We are led through a rough wooden door, forewarned that it will be dark inside. Reach to your left, there will be a handrail. Simply follow it, into the larger space, and there stop. The darkness is because we are underground. To be specific we are in a Victorian water tank. We are in the space known as ‘aqua oscura’. There is no dark water today however. We like to have the tank full of water, it changes the experience by having the image reflecting…but it gets stagnant...so we are careful as to when...which means basically, mostly, they don’t. Is that fair? Is that fair to those of us who come to see an art installation that is not how it is designed to be seen? Is that fair to the artist? Is that fair to the concept and the work?
I don’t think so…but still…I stand in the dark, obedient and waiting to see what will happen.
Our guide has followed us in. Asks everyone to turn off their phones. Shines a light on a rough wall in front of us. There is nothing to see…except, he tells us, there is….we simply need to wait for our brains to adjust to the light. He switches off his torch, and explains the mechanics of what artist
James Turrell has done.
There is art where the doing is what causes the amazement – the skill of the painter, the sculptor, the physical execution of the dancer, the singer, the words-spell-making of the poet – but then there is also art where the true artistry is in the concept, the imagining that it will work if you do x and y, where x and y are actually very simple things that rely on Mother Nature to do the rest.
This is art where your own brain has to do most of the work, not in the sense of thinking about it, deconstructing it, interpreting it - except maybe in a very literal sense. Your brain has to adapt to the extremely low light level and then process what comes in through your eyes. We are asked to simply stand, in the dark, and look at the wall. I am going to prove to you, that you can see in the dark, our guide tells us. Shapes start to appear on the wall. They were there all along, but our brains needed to adjust to the very limited light. The light is being fed in through a simple hole in the ceiling and reflected downwards on a series of mirrors, where the glass has been blackened in strips. The effect of the blackening is to break up the light spectrum so that the image we see is in black-&-white – without that intervention we would see it in full colour. I would have liked that, but perhaps it would be less arty, less atmospheric.
We are reminded that this is not a film, not a video, we are looking at a live image of what is happening above our heads, the image is what we would see (albeit monochrome) if we lay on top of the water tank chamber and looked directly up, an image of ferns and trees, moving in the breeze.
It takes a while…five to seven minutes on average…for people to begin to see the image. Michael tells us that our light-sensitivity is retained for about five minutes after we leave the chamber. If he is outside for anything up to that time and then returns, he can see the image immediately the light is switched off, longer than five minutes and his brain needs the same time as ours to readjust. To prove his point he switches his torch back on and we look at a blank wall, off half-a-minute later, and the image is there again – as clear as it was. Tree-tops, ferns, moving in the breeze.
It is a dull day, so we do not get the best effect. I would love to see this on a bright blue day. I would love to see it with the tank full of water, as it was intended to be seen. But even so…I stand in pitch black, unable to see my hand in front of my face, concerned about my balance, about the proximity or otherwise of the strangers around me, unseen, scarcely heard…I want to reach out and put a hand to the wall for security. I know it is beyond my reach and I dare not move, for fear of walking into someone. I watch the wall.
I watch complete blackness fade to shades of grey…I see branches and leaves and ferns, black against the grey. They come slowly into focus. Michael tells us that were we to stay for an hour, we would be able to see individual leaf-level detail. We are not permitted to stay for an hour.
It didn’t occur to me until long afterwards, that if I had been thinking straight – with the absence of a full queue behind us, I could have asked to join the next group, I could have circled back. It didn’t occur to me because I was still trying to process what had just happened. The idea of light and dark. The relativity of them. The beauty of monochromicity (is that a word?). The delight that an artist (allegedly) climbed over a fence, discovered a disused space and decided he could do something with it...that there are people in the world who think like that..who are curious enough to go look, and then inventive enough to create.
I come away, into the green light of semi-tropical woodland, and I feel clean-washed. Opened.
And that was the beginning of my visit to Tremenheere Gardens. I will call them ‘gardens’ rather than sculpture park, because for the most part the sculptures did not entrance me – and the gardens did: the semi-tropical walk up-stream, where the water was flowing down in the opposite
direction and I was bathed in the greenery of giant ferns. There are those whose guided meditations for healing ask us to imagine a white light. In my version, that cleansing light is always green: it is filtered through trees. To walk through it for real was not just magical: it was mystical.
Then I came across something I could never have imagined. There is a plant I have been fascinated by since my first trip to Guernsey – the only place I have ever seen them. I did not know that one of the names for them is Black Rose, which makes perfect sense. I did not know that they are not always black. I did not know that they grow vibrant green, before the succulent leaves edge deep garnet red, darkening as they grow. I did not know that they send out scarlet stems to hold buttercup-yellow sunbursts of daisy-like flowers. I had to look and look again to be sure that this was indeed the same plant. Aeonium arboreum, a loose translation of which is immortal tree, due the fact that you can cut the rosettes before flowering, let the cut heal, and plant the stem…it will re-root easily. If I thought the Norfolk climate would suit these plants, I’m sure I’d have reached for my cutlery. They’re native to the places further south, warmer climes, with (I suspect) more moisture in the air than in the soil. Oh, but I want one of these.
None of the sculptures in these gardens could hope to touch me the way this plant has done.
A week later, I will get to St Mary’s and see them growing everywhere. I will start to wonder if a plant is a reason to move 400 miles and take out a mortgage I could never hope to repay. Possibly not – but it is a temptation serious enough to have me looking in the estate agent window. Dream on!
Before that though, I’m still in Cornwall, still wandering around the gardens. Still being annoyed by parents who think it’s ok for their kids to ignore the please do not climb signs, especially when it applies to the one sculpture that I'm sure I don't actually "get" but love anyway: Peter Randall-Page's "Slip of the lip". Look it up...make of it what you will...masculine, feminine, seeds, rods and wells...curvaceauous and tactile. It's rare that I wish I had a garden big enough for a statement sculpture, but there are moments.
I'm continue. still seeking out the silent spaces. One of them is by the pond where white flowers, hydrangea possibly, drape themselves among all the shades of green, and arum lilies, definitely, stand proud. The water is still beneath pond-weed and water-lilies float patiently awaiting their turn.
But I end where I started, with James Turrell. Having started underground, in his aqua oscura - that wasn’t quite – I finish in one of his Skyspace places: that absolutely is.
I’m calling it a place. Maybe he thinks it is a sculpture…or an installation…or maybe he uses some other word. I have no idea. But I know what the place is. It is a sanctuary. It is a silent space. It is a sacred space. It is a place to simply sit and lean back and look at the sky. The last time I did this was in a Norfolk woodland on a very rainy day, looking up through trees. Today, I'm in a white-painted hall, on a cloudy day, looking up through a hole in the roof.
Isn’t it sad that we need such spaces…that we need an artist to tell us / show us how to do what we all did instinctively as children…lie back and look at the sky in wonder?
Then again…there is something different about doing it here, in this white space, the sky seen through an oblate opening in the roof. On another day, it would be a very different experience…if there were deep blues and cotton-wool whites…but today is grey, the sun is shrouded. I cannot see individual clouds, rather there are layers that seem to slide over each other. Paler. Darker. Morphing into shapes, and dispersing, inviting stories to be told about what I can see and what it might mean. It is strangely like being inside an egg, seeing the through shell from the inside, the dark, shifting, insubstantial shapes of the world outside. It is strangely like watching the birth of the universe. In monochrome.
Which is where I came in.
