Art of the Marsh

Niamh Lawlor on 18/05/2026

Close up photo of a wooden bench with the inscription "Fay Godwin, Photographer" in capital letters

By Louise Kenward

Louise Kenward asks how chronic illness shapes her perception of the changing shoreline.

Beachcombing the strandline, I’ve mostly been walking in windy drizzly conditions, along the shore of the Romney Marshes at high tide. It is only in going back to Pett for low tide on a sunnier, drier day, cup of tea from the van off the slipway in hand, that I take a seat on one of the benches to pause a while. It’s a solid wooden bench, with some age but wearing well. There are dozens along here, all pointing out to sea. A dotted line of memories to loved ones, they edge the coast. I accept the silent invitation of this one and sit to look out across the water, enjoying the warmth of the sun. I wonder how much the shoreline has shifted since I was here last; with each tide of moving shingle the beach redraws itself. Over time, land bridges have formed and eroded. Pett, as with much of this stretch of coast, has been both land and water. It’s one of the things that draws me to this place – the possibility of both. This duality gives me space to be both too, solid and fluid, sick and well – the in-betweenness of Susan Sontag’s kingdoms. I am learning to live with fluctuating chronic illness, and the sea has helped me do this. Living in a body resistant to consistency often leaves me floundering on land. Marshes and inter-tidal zones offer me kinship; I feel a greater sense of belonging in these typically difficult places to inhabit. Living with a continuity of unwellness, without treatment or a finite timeline, this is a habitat that reflects those of us used to living with the unpredictable and unstable.

As I drain my cup and get up to walk on, I turn and notice the bench I’ve been sitting on. Its slats are weathered, letters carved into the wood, silvery and worn, with yellow lichens blooming at the crevices of the armrests. All these benches have a memorial to someone, short stories of people and place. A dedication to the places they loved, places their loved one’s loved, places filled with memories of people no longer here. On this bench, the inscription simply reads:

1931 Fay Godwin 2005

Photographer

I knew Fay Godwin Hon FRPS (1931-2005) had lived locally, she’s often listed as having been a resident of nearby Hastings. She lived at Pett Level in the latter years of her life. I know her work as a photographer documenting the Romney Marshes. I have a book of some of those images, text by Richard Ingrams, called The Romney Marsh and Royal Military Canal – the body of water that defines the inland edge of the marshes. To have sat on her bench, of all the ones to choose from, seems especially serendipitous.

I am interested in Fay Godwin as much for her experience of ill-health as for her photography. I am curious about how illness can affect writers and artists, beyond the immediacy of our bodies and levels of functioning. I’m wondering about how it impacts on creative process and practice.

My own writing practice stems from those early years of post-viral illness, once able to do more than simply keep my body alive. With a background in the visual arts, writing more readily lent itself to someone unable to leave their bed or home. My arts practice had been more physical, creating large installations, working with and responding to particular places, often overlooked or derelict. Even putting work in gallery exhibitions demanded travel for printing and submission, requiring a level of energy I no longer had. As my conditions fluctuate my creative process adapts. Using beachcombing as my current practice I can take my time, walk as far or as near as I’m able, stopping along the way. Alongside writing about the objects I collect, I have begun to develop my art practice again, returning to my camera, recording short fragments of moving image and teaching myself lenseless photography.

Godwin’s career as a photographer began in her 30s, taking pictures of her young children. She went on to take pictures of other people’s families before teaching herself how to develop and print the images she took, growing her practice into a profession. Working with publishers, she began to photograph writers and poets: Doris Lessing, Ted Hughes, Phillip Larkin, Salman Rushdie. Her portraiture evolved into a practice of social commentary, with a series of images of factory workers, people working in the fishing and oil industries, and people who were unemployed.

In her 40s, in 1976, Godwin was diagnosed with cancer and her practice changed from portraiture to landscape photography. Having recovered following conventional medical treatments, Godwin wanted to spend more time in the outdoors for her health. Convalescence is typically a term we associate with the Victorian age, often associated with being outdoors and by the sea. Living with chronic illness I know the importance for my own body of prolonged rest beyond and alongside any initial treatment and recovery. It feels as though this departure from usual routines was a way of Godwin finding the space for rest and recuperation following the cancer treatment too.

She began to walk as part of her photography practice, and went on to collaborate with several writers in creating books akin to the Wainwright walking guides[i]. The book on the Romney Marshes is one of those. In her interview for The South Bank Show in 1986 she said: ‘After being ill, I think that I concentrated more on landscape…the natural world became even more important and valuable to me, it already was, but it was even more so and I had this instinct that it would pull me through’ (The South Bank Show, 1986).[ii] I similarly experienced a greater connection to the natural world during and following severe illness. This isn’t a ‘nature cure’ as some might call it. Rather, I see it as a companionship, an identification with fellow kin. We are all a part of nature, prone to cycles of decay and growth as any other living creature, and it is perhaps a greater recognition of this that illness can foster.

Godwin’s landscape images are inseparable from her movement through place, created while walking through the countryside. An environmentalist and politically engaged thinker she was also an advocate of the Right to Roam movement and president of the Ramblers Association (1987-1990). She campaigned to protect the natural world she photographed and sought to reflect the history of the human in the landscape. The Romney Marshes embody the intervention and occupation of this place. This is no wilderness or natural beauty; it is entirely dependent on human engineering. While the shape of the coastline has altered over the centuries due to storms and longshore drift, the reclaimed land has subsequently been maintained with constant and ongoing management. Shingle is regularly transported west, from Rye Harbour to Pett, from one side of Dungeness power station to the other – protecting the coast from continuing to travel eastwards. The ditches and sewers networked throughout the marshes are perpetually draining and moving water. Early inhabitation was organised around precisely this. Walls were built and dykes dug, each resident responsible for their own stretch – to clear, maintain and rebuild when necessary. This is written in the early records, the foundation of the Romney Marshes centres on maintaining the land as land, protecting it from the encroaching sea. Without it, with much of the land below sea level, this would quickly be drowned again by the tides.

