monumenting forgotten histories of Trollers Gill

To document and monumentalise the forgotten tales of The Miner, The Troll and The Barghest of Trollers Gill.

Sometimes we are aware of green spaces only in their current state, seemingly wild and sometimes untamed but many of these places have an industrial past, a human past. Intervention into the landscape and countryside includes more than just agriculture and husbandry, especially in the north of England, there are small echos of what was once were hives of industry. Yes, the industrial revolution fuelled cities and towns, but the impact of its sudden development, and decline in the countryside, is equally important.

The subject of this project is Trollers Gill, a limestone gorge in the north Yorkshire Dales. I was, until recently, unaware of the origins of the gorge’s name, the aesthetic themes of this work have been heavily influenced by Scandinavian and northern European imagery, since thats where the name has come from. In the book ‘Place-Names of the Yorkshire Dales’ Peter Metcalfe claims the name is old Norse and translates as ‘The Troll’s Arse Ravine. The trolls of Scandinavian myths, known as jötnar, are giants that turn to stone in the sunlight and populate woodland and mountains.

Trolls do have a bit of a bad name and in many of the myths and legends they are generally the enemy of humans, i have tried to focus on the other side of this coin. we are equally their enemy. I am somewhat biased, I have tried not to make my love of John Baur’s beautifully bejewelled and majestic Trolls too obvious. I have however chosen to include pieces of the fluorspar i sieved from some clay i collected from the mouth of Gills Head mine, an easy twinkle in an eye or head torch.

The surrounding area is also home to a series of mines, some quite old, some not. Gills Head mine was only closed in the 80s, it had been used as a lead mine, then for fluorite when the lead ran dry. Fluorite is a mineral that grows alongside seams of lead, it varies in colour across the world, the pieces I found here are mostly translucent, often with black speckles, some even with tints of pink and purple.

Quite quickly I was confronted with three characters; The Miner, The Troll and Barghest, the black dog spectre of Trollerdale. Apparently the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. i knew these figures would make up the monument.

Maybe just to connect a little more with the site, I started to collect various ‘resources’, including; two kinds of clay, quartz, flouspar, some iron ritch rocks and some Lichen that I used to dye some clothes.

I thought it might be interesting to treat the site not as a place of natural beauty, but a collection of useful materials, the act of treating the land like a bottomless pit of valuable resources the human race is free to pillage, is nothing new. Ecofemenists define this as ‘Rape of the Land’, an issue of not just human nature but specifically the patriarchy. However, the miner is exploited just as the land is, he is both a perpetrator and a victim .

Mining provides work for the working classes but its exaughsting, it ultimately lines the pockets of those who are already wealthy, while simultaneously poisoning the earth. Is the industrial a matter concerning wealth, class and the patriarchy? of course it is. But thats a whole other matter that I do not have time to get into.

Handspun wool collected from barbed wire near home, dyed with yellow lichen (Xanthoria parietina) collected from Trollers Gill and bicarb from cupboard.

Anyway, I quickly decided to use these three characters as representatives of the land, because I feel they do this quite successfully and because their story’s are relatively unknown and their collective narrative is currently untold. I spent the first week or so sketching, then visited the site, I tried to figure out what my troll would look like, I knew what its expression should be; wise, a knowing half smile, big, sedate eyes. A sense of tragedy in its expression but also a suggestion that our sense of time is not universal, that this gorge will outlive us all, the troll represents the area itself i suppose. The Monument i have chosen to create is an amalgamation of my sketchbook drawings and designs, and the two main maquettes I have created.

The second drawing was inspired by the whale eating fish toy I had as a child, in many ways, all parties have been robbed of something.

i also painted the whites of the second’s eyes with the paler clay I found at Trollers Gill.

