and the hill are full of dark chambers

*

from up there, he says, we mayn’t see much
but we’ll share the joy of looking the right way

*

my boots have the appearance of mountains
but my hills are made of pills

*

like a pencil on a short string, his minor walks
drew small circles around niches of land

*

the hill exaggerates the plain

*

the hollow diminishes the meadow

*

(EA)¹⁰

¹⁰ EA: Etel Adnan, one of the artists in the exhibition.

dawn
hills of many colours
under a sky of blue

dusk
a sky of many colours
above blue hills

*

An Óir nam Beann¹¹
a particular mountain

¹¹ The Golden Mountain: an image from David Hume’s A Treatise on Human Nature, here translated into Gaelic.

The Golden Mountain
in a certain light

*

a sheaf of felt tips
swatch

*

a posh breeze
swish

*

high-
snow-

light
fall

*

(RL)¹²

¹² RL: Richard Long, one of the artists in the exhibition.

if the walk is the joy then
where is joy without walking?

*

walk when your enemies rest

*

you cannot walk far on your fists

*

twitter pile-ons are proxy hunting

*

(BS)¹³

¹³ BS: Bridget Smith, one of the artists in the exhibition.

have you a rope?
we could tether the moon to the path

*

spoon & seal
moon

*

(YB)¹⁴

¹⁴ YB: Yto Barrada, one of the artists in the exhibition.

a tear in the sky
a peeled off cloud

a crease in the mountain
a ripped pine

*

should we give up looking
at mountains we can’t climb?

*

choose

the things that belong on the mountain

your

the things that are near at hand

ground

*

(SF)¹⁵

¹⁵ SF: Spencer Finch, one of the artists in the exhibition.

meet me in the middle
venn

*

I do know where we are
I just haven’t been there

*

how we feel the world is wrong
and how it is wrong are different things

*

coda: three Sheffield walks

a walk from Applegarth Close to Orchard Lane
a walk from Hunters Green to Hartshead
a walk from Kiln St to Potters Gate

— AF