Godwin’s black and white landscape photography took her across the UK, along with trips to Hawaii and New Zealand for photography workshops. Often associated with light, Godwin’s photography was also about time. Taking photographic images was a durational process, one that demanded patience and attunement to her surroundings. ‘I don’t get wrapped up in technique and the like’ she said in one interview about her process. ‘I have a simple rule and that is to spend as much time in the location as possible. You can’t expect to take a definitive image in half an hour. It takes days, often years…The land is a living, breathing thing and light changes its character every second of every day. That’s why I love it so much.’ The work also references time through the inclusion of human presence, of buildings and artifacts.

For me, as with others who live with perpetual illness, time has an altered value. I can no longer fall into the patterns of human created time, of 9 to 5 and normative linear time. My body requires its own pace and time keeping. It can be cyclical, repetitive; time jumps and slows. Ellen Samuels wrote about this as ‘crip time’[iii]. Crip time is waiting time, for appointments and access requirements causing people to be late for things. It can be extra time I need to get up in the morning, for my body to adjust to being awake and upright. Additional time is needed throughout the day, to listen and attune to the needs of my body. In the words of Alison Kafer: “rather than bend(ing) disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.”[iv] I see the tides running to crip time, moving no faster nor more slowly than they will, governed by the moon not man.

Like Godwin, I have noticed my own creative practice develop in response to my changing physical health. Instead of being able to spend prolonged periods of time in one place, or to walk the entire coastline, I move slowly, walking short distances, and return time and again. It is with repetition that I learn more about a place. The ritual of beachcombing focuses my attention to one specific part of the coast. I study the strandline looking for clues of what is happening elsewhere, of the things I don’t or can’t see. The strandline shows me fragments of life beneath the water in the shells and egg cases. It shows me the presence of people and the fishing industry through washed up plastic and string.

While Godwin initially responded to treatment and recovered from cancer, it seems it returned some years later. As many people experience, it is not just the illness that causes the most immediate problems; the treatments can be as debilitating as the illness itself. Unable to walk as she had previously enjoyed, her practice changed again. This time, Godwin blamed the medication she had been given for her disability. It affected her heart, impacting negatively on her energy levels and stamina[v].

Energy limitations and lack of stamina are some of the most prolific symptoms for anyone living with disability and/or chronic illness[vi]. Yet they are often least recognised, poorly understood, without effective treatment and difficult to quantify. These are also often one of the most impactful experiences, with little in the way of adaptations available, as there might be with other forms of disability, undermining every element of day-to-day functioning. Otherwise daily activities of washing and eating can become momentous tasks, rendering a person unable to do much else in their day and requiring rest to recover from.

In response to this second prolonged period of illness, Godwin began to work on abstract images and macro photography. Some of Godwin’s last works are collected into a book called Glassworks and Secret Lives (Godwin, 1998). Many of the images were large prints included in her last retrospective at the Barbican Gallery, London, in 2001. The book is a collection of abstract views of the landscape, a departure from both her early portraiture and the wide-open expanses of places previously documented. In his introductory essay to the book, photography critic Ian Jeffrey references the absence of the horizon and how disorientating this is for a viewer. He writes: “To remove the horizon, then, entails a return to the pre-rational, or at least to a time before our powers of abstraction made it possible to think about as well as to sense place.” Removing the horizon “remove(s) assurances that that the earth is fully amenable to human order.” (Jeffrey, 1998 p8).

A horizon offers the viewer an anchor point. It provides information about where you are in space, which way is up, a distinction between land and sky. Without it, suggests Jeffrey, the viewer can feel unmoored. When out at sea and in motion our bodies can respond in a very visceral way to this through seasickness. To manage these experiences, we are told to concentrate on the horizon. The horizon steadies our bodyminds in very real ways. For those who develop chronic ill-health, disabled by energy limitations, we are more used to an absence of a metaphorical horizon. It is more easily recognised that there are no such assurances of Jeffrey’s ‘human order’ in the world, ours are upended and there is little solid ground to rely on by way of medical treatments or societal understanding and support. In perpetual illness the horizon moves and slides or is erased entirely. I disagree with Jeffrey’s statement though: I can think about and sense place without it. It is simply a different way of sensing and thinking than it might be for others.

What we develop in the absence of a stable horizon is, I think, the richness and creativity that can come with living with and having to adapt to experiences of chronic illness. We learn, perhaps, to redraw a horizon, to watch for it even when it is moving. For those who are limited to movement within their home or their bed, the horizon outside may very literally be obscured. When I was first seriously ill fourteen years ago, largely confined to my bed for nearly a year, I was living in a basement flat near the sea – just along the coast from Pett in Bexhill. At the front of the building, beyond the window, my horizon was the pavement where I’d see people passing from the knees down. I felt literally and metaphorically subterranean. I could still track a sense of time, through changing light and shadows, weather and the clothes people wore, and my sense of place remained, albeit much smaller, through my memory and knowledge of what lay beyond my street.

Jeffrey quotes Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: “Our bodies too are always, endlessly changing; what we have been, or are today, we shall not be tomorrow.” (Jeffrey, 1998 p7). While Godwin’s health and diagnosis is never mentioned by her or Jeffrey, the implication is embedded throughout. At the end of his essay Jeffrey returns to Ovid, citing Metamorphoses, xv: “Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives. In all creation, be assured there is no death – no death, but only change and innovation…” (Jeffrey, 1998 p12).

