Allenheads – Land inside out

Things of course are nothing like what they appear. Land like any other time-based and event-based instance needs to be decoded or requires literacy to understand its stories.

Last week I was generously welcomed to Allenheads Contemporary Arts by founders & artist producers  Alan Smith and Helen Ratcliffe, and by Hannah Marsden, curator of their recent show Exploring Nostalgia (see earlier post on dead moles in dresses). Alan gave me an intense tour of the land, 2 hours of condensed experiential learning by car and foot – jumping up and down on the watershed land (a spongy trampoline), looking at charming, flower-strewn brooks (actually garbage middens from 19th c lead miners), and learning to read the vertical scars on the hills – channels made by huntsmen to drain the highland moors for better pheasant and grouse hunting conditions. Underground, a white-lime painted maze of tunnels that takes you forward in time as you go further in (newest last); this work of burrowing has, like worms, left giant-sized man-castings on the surface which look like naturally  picturesque bumps and hillocks.

I thought there was an odd and distant kinship to New York/Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill, of a long term land shape that’s formed from the inside out, entirely by man (see “Why Call Them Landfills? They are dumps, eyesores, middens and disgraces.”)