I chose to represent the troll as the hillside, with the cavity of the mine in its head, reiterating the idea of the land as simply a resource. I also liked the relevance of the name of the mine ‘Gills Head mine” to this idea. This all feeds into one of my main themes, the concept that all the different narratives of this landscape are intertwined and inseparable, the troll cradles the Barghest in its hand, oddly nurturing, while a miner protrudes from its mouth. The troll welcomes you with an outstretched arm, showing you the way. This monument is more of a playfully informative sign post really, something to be discovered and pondered at, and hopefully make the walk ahead a little more thoughtful and exciting.

pretty much all the constructing of the maquettes and the monument itself was done using coils and slabs. the troll is a sort of vessel, inspired by what i feel is monumental pottery, made by women in west africa.

Throughout this project i have been reminded of the Gorillaz song; Fire coming out of the monkeys head, it tells the story of a village and the nearby mountain that plays host to foreign diamond miners, they are eventually met with the wrath of the deity they hack into. I suppose its relevant because of their exploration of contemporary mythologies.

Creative futures/artist research/inspiration……

Trollers Gill is after all a Norse name, the place will have been inhabited by Anglo Saxons and Vikings alike. So i’ve included these rock drawings in my research, hopefully i’ll be able to channel the early art of these peoples.

Voulkos’ dissembling of ‘pottery’ both physically and theoretically has given him the status of a sort of godfather of fine art ceramics in America. His disregard for traditional aesthetics may seem like a natural progression in craft and art, to we who study him but I believe what Voulkos pursued, was at the time, quite revolutionary. By rendering a functional object entirely dysfunctional with a few swift gashes of his knife, he subverted traditional methods – not to disregard them entirely but highlight what could be achieved with a different approach.

I was, until recently, unaware of Voulkos’s successful career as a professional potter, making tableware. If his collision with abstract expressionism and Black Collage fine artists had not happened, I wonder where we, as ceramicists, would be today.

Urns (seven works), Francis Uprichard – 2015

Uprichard has created a series of urns, largely influenced I think, by Egyptian Canopic jars and ceramic lamps from the 1970s. They are garish and sludgy, but delightfully reminiscent of two vastly different aesthetics, she really champions the transformative power of glaze.

By the time the sculptures were finished and installed, Vigelands’s supposedly distinct style was wholly unfashionable in the art world. the statues are naked because Vigeland wanted them to be timeless, not from any particular time period, suggested through clothing.The monolith, initially made in clay by Vigeland, took masons 40 years to complete. It has been suggested that he was a Nazi sympathiser, that his pieces are totalitarian and have facist themes, the tower for example, striving upward.

I think I should go there myself and figure it out.

Various pieces from Lena Peters’ collections; Secrets of the hidden north (2017) and Saints and Spirits (2018)

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Marjane Satrapi – Pages from her graphic novel Persepolis (2000)

https://www.vogue.com/article/emma-watson-interviews-marjane-satrapi

Various photographs of Wildermann from Europe and Scandinavia by Charles Freger.

Illustration of *Struwwelpeter*, from the children’s book of the same name by Heinrich Hoffmann

Struwwelpeter is a character in the book who does not groom himself and so is unpopular.

Set design by Julian Crouch and director Phelim McDermott, for Phillip Glass’ opera; Satyagraha – based loosely on the life of Ghandi.

simon armitage painter

I have dedicated this section to artists and ceramicists that explore anthropomorphism and pre-classical imagery/iconography in their work. I find this is often difficult to achieve or ‘pull off’, without ripping off ancient art. Many of the following pieces teeter on the edge of this…

Village Casket, Ian Godfrey, circa 1978
Stoneware, dry brown with mottled ochre glazes, the sealed casket mounted with a mountain village of huts with birds and beasts, the sides mounted with flowers and foxes, raised on three carved feet.

On the Oxford Ceramics Gallery website, David Whiting describes Godfrey’s ceramics as “ritualistic in feeling”, he also explains; “His source material was eclectic, admiring as he was of art and ritual from a range of ancient civilisations, and able to convey something of their mysteries in his own sculptural and playful pieces.”