One of society’s great collective denials is of disability and chronic illness. It is the one marginalised group we are all likely to join at one time or another during our lives. To accept this and build a world that is more tolerant, accepting and supportive of sick and disabled people would make for an easier place to live in for us all. It can be life changing to become sick and not recover, to acquire a disability through illness, trauma or accident. The grief associated is amplified by the inaccessible and unforgiving society we live in, one which celebrates physical achievements and productivity rather than our humanity.

Jeffrey goes on to write of Godwin’s images: “Animated nature acts in memory of the body’s organs and surfaces: lungs and the tracks of nerves.” (Jeffrey, 1998). My own work is attempting to integrate the natural world with the body, and vice versa, slipping from human to more-than-human and back again. I am drawing on metaphor and the imagination in my writing. Each of Godwin’s prints in Glassworks and Secret Lives are untitled, but grouped into named series within the collection. Many of the images show partial plant matter in close-up views, spider webs, shadows, rocks and condensation. All are taken in colour and at very close range. Page 46 of the book shows one image from the series Lings’ Secret Lives, 1993/4. This picture is predominantly red in colour, with branching veins from a central stem. The dominant object looks as though it could be pulsing and breathing, recently removed from or observed within the body.

In the notes at the end of the book Godwin writes about the process of making the work. Borne out of chance, she had begun to ‘explore the detail, forgotten corners, behind glass, plastic and other materials’ after being given some colour film (Godwin, 1998 p53). It began in Sussex at a nursery that had held a special kind of magic for her, in 1989. She goes on to comment on how, despite initial appearances, there is a clear connection with her black and white landscape images, the thread between both sets of work being the role of the human in the landscape, of the use and history of the land.

Retuning to a process of visual art I am teaching myself lenseless photography techniques. Beginning with cyanotypes, I spent a week in a caravan further along the coast in Greatstone last spring. Using the shower room as a dark room, I painted sheets of watercolour paper with the chemical solution and collected objects from the beach to expose under a sheet of glass on the deck area outside. In the bright sunlight I was lucky enough to have, they quickly transformed into indigo prints. Perhaps these draw on a similar creative response to the one Godwin was motivated by in her close-up colour work. They are small, curated abstracts, more manageable for my energy levels than long hikes across the marshland. It is as if the place making work about itself, something I am hoping to develop, drawing on elements of the Romney Marshes and the intertidal zone.

This unstable coastline, prone to shifting and sliding, reminds me of the vagaries of chronic illness, a place of anomalies and contradictions. The ebbing and flooding of the tide and the betweenness of its intertidal zone connects me to this uncertain body I live in. Connecting with Fay Godwin, and others who adapt their creative practice through illness, connects me to place and people in new ways: of making sense, of understanding, and of exploring the world we live in.

References:

Jeffrey, I. (1998) Introductory essay in Glassworks and Secret Lives. (Godwin, 1998) Rye: Stella Press.

Fowles, J. (1985) Essay in Land. (Godwin & Fowles, 1985) London: Cornerstone.

Godwin, F. & Fowles, J. (1985) Land. London: Cornerstone.

Godwin, F. (1998) Glassworks and Secret Lives. Rye: Stella Press.

Kafer, A. (2013) Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana Press.

Samuels, E. (2017) “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, Disability Studies Quarterly 37(3).

The South Bank Show (1986) London Weekend Television (LWT). 9^th November.

O’Neill, B. (2023) Exploring the Fay Godwin Archive at the British Library. The Royal Photographic Society. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRv6mt-pVQ (accessed 2^nd January, 2026).

The South Bank Show: Fay Godwin (1986) London Weekend Television (LWT). 9^th November. online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JE8I44Ak7o (accessed 2^nd January 2026).

Samuels, E., (2017) “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, Disability Studies Quarterly 37(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824 (accessed 2nd January 2026)

Kafer, Alison. (2013) Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Corfield, D. (2005) No Man’s Land – Fay Gowin’s Last Interview. ePHOTOzine. 31^st May. https://www.ephotozine.com/article/no-man-s-land—fay-godwin-s-last-interview-67

Hale, C. Benstead, S. Lyus, J. Odell, E. & Ruddock, A. (2020) Energy Impairment and Disability Inclusion: Towards and Advocacy Movement for Energy Limiting Chronic Illness. Centre for Welfare Reform. https://chronicillnessinclusion.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/energy-impairment-and-disability-inclusion.pdf

Images:

Cyanotypes made at Greatstone during a residency Louise Kenward

Photographs of the bench at Pett, dedicated to Fay Godwin, by Louise Kenward

[i] O’Neill, B. (2023) Exploring the Fay Godwin Archive at the British Library. The Royal Photographic Society. Online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abRv6mt-pVQ (accessed 2^nd January, 2026)

[ii] The South Bank Show: Fay Godwin (1986) London Weekend Television (LWT). 9^th November. online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4JE8I44Ak7o (accessed 2^nd January 2026).

[iii] Samuels, E., (2017) “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time”, Disability Studies Quarterly 37(3). doi: https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v37i3.5824 (accessed 2nd January 2026)

[iv] Kafer, Alison. (2013) Feminist Queer Crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

[v] Corfield, D. (2005) No Man’s Land – Fay Gowin’s Last Interview. ePHOTOzine. 31^st May. https://www.ephotozine.com/article/no-man-s-land—fay-godwin-s-last-interview-67

[vi] Hale, C. Benstead, S. Lyus, J. Odell, E. & Ruddock, A. (2020) Energy Impairment and Disability Inclusion: Towards and Advocacy Movement for Energy Limiting Chronic Illness. Centre for Welfare Reform. https://chronicillnessinclusion.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/energy-impairment-and-disability-inclusion.pdf

Rebel Light: Radical Visions of Britain on Film

Alexandra Harris on 20/04/2026

A film series featuring It Ain’t Half Racist, Mum (1979) • African Oasis (1982) • Traces Left (1983) • Giro: Is This the Modern World? (1985) • Language is the Key (1985) • Paradise Circus (1988)

Various Wednesdays 6-8pm, April-June 2026 at BRIG Cafe, The Warehouse, 54-57 Allison Street, Birmingham, B5 5TH. Screening details and booking here.

