MAY BE ON THE MOORS #1

It was the first MAY BE ON THE MOORS walk on Sunday just gone. Hiking from Lumb Carr Road to Harcles Hill via Peel Tower, we each picked up a stone along the way to add to the cairn on the summit of the hill.

 

We discussed the ritual and tradition of cairn building, how it is both a collaborative and co-created endeavour without need for authorship or hierarchy. We discussed flow and energy and non-human agency through the decentring of the human experience in the landscape. We talked about flow in relation to cairns, which are fluid and active structures; always in flux, constantly being made and re-made.

 

During the walk we passed around a single use film camera, which are the images you see here.

We also visited the cairn further along the moors, towards Pilgrims Cross which has an altogether different character to the first. At each cairn we made a series of lumen prints which have now been fixed with first year students at the University of Greater Manchester. On the images below, the top row are prints the students made themselves on their own walk, and the bottom row are the fixed prints from Sunday. Our students have been exploring deeper and more expansive ideas of collaboration, and they have entered this co-created assemblage of work.

 

 

MAY BE ON THE MOORS continues this Sunday. Tickets are free but booking is essential.

Book your place here:

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/maybe-on-the-moors-2-tickets-1985574306200

ONE OR SEVERAL STONES?

Continuing my collaboration with the cairn on Harcles Hill, I’ve been developing a body of work for a group exhibition at Bolton Museum called Connected Futures. It’s open for viewing now, and there is a private view event on Thursday 26th March, 5-7pm. If you’d like to come, send me an email to RSVP.

 

In the exhibition I’m showing a series of lumen prints, made-with the cairn. Lumen printing is a cameraless photography method that uses sunlight to create photographic images outdoors. Objects are placed on photographic paper, partially shielding the light, whilst exposed or partially exposed sections of the paper are developed by the ultraviolet light of the sun. This results in a paper negative print that can then be placed in photographic fixer to preserve the image.

As seen in the images above, photographic paper has been sandwiched between stones on the cairn and left to expose in the sunlight together. The resulting images show the in-betweenness of the stones, manifesting the thresholds and energies between things. I’ve been reflecting on this process as an alternative way of photographing a cairn, and treating the individual prints as part of a multiplicity, in the same way that the individual stones are to the cairn.

 

Deleuze and Guattari describe an interpretation of a multiplicity as follows:

 

It was created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state, to cease treating it as a numerical fragment of as lost Unity or Totality or as the organic element of a Unity or Totality yet to come, and instead distinguish between different types of multiplicity. (Thousand Plateaus, p. 37)

 

So, to discuss the multiplicity, is to discuss the energies between various multiples, not as a duality, but as a constant flow, in what Deleuze and Guattari might determine as a deterritorialised space or ‘smooth space’ (TP 551). This is how I like to think about cairns. A cairn is a loose structure of multiple stones, constantly in flux and open to change. Cairns are co-collaborative structures, constructed by anonymous participants over a long and open-ended period of time, formed with and by the landscape, and changed by the weather. Their structures are fluid as they are constantly built and re-built in an anonymous, co-collaborative, and non-hierarchical way.

IS EVERYTHING AN INTERMEZZO?

Like the stones in the cairn, the lumen prints are interchangeable, reversible, and like wolves in a pack, both one and several simultaneously. They show the energies between things, between stones, between the stones and the sun and the weather, and between the edges and the thresholds. The surface of the prints shows evidence of the physical connection they shared with the cairn, the scratches, grazes, folds, and stains from their contact between the stones, where they were both holding and being held, simultaneously. The essential characteristics of lumen printing as a process makes observable not just the in-betweenness of things, but also the shadows at their edges. Lumen prints are negatives, so the lightest areas are the parts where they had direct contact with the stones and thus blocked the sunlight from developing the paper. The darker areas are the exposed parts of the paper, but there is nuance and shadows between the light and dark areas, where shadows of the stone have been imprinted and the curvature of the stone has left its mark. These nuances manifest the thresholds of the stones, the liminal places in-between positive and negative. I have come to realise that my practice, the practice of Geohauntography, is to do with lingering in the thresholds, the hauntological space of both there and not there, and places we might describe as edgelands. But perhaps everything is something else’s edge, which would describe the perceivable world as one interchangeable threshold. Deleuze and Guattari ask, ‘has everything become interval, intermezzo?’

Connected Presence (2026) at Bolton Museum, as part of the exhibition Connected Futures.

The installation of the lumen prints at Bolton Museum is informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s prompt to ‘make a map, not a tracing’ (TP 12). A cairn itself is like a map, with each stone having its own history, and coming together within the coincidental assemblage of the cairn to become a multiplicity. In this same way, the lumen prints are single photographic prints but held together in this installation to form a map, forming a rhizome with the cairn rather than representing an image of it.

 

Like the cairn itself, the assemblage of individual objects in Connected Presence (2026) has no beginning or end, it is always in the middle. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s definition of the rhizome, there are multiple entry points (TP 22), meaning for a reversible, malleable and non-hierarchical system of organisation. The network and organisation of individual prints is modifiable, just as the individual stones are within the body of the cairn. Made through the contact between stones, each print is an intermezzo of the cairn, a state explored by Deleuze and Guattari as that which is in-between (TP 26).

 

I wanted to replicate the idea of cairn building within the exhibition itself. To do this, each of the prints have been mounted on found offcuts of wood from the workshop at the university where I work. Where possible the wood was not cut further, and there no consideration of hierarchy, or even conscious choice, that determined which prints would go on each board. It would be quite unusual to chuck a rock onto a cairn with deep considerations for aesthetics and so it was important to consider the mounting of these lumen prints as one would consider the building of a cairn - foraging for materials within reach, and with as few steps as possible. Perhaps Deleuze and Guattari would describe this process as Becoming-cairn.

References

Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus. London: Bloomsbury, 2023