SingingPub

Tuesday, 30 April 2024

The artichoke, the exhibition and the missing files

My first thought was, "Someone has built a new shed on the allotment." But they haven't built a new shed. I just noticed it on my way to work as if I were seeing it for the first time. Maybe I just noticed it because it's spring and the sun i…
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The artichoke, the exhibition and the missing files

Michelle Kn Stone

April 30

My first thought was, "Someone has built a new shed on the allotment."

But they haven't built a new shed. I just noticed it on my way to work as if I were seeing it for the first time. Maybe I just noticed it because it's spring and the sun is shining and the gap in the hedge perfectly framed the red-brown shed this morning.

"It must be a newly built shed," I thought, but it didn't look new on closer scrutiny.

I thought "Maybe it's been painted recently?" but the paint was faded, a little bit peeling from the edges.

I used to be a member of this allotment. I spent a lot of time up there weeding and watering and trying to get a long-uncultivated plot back into use. I must've seen this shed during all those hours I spent there but I don't remember it. I spent a long season trying to create a cultivated and productive space, but after The Artichoke Incident I quit the allotment and decided to focus my gardening energies elsewhere.

The Artichoke Incident

The plot we inherited had been taken over by tough grass and lots of weeds and the only plants in the garden that were already established and productive were some artichokes. These plants with their feathery leaves grow globe-like flower shapes. These spiky but edible bulb flower things were the only produce we were going to get from the allotment for some months.

Over the winter we had been going up there watering and digging over, optimistically planting asparagus, beans and whatever else we thought was a good idea at the time, but the one thing we knew that was alive and productive were the artichokes. Come the springtime we saw the bulbs were ripening and we thought, finally, we will get to eat something as a reward for all this work we've put in. We're going to get some food back for all the hours of digging in the cold, even if it's something we don't know much about or even how to cook.

We had been checking the plants and saw they were nearly ready. "We will come back on the weekend," we said, "and we will make our first harvest. We will take our harvest home and we will eat them on Saturday night."

On Saturday we go back to pick the artichokes that should be ready.

When we get to the allotment we find the artichoke bushes are in disarray. They are leaning crookedly.

Someone has come along between our last midweek visit and this Saturday afternoon and picked every single ripe artichoke. But they haven't picked them in a neat and tidy way, no. It looks like they've gone to battle with the artichoke bushes. They've tried to pull and twist the bulbs off the plants and in the process nearly pulled the bushes out of the ground. The stems where the bulbs were are broken and splintered.

That was when I decided actually I didn't want to do this allotment thing anymore.

The one thing I had to eat from all these months of work and it's stolen by some other allotment owner. And stolen in a brutal and savage way. I'm thinking, "I'd someone is keen to steal my artichokes, what will happen to my asparagus? To my beans? Will they also disappear? Will all my work go to filling someone else's plate?"

Suddenly the idea of "grow your own" didn't seem so appealing.

Abstraction/Extraction

On the weekend I went to a photographic exhibition of the works of Edward Burtynsky. I asked Husband if he wanted to go, but there must have been something in the way I described the exhibition to him, as being about how mankind has shaped the landscape through things like mining, that he thought it sounded depressing and not very interesting.

The exhibition was on at the Saatchi Gallery in West London. I don't often go to West London because I live in East London and it takes a long time to get to the West, and the main attractions of this area around Sloane Square and Kings Road in Chelsea are the expensive brand fashion shops, which are not really my thing.

The exhibition was certainly thought-provoking, with maybe a dozen rooms of photographs, although there were not many photographs in total due to the huge size of each image.

The size makes sense, because how else can you capture the scale of a mine or a factory or a hydroelectric dam if you're not presenting the image in a large enough scale to give the viewer the necessary perspective?

Glacial melt river, Iceland

The photographs also had an incredible 3-D texture, really drawing you in. At the same time, although incredibly detailed close up, from a distance you could almost imagine them as abstract paintings, hence the exhibition title.

Two things I noticed about the images: one, that considering this was about humanity's impact on the environment, there was very little evidence of human beings in the images at all. In some images, you would see a small white smudge that was a vehicle of some sort. Sometimes there were shadows that turned out to be people of you looked closely enough.

Secondly was the difference between natural and man-made/industrial forms. There was a terraced hillside in China, all curving lines to follow the shape of the mountain. There was the meandering river in Spain from which some artisanal salt production was done. These curving shapes contradicted either the straight lines of Rock of Ages mine, or the rows of greenhouses in Ethiopia that grow roses for export.

Ethiopian rose greenhouses

This was the largest ever exhibition of Burtynsky's work, and included a room explaining his equipment and process. Some of the photos were stitched together out of several images to ensure the focus and clarity all the way back, e.g. when photographing workers in a factory. Some were taken from the open door of a helicopter (Burtynsky hanging out the open door with a harness), some made use of drones (the photographer working with a drone pilot) and one extra large image of a coral reef that covered a whole wall was stitched together from images taken by divers.

There is the question - if the photographer conceives the image they want, but needs the assistance of others (e.g. scuba divers) to achieve the realisation of that image, is the image entirely theirs?

Workers in a chicken processing factory, China

The exhibition was thought provoking and the images were beautiful even if some of the individual subjects are ugly.

I saw Burtynsky has contributed to a film called "Anthropocene" which I might look up.

Rock of Ages granite mine

The missing files

I've got three long form works in progress, although only one of them has had any work on it in the last year.

I decided to find those old WIP files and print them out so I could read them through with the benefit of a year's distance, with a red pen in my hand, and with an editorial mindset, so I can work out just how much work is still needed, what needs to be written or rewritten, what needs to be cut. Basically to see if the bones of a good story are there.

But they weren't there.

I opened my "writing" folder and found in there only documents related to my current work in progress.

These other WIP files must be somewhere, but they are not in the writing folder on my work laptop. I'm not panicking yet. They might be in "the cloud", as we had to clean out our work laptops a few years ago and transfer any non work files to another device by an online file drop service. They might be on our old home laptop, which still works albeit very slowly. Maybe I've saved them onto our hard drive storage device.

I am about 5% worried right now. After I've had a chance to do some more searching at home, I will adjust that worry level.

One of these WIPs is my first idea. The first story idea I worked on when I let myself sit down and write freely for the first time. That time I said, "what if I didn't wait for the perfect time, but started now, when it's not perfect, but it's the perfect time to start?"

That story means a lot to me because it represents a trust in my own voice.

I'll let you know if I find them.

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