This series is organised by the Stuart Hall Archive Project team. For enquiries about the film screenings please contact Dr John Fagg (j.m.fagg@bham.ac.uk) or Professor Daniel McNeil (d.mcneil@bham.ac.uk)

Britain has never been a finished picture — it’s a work‑in‑progress, a long edit, a frame that keeps shifting. This film series brings that truth to the screen.

Drawing on the radical traditions of the Birmingham Film & Video Workshop (BFVW) and the critical imagination of Stuart Hall, these films invite audiences to rethink how stories of place, identity, and power are made — and who gets to make them. Across six bold works from the 1970s and 80s, we encounter a Britain alive with cultural struggle and creative resistance.

This is cinema as confrontation, cinema as community, cinema as the start of a conversation that young people continue today — about justice, belonging, resistance, and the right to shape the images that shape us.

Each event in the series includes a post-screening conversation with the filmmakers, offering audiences deeper insight into the work.

Arts of Place/Oxford Centre for Life-Writing Summer Lecture: Karen Karbiener on Whitman

Alexandra Harris on 02/03/2026

“Who wishes to walk with me?”: Walt Whitman, Poet of Places

Tuesday 2nd June 2026, 4pm, Lecture Room 3, Arts Building, University of Birmingham Edgbaston Campus. Free and open to all. Registration recommended: please follow the links here.

Our annual lecture, a collaboration between Arts of Place and OCLW, brings together thinking about place with some of the most exciting current work in the fields of biography and life-writing. Lives happen in places; places shape lives and have lives of their own. For 2026 we welcome Professor Karen Karbiener from New York University.

How does a poet become profoundly connected to places he’s never been or even written about?

Walt Whitman (1819–1892), often celebrated as ‘The Poet of New York’, never travelled beyond North America and spent most of his life in only a few locations. Yet he remains a living presence in Bolton, a former Lancashire mill town, where an annual ‘Whitman Walk’ through the surrounding countryside has taken place, with occasional interruptions, since 1887.

This unlikely connection began in the 1880s with the Eagle Street College, a group of Bolton readers—clerks, professionals, and workers—who gathered to read and discuss Leaves of Grass. The group corresponded with Whitman in Camden, New Jersey, sent him birthday greetings, and helped circulate his work in Britain, interpreting his poetry as a powerful articulation of democracy, equality, and social transformation.

Examining life-writing, poetry, and place, this lecture will appeal to anyone curious about how readers and communities shape a poet’s legacy—and how literature can travel far beyond the locations of a writer’s own life. It will also be of interest to students and scholars of American literature, history, and transatlantic cultural history. No prior specialist knowledge or preparation is required.

Professor Karen Karbiener is an internationally recognised Whitman scholar and a Distinguished Teaching Award-winning professor at New York University. She has published widely and curated several exhibitions on the poet; she is also president of the Walt Whitman Initiative, a non-profit organisation serving as an organising centre for cultural activism and poetry-related events. Karen is currently at work on American Kosmos: The Lives, Loves, and Worlds of Walt Whitman (Harper Collins, 2027), the first full-length biography of the poet in over 25 years.

After the event, please join Arts of Place for a complimentary wine reception.

The event will be recorded and made available on the Arts of Place and OCLW websites soon after.

Location: The Arts Building is R16 in the Red Zone shown on this campus map. Regular trains from Birmingham New Street stop at University Station (10-minutes’ walk from the venue). You are warmly invited to explore the campus if you have time. You’ll find a park-like space in the ‘Green Heart’ and a range of cafes, including at the Bramall Music Building near the clock tower.

Jenny Uglow: ‘A Year with Gilbert White’

Niamh Lawlor on 28/03/2025

Summer Weinrebe Lecture

Tuesday 17 June 2025, talk at 4pm, drinks reception 5.15. University of Birmingham Arts Building, First Floor, Main Lecture Theatre.

On the 17th June we welcomed Jenny Uglow OBE to speak about her new book A Year With Gilbert White: The Story of a Nature Writer (to be published by Faber this September). Jenny is the author of highly acclaimed biographies and histories, including the classic of Midlands history The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future. The talk formed part of our ‘Pioneers of Local Thinking’ series.

“In 1781, Gilbert White was a country curate in the Hampshire village he had known all his life. He kept journals for many years and was now halfway through completing his Natural History of Selbourne – in print since 1789, paving the way for later naturalists. No one had written like this before, with such close observation, humour, and sympathy.

Often called ‘the father of ecology’, White noted the results of ‘watching narrowly’ in his Naturalist’s Journal. Through this we follow the seasons, from frost to drought, noting everything from the migration of birds to the sex lives of snails, and the vagaries of village life – a determined local record, imbued with a profound sense of place.”

A former editorial director of Chatto & Windus, and previous Chair of the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, Jenny Uglow is a biographer and historian. Her books on scientists, writers and artists include The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars and Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, as well as Edward Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. Her book on Gilbert White will be published in September 2025.

Featured image: Eric Ravilious, The Tortoise in the Kitchen Garden, from The Writings of Gilbert White of Selborne, ed., H. J. Massingham, (London: The Nonsuch Press, 1938), Private Collection.

Description image: Engraving after Samuel Hieronymus Grimm, East view of Selborne from the Short Lythe.

Reading Group: The Lunar Men

Niamh Lawlor on 18/03/2025

Monday 19th May 2025, Arts Building, Lecture Room 5

2-4pm

Refreshments provided

The Arts of Place network would like to invite you to a reading group which will revisit Jenny Uglow’s group biography and classic of Midlands history The Lunar Men ahead of her upcoming summer lecture on 17th June.

The Lunar Men explores the lives and legacies of the many members of the Lunar Society, a group of curious and enthusiastic men on the cutting edge of discovery. From James Watt and Matthew Boulton’s exploits with steam engines, to James Keir and Joseph Priestley’s experiments in chemistry, collaboration was at the very heart of their work. Uglow’s group biography is the perfect way to chart this, intertwining details of their personal and family lives with their professional exploits. Birmingham became their hub, their home, and the Midlands on the whole provided the perfect backdrop for their work, from Erasmus Darwin’s medical practice in Lichfield to the group’s adventures exploring the minerals of Derbyshire’s caves. This group of men revolutionised Birmingham’s history, and their legacy should be celebrated.

In anticipation of Jenny’s summer lecture about her new book A Year With Gilbert White, we will be hosting a reading group exploring this earlier work so closely intertwined with Birmingham’s history. The afternoon will consist of talks from Birmingham’s Dr Louise Curran and Dr Malcolm Dick as well as The Lunar Society’s own Dr Peter Borg-Bartolo – experts from the fields covered by this expansive text and enthusiastic readers themselves. These talks will then be followed by discussion.

We invite you to read especially the ‘Prologue’ and the initial section: ‘First Quarter’.

Access the book via FindIt. Or access these PDFs for PROLOGUE and FIRST QUARTER. But no prior knowledge is required and all are welcome to take part!

If you have queries about this event please contact Lucy Snow: lrs103@student.bham.ac.uk.

Image: Anonymous artist, Birmingham by Moonlight, c. 1800, Birmingham Museums Trust

‘Standing on the verge of another world’: Romanticism on the Volcano

Niamh Lawlor on 12/02/2025

With guest speaker Professor Simon Bainbridge

Seminar Hosted in Collaboration with the Nineteenth Century Centre at the University of Birmingham

Simon Bainbridge is a Professor in English and Creative Writing at the University of Lancaster. Simon’s extensive work in the field of Romanticism has involved close research into the relationship between the movement and the historic contexts that surround it. He is the author of Napoleon and English Romanticism (1995) and British Poetry and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (2003). In this seminar we heard about Simon’s recent research exploring global mountaineering in the Romantic-period, focusing on accounts of ascending Hawaii’s highest volcanoes.

Simon introduces his subject here:

‘This paper will examine the Romantic-period phenomena of global mountaineering through a focus on accounts of the climbs of Hawaii’s highest volcanoes (Mauna Loa and Mauna Kea). These climbs by western travellers began in 1779 with attempts made by crew members of Captain Cook’s third voyage and culminated in 1840-1 with a 400-strong ascent made by the United States Exploratory Expedition as part of the first American government sponsored scientific expedition to the Pacific. As these contexts would suggest, the ascents were very much linked to the scientific and imperial agendas of the voyages of which they were a part. The paper will examine the extent to which the exploration of what were seen as physical, psychological, geographical and imaginative extremes in Romantic-period global mountaineering undermined or reinforced the climbers’ conceptions of the self, the aesthetic, the world and the divine. It will particularly examine the question of whether western climbers’ attempts to understand and appreciate the Hawaiian volcanoes were influenced and informed by the knowledge and beliefs of the indigenous peoples who played such a crucial role in their ascents or whether the western climbers used their ascent narratives to reinforce wider imperial and colonial power structures.’

Image: Johan Christian Dahl, Eruption of Vesuvius, 1826, Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Pioneers of Local Thinking: Polly Atkin

Jessica Fay on 27/10/2024

“From towers of joy to sickroom gardens: revisiting Dorothy Wordsworth’s dwelling-places of the mind”

At the confluence of nature-writing, life-writing, and disability studies, Atkin’s work is underpinned by a rich understanding of the Lake District and expertise in Romantic literature.

Atkin is the author of Recovering Dorothy: The Hidden Life of Dorothy Wordsworth (Saraband, 2021), a ground-breaking biography that focuses on the mental and physical illness that Dorothy Wordsworth suffered in the final decades of her life.

Atkin’s most recent book, Some of Us Just Fall: on Nature and Not Getting Better (Sceptre, 2023) is a profound reflection on the experience of inhabiting a body and a place in the context of disability and illness. She is also the author of poetry collections including Much With Body (2021), Basic Nest Architecture (2017), and Shadow Dispatches (2013), as well as works of literary criticism, biography, and short form non-fiction.

Atkin introduces her subject here:

“This talk will take a wander through places both of the earth and the mind as Dorothy experienced them, with a focus on the parallels between her acute sensory experience of material place, and her ability to conjure places from her imagination, both remembered and created. I trace her ability to inhabit both real and unreal places from the dream cottages she imagined as a unsettled young woman without a home of her own, to the gardens she brought into her sickroom when she was housebound later in life. During those housebound years, writing and reciting poetry becomes a way of both reigniting memories, and bringing the natural world into her mind and her room, even when she cannot leave her bed. She brings the outside in, literally, and in memory and poetry. In this talk I bring those late imaginative travels back into parallel with her youthful attempts to ‘build castles’ or ’tower(s) of joy’ as she dreamt of a home in which happiness might arise from ideal company, ‘retirement and rural quiet’. In doing so, I question whether everything we value about her place-writing – her intense attention to the intricacies and particularities of place – is what enables her to travel so satisfactorily through the many mansion of her mind too.”

Daphne Astor

Alexandra Harris on 12/10/2024

Daphne Astor was a writer, publisher, philanthropist, farmer, and environmentalist with an extraordinary gift for encouraging and enabling others. Daphne was a loyal supporter of Arts of Place from the first, coming regularly to our online seminars and championing the work of speakers she heard. Her punchy and insightful contributions always brought a new perspective to the subject at hand, whether she was urging us to think more about contemporary farming or to visit the places of the poet George Crabbe. Even when she was ill and knew her time was limited, she logged on, listened, and shared her knowledge. Daphne died in July 2024 and she is remembered with deep appreciation by the Arts of Place community.

Hazel Press, which she founded, continues to publish new work with a focus on environment and the arts.

Daphne Astor obituary at Artlyst.com

The Allure of Lodore: Painting Sensation as well as Scenery

Jessica Fay on 30/09/2024

by William C. Snyder

Created at Lodore Falls in the Lake District in 1777, Thomas Hearne’s Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall (Figure 1) is a work that resists the usual categorizations of late eighteenth-century landscape painting. A scene in pen-and-wash, it allows us to glimpse an early model of English visual artists embracing elements of native landscape on its own terms.

In executing this image, Hearne discounted a Claudean approach, eschewing imaginary persons occupying wistful atmospheres, or pastoral figures roaming beneath relics of architecture. And, while the painting contains some picturesque elements––a rugged scene mixing beautiful and sublime–– Hearne avoided placing a frame around the view, disqualifying it as a “prospect” favoured by contemporaries William Gilpin and Uvedale Price.

Instead, Hearne requires of us a fluency of gazing: to perceive a location where nature is active instead of static, to discern his own friends in the exercise of capturing a wilderness within which they are actors, and to behold an experiment in conveying atmosphere. Yet even as it edges toward such “romantic” qualities, the painting does not aspire to the naturalism, chromatic intensity or imaginative power found in the next generation of British painters, a number of whom paid homage to Lodore Falls in later decades (including Constable, Turner, Ibbetson, Towne, de Loutherberg, Sunderland and Girtin).

Figure 1. Thomas Hearne, *Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall, 1777,* pen and wash drawing, 41 x 28.5 cm. Digital image courtesy of the Wordsworth Trust, Grasmere.

Lodore Falls first gained notoriety in the mid-eighteenth century, via descriptions offered by writers Thomas Gray, John Dalton and John Brown, whose verbal accounts from the 1750s and 1760s were poetic and pictorial. In his 1769 touring journal Gray depicted “Lodoor” Falls as a stream “nobly broken, leaping from rock to rock, & foaming with fury” . . . from a height “about 200 feet” with a “towering crag, that spired up to equal, if not overtop, the neighbouring cliffs” with the surrounding area consisting of a “rounder broader projecting hill shag’d with wood & illumined by the sun, wch glanced sideways on the upper part of the cataract”. These impressions were included in a collection of Gray’s works, edited by William Mason, in 1775.

Joseph Farington (1747-1821), an understudy to Richard Wilson (1714-1782), appears to have been struck by Gray’s exalting rhetoric. According to John Murray, Farington traveled to Keswick in 1775 proposing to illustrate Gray’s views, but that plan was not realized. Nevertheless, Farington was able to trek through parts of the Lakes during that autumn and the following summer, explorations which provided familiarity with topographical features, allowing him to guide Hearne and Beaumont the next year.

Farington, Hearne and Beaumont all shared some interest in non-idealized landscapes. Each had previously traveled to the west and north of England and to Scotland––where terrain was wilder, more dramatic or more surprising than the gracious plains and hills of Oxfordshire, Staffordshire, or Worcestershire. At Derwentwater they came to realize that familiar or academic approaches to image-making needed expansion; sublime panoramas and the capricious weather and modulating atmospheres of the mountainous lakes urged all three artists to enlarge their vision. For a few weeks in August of 1777 the men traveled to the North Lakes to indulge their desire to paint pure landscapes together, on location, drawing upon each other’s technical and academic skills as well as upon one another’s perspectives and approaches.

The plan to work around Derwentwater probably arose from Farington’s standing desire to pictorialize Gray’s tour. Taking into account dates given on his sketches, we might infer that Farington took three tours in 1777: working in and around Grasmere and Keswick in June, heading to Carlisle to paint Corby Castle in July, and tracing through the northern Lakes from mid-August to mid-September.(Sketches and drawings indicate that this third outing took him from Cockermouth on 14 August and back to Keswick by 10 September. Dates affixed to pencil sketches of High Crag and Gatesgarth suggest that after the stay at Lodore his itinerary followed Honister Pass, ending at Cockermouth, where he produced a sketch of the northwest view of the castle).

The Low Door Hotel, situated at the entrance to the Borrowdale Valley, served as a pied-à-terre for the three artists. This location provided vistas that could be enjoyed from Derwentwater’s southern shoreline. The marsh in front of the hotel supplies choice views of Skiddaw, six miles to the north, looming above Keswick with the breast of the Lake in the foreground. A nearby pier makes access to other points on the Lake possible, and images from these locations were produced by these painters as well as by many others in later years. Today, lower Lodore Falls is actually within hotel property, an un-demanding ten-minute climb on foot, about twenty minutes with equipment.

On 27 August the three painters, along with a footman and a dog, bundled materials of composition and climbed a path alongside the cascade of boulders to their right. A Farington pencil sketch includes the script “Lodore Cottage from the Waterfall” in the lower left corner. On the back is “27 8 1777”. This artifact is likely Farington’s view in the Hearne canvas. (See Figure 2.)

‘An extraordinary idea somehow transpired: Beaumont and Farington resolved to paint from within the waterfall.’

Figure 2. Joseph Farington, Lodore Cottage from the waterfall, 27 8 1777. Enhanced digital image, The Wordsworth Trust.

Before the rocky channel got too steep, they unpacked and began to set up. An extraordinary idea somehow transpired: Beaumont and Farington resolved to paint from within the waterfall. They secured two easels on top of large boulders. Hearne, the antiquarian and architectural draughtsman so familiar with composing from a distance, found a spot about eighty feet away, under a small clearing beneath a coppice of trees. On the same plane as his mates, with the falls tumbling aside a 35-foot limestone wall, he positioned to record his colleagues situated against the impressive backdrop, as they went about the unusual action of sketching in ink, outdoors, from an atypical point of view, surrounded by movement and moisture.

Hearne had been comfortable working outdoors from his years of rendering buildings. But the scene at Lodore Falls presented a pure landscape, and was less subject to conceptual control than a house or ruined abbey. So the painter nodded to a few familiar techniques of the continental picturesque tradition. The appearance of figures below an imposing rock façade with rugged features is a consistent idiom in the work of Salvator Rosa, Italian master of sublime landscapes and an influence on English nature painters in the latter part of the eighteenth century. Also, terrestrial elements—the canopy of trees at the top, and the array of boulders below—hint at a frame for the scene, a pattern from Italian and Dutch landscapes introduced by Wilson to English places.

Yet Hearne’s effort, as well as the initiative of Beaumont and Farington, crosses boundaries into entirely new territory. First, the figures are not only real, but known by the artist. Hearne is, for the era, surprisingly personal as he breaks from his training as an objective historian and provides a kind of visual diary entry. And, while picturesque or antiquarian painting typically includes animals, peasants, or children, they tend to be anonymous reference points who serve to convey a sense of proportion. Here Hearne names the performers, divulges clues about sensibility and motive, and implies his own participation by capturing the same subject as his colleagues. He punctures the standard screen of seeing the world, of presenting the view as “out there”.

With a rigid neo-classical frame elided, and with no long view or vista, Sir George Beaumont and Joseph Farington Sketching a Waterfall conveys a sense of enclosure, if not intimacy––between man and nature, and among the painters.Without a horizon, the margin between subject and observer is reduced, as Hearne refuses to artificially position trees or rocks to frame the figures. Beaumont and Farington are affiliated with the scene that they are involved in capturing—artists as subjects––woven into the larger visual web. Enveloped in the waterfall, their figures do not command immediate attention; we are prompted by the title to seek for them—and then to enter into the image, to assemble it ourselves.Hearne captures a moment in time integrating real subjects, natural elements, and local atmosphere, thus separating from historical or mythological landscapes which transport us to a different era, far removed from current life and conditions. Here we are in the present day viewing men at work at a specific time in a known place.

The paraphernalia of the artists––the brushes, umbrellas and tripods–– insinuate shapes found elsewhere in the painting: the sloping tops of boulders, or the trunks and branches of some of the trees. Also, seeming to borrow from Rosa, Hearne takes license to accentuate the rock wall, bending it toward the artists for dramatic effect, as the axis of the actual slab is more vertical in proximity to the stream. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3. Author’s photograph of rock face, Lodore Falls, October 2016.

The placement of the two artists––not just in proximity to the water, but inside the rock channel of the falls—is striking for the time. The germ of the idea to attempt composing from such a position may never be known, but Beaumont and Farington might have been seeking immediacy, to paint sensation as well as scenery. In any case, they were undertaking quite a challenge. At Lodore Falls, the set-up of equipment required of oil painting (involving larger canvases than pads or sketchbooks) would have been physically difficult. The unevenness of the boulders and the variation of their size, in addition to the wetted surfaces and slippery moss, required extensive preparation before any brush touched canvas.

To navigate this problem, the men likely customized their supports, scanning the ravine’s bed for small sandy pods flat enough to allow sturdy footholds. Still, the painting presents the canvases as a bit askew; the ruggedness of the landscape is complemented by the ruggedness of the process, which invites another potential interpretation: was the sight of his fellows climbing over slick rocks to install two easels so unique that Hearne decided that such an act of human enterprise was just as worthy of portrayal as the falls? In any case, Hearne shows the challenges involved in painting landscapes on-site, revealing to us that era’s tools of the trade, from the mountings to the multiple umbrellas to the mahlsticks. (See Figure 4.)

‘…a kind of visual diary entry’

Figure 4. Thomas Hearne, Beaumont and Farington Sketching a Waterfall, detail.

Hearne’s preliminary and larger sketch for this tableau lays out another interesting subplot in the Lodore story. A pencil drawing (17.8 x 19 cm) (Figure 5) archived in the Wordsworth Trust adds nuance to the finished work. Most notably, the preliminary sketch includes facial expressions of two of the men, gazes of satisfaction or pleasure. The closest figure, likely Sir George Beaumont (Figures 6 and 7), appears to be looking at the canvas with serene approval while he holds a brush; the standing figure, probably Beaumont’s attendant, with hands in pocket, casually admires the waterfall. The expression of the middle figure is not apparent, but the curve of the chin suggests Farington, who had a full, round face. The pencil rendition includes a dog, who is looking at Hearne, providing a point of entry into the scene for the viewer, and disrupting any sense of picturesque distance. All four figures are interconnected, yet all are looking in different directions.

Figure 5. Thomas Hearne, *Beaumont and Farington Sketching a Waterfall,* pencil sketch, 17.8 x 19 cm, the Wordsworth Trust.

Figure 6. Enlarged detail from pencil sketch.

The final work switches the positions of Beaumont and Farington, and obscures their expressions. The attendant is shown as sitting and is darkened, nearly lost in the composition. The dog has been erased. Different too are the posts for the easels (less rugged in the painting) and Farington’s easel has two intersecting spires with no apparent footing.

As Hearne worked the tableau into the final, larger canvas, he traded the intimate detail of the figures for the impact of boulders, slab, and waterfall. The sketch is realistic; the painting is artistic. The sketch betrays the pleasure and contentment of connections—to nature and to art, even of a brotherhood of picture-making. The painting zooms out to a view that allows natural elements—and some sense of sublimity—to prevail.

Nevertheless, the two versions of the men at their canvases allow two perspectives of an experiment in process. The three artists were outside their usual spheres, and certainly beyond the compass of their masters. Castles, priories, goddesses, shepherds, estates, engravers and a picturesque frame were not in play. Instead, the focus is on flesh-and-blood British gentlemen enjoying an actual British place in a specific moment of time. John Constable, who eventually became good friends with Sir George, might have titled this work “Waterfall: Noon.”

Finally, while Hearne’s execution is remarkable enough, his point of view is rare for the time. Standing on a small plateau, a twenty-first century visitor to the Falls can approximate Hearne’s position and gaze upon the disheveled boulders that upheld Beaumont, Farington and their easels, imagine the two painters putting pencil to palette after studying the cascade, and perhaps occasionally glancing back at Hearne, thinking that the Falls were his subject, little realizing that they were subjects themselves, part of the scene, being immortalized.

Somewhere during their long friendship, Hearne made a gift of his Lodore watercolour to Sir George, and, except for occasional exhibition, the canvas evidently was in the Beaumont estate until obtained by the Wordsworth Trust in 1984.

If it is accurate to say that the “Lakers” of the Romantic age found qualities in Cumberland and Westmoreland that were already inside themselves, we should see Farington, Hearne and Beaumont as belonging to an earlier sensibility, teasing out a new kind of art in an elemental way––where classical vision and technical training were tentatively fused with a varied and spectacular topography. In the Lakes, and especially at Derwentwater, the three men began to extend the boundaries of their academic preparation so that they could do justice to Cumbria’s unique terrain, atmosphere, and history. The vicissitudes of the Lakes provoked their imaginations, summoning them to dabble with effects, perspectives, techniques and moods which presaged their later works, and which would become standard in the painting of the next generation.

Figure 7. Joshua Reynolds, *Sir G. Beaumont, Baronet,* 1807, National Portrait Gallery

William C Snyder is an independent Romantics scholar based in Pennsylvania

“To the Lakes!”: Local artistic perspectives

Sean Ketteringham on 16/02/2024

with guest speaker Jeff Cowton MBE, Principal Curator & Head of Learning at the Wordsworth Trust

Monday 20 May with Jessica Fay in response and conversation.

On 20 May, Jeff Cowton joined us to discuss the Wordsworth Trust’s exhibition ‘To the Lakes!’, a study of how the Lake District attracted outside tourists and artists from around 1750 onwards, and how this tourism has shaped both the art it produced and the place at its centre. As Jeff makes clear, the work of visiting artists taking picturesque tours of the area was partly shaped by local writers and artists. Jeff focused on the work of two artists: William Green of Ambleside and Joseph Wilkinson. He explored their challenge to the pictorial conventions surrounding landscape in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, and their engagement with the emergent tourism industry.

Watch the recording of this talk below and read on for some highlights.

Introducing his latest exhibition, Jeff invoked the finest poet of our age: yes, Taylor Swift of course, who sings ‘Take me to the lakes’. Unfortunately, this is followed by the line ‘where the poets went to die’. Jeff set out to chart more cheery and perhaps more lyrically nuanced territory. He turned our attention to tourists of the past and the present and how they have made the Lake District what it is today.

William and Dorothy Wordsworth’s lives at Dove Cottage were shaped by tourism, as William writes in ‘The Brothers’:

These Tourists, heaven preserve us! needs must live
A profitable life: some glance along,
Rapid and gay, as if the earth were air,
And they were butterflies to wheel about
Long as the summer lasted: some, as wise,
Perched on the forehead of a jutting crag,
Pencil in hand and book upon the knee,
Will look and scribble, scribble on and look,
Until a man might travel twelve stout miles,
Or reap an acre of his neighbour’s corn.

Jeff turned first to Joseph Wilkinson (b. 1763), a Carlisle-born deacon who lived in Ormathwaite Hall north of Keswick. He left the lakes in 1803 to live in Norfolk but not before creating a substantial volume of landscape prints of Northern Scenery, with a title page created by William Marshall Craig featuring labouring figures in the landscape (a rarity within the landscape conventions of the day). Wordsworth was enlisted to write an introduction to Wilkinson’s, and he later voiced his embarrassment that the landscape would not meet the exacting standards of his patron Sir George Beaumont. Jeff expertly guided us through the ‘holy grail of Joseph Wilkinson studies’: a fascinating progression from preparatory drawing to watercolour and three prints with various levels of colour added.

Next Jeff turned to William Green (b. 1760) who trained in Manchester and later moved to Ambleside to create a prolific career as a landscape draughtsman and printmaker. Although Green was evidently conscious of the conventions of the picturesque, he also sought to depict a faithful record of landscape and architectural features in Ambleside and its area. Jeff highlights this tension between the pictorial and the practical by presenting us with an extract of an account of a tourist, Green, and his daughter discussing Stockghyll Force:

‘See now,’ observed Mr. G. ‘that tree shuts out the prettiest part of the cascade, while there wants one to hide the deformity of that other bank; be-side, that wood on the declivity of the other hill, which threw so fine a gloom over the whole glen, is now vanishing beneath the woodman’s axe; and a certain degree of poverty will be the natural consequence.’ ‘You will excuse,’ said Miss Green ‘my father’s enthusiasm for his darling art. He knows no world, but that in which a painter lives. Trees, with him, have no other use but that of giving softness and effect to a picture. The meadows were created for foregrounds and the hills were designed for distances. Rivers only roll along to brighten up the landscape; and cattle graze only to give life to his drawings. When any thing, therefore, is out of place, in a picturesque point of view, it excites his criticism, notwithstanding its utility in other respects.’

Jeff compared this to Thomas Gray’s notorious description of Grasmere life in 1763 where ‘all is rusticity and happy poverty’ and ended by sharing with those us in the room a small collection of prints produced by Green in the 1790s.

William Green (1760-1823), View of Windermere and Belle Isle, pencil and watercolour, Eton College