By Jemma Stewart
This blog post considers the role of the Pendle Sculpture Trail in inspiring re-enchantment with the natural world through art. Join me on a walk through the woods to see an array of artworks displaying distinctly ecoGothic traits…
If you go down to the woods today, you’re sure of a big surprise…
Aitken Woods is brim-full of spectres.
But don’t panic: they are (mostly) child-friendly.
Pendle Sculpture Trail is a palimpsest of horrors, where nature is concurrently a stage, a prop, and the star performer. Developed in phases during 2012, 2018 and 2019, with a lead artist (Philippe Handford) and a range of contributors, the seemingly incongruous artworks come together to create an effect that is downright uncanny. Ever growing and expanding, the sculpture trail is truly an organic artistic space which aims to engage children in particular with the darker side of nature.
The sculpture trail is situated in Aitken Wood near Barley, part of the Forest of Bowland, an area of Outstanding Natural Beauty in Lancashire. The rugged local landscape is used to haunting effect in the sculpture trail. It’s a gutsy walk past the Black Moss reservoirs, especially for little ones on a cold day, and once you enter Aitken Wood, an ambience of arboreality pervades. For me, this is homegrown horror. I’ve lived in the shadow of Pendle Hill for most of my life, and the landscape starts to infiltrate your outlook via osmosis: whether biking with my friend Baz to ‘Witches Galore’ of Newchurch-in-Pendle (on the hunt for a crystal ball), or casting a ‘Four Winds Wishing Spell’ on the Nick O’Pendle. The point is: treacle-eating boggarts are part of the furniture, in this neck of the woods, and you can’t help but feel an affinity with the weird history and local legends.
Readers might be familiar with the area through a range of fictional reimaginings of the Lancashire witches, from Robert Neill’s Mist over Pendle (1951) to Camille Ralphs’ pamphlet of epitaphic poetic monologues, Malkin: an elegy in 14 spels (2015). Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘The Poor Clare’ (1856), set just over the hill in the Trough of Bowland, is a Victorian representation of witchcraft and a contributor to what Catherine Spooner terms ‘Lancashire Gothic’1. Spooner suggests that in Gaskell’s Northern Gothic, ‘place is constructed not just through landscape, but also through the accumulation of legends and folklore that inform local identity’ (p. 29).
Folklore and legends contribute to the experiences and identities of the individuals living in any given place, and as such they do not just provide a Gothic frisson but also enable the precise documentation of that place – a form of ‘realism’.
(Spooner, p. 41)
The Pendle Sculpture trail is an embodiment of this idea – an accumulation of artistic interpretations of legends and local folklore – including, for example, the Black Dog and the Towneley Boggart courtesy of Incredible Creations.
Contemplation of art and the construction of identity and place can begin a series of connections for the viewer, perhaps encouraging the enactment of the message within Philippe Handford’s ‘Reconnected’ sculptures. Without a straightforward, linear narrative attached to the displays and the route, viewers are encouraged to go off the beaten track in terms of creative story-building.
Critics may call out the trail as capitalising on ‘Dark Tourism’, namely, the 1612 Lancashire witch trials and associated executions. Additionally, some sculptures could be perceived as nature bent to human will: ‘Reconnected 1’, ‘Reconnected 2’, ‘Magic Chair’ and ‘Quaker Tree’ in particular exhibit a manipulation of nature as trees are literally distorted, dissected and moulded for visual pleasure. The sculptures exemplify several of Elizabeth Parker’s ‘Seven Theses of the Deep, Dark Forest’: bound to fears of the past; a site of gruesome trial; the place where we may be eaten; a site of antithesis to civilisation.2 In this way, several of the sculptures can be seen as emerging out of ecophobic imaginations, and perhaps inspiring ecophobic anxiety in the viewer. And yet…
Pendle Sculpture Trail shows how art can benefit society and encourage environmental thinking, especially in young people. The Dryad, for instance, can be considered ecophilic. As a scholar of Victorian studies with interests in the cultural phenomenon of the language of flowers and the Gothic, I was drawn straight to the Dryad:
Dryads appeared in Greek mythology as spirits or nymphs residing in oak trees, completely dependent on the tree that they inhabit for life. Dryads feature in nineteenth-century literature for children – notably Hans Christian Andersen’s The Dryad (1868). Andersen’s tale can be read as an ecological narrative, espousing anti-anthropocentric views: urbanisation, artificiality, pollution and materialism all come under fire in the story. The importance of the natural world, including symbiotic relationships, are emphasised in Andersen’s tragic story of the grass is always greener. For the titular character of the tale, leaving her home chestnut tree to experience the rush of humanity promptly results in death.
The theme of symbiosis is also a key concern in ‘The Dryad’ sculpture from Incredible Creations on the Pendle Sculpture Trail. Regarding the intertwining of the Dryad, the oak tree and the ivy, viewers might be reminded of the notion that ivy kills trees by competition for nutrients or by strangulation. This, according to the RHS, is not entirely accurate. Although ivy can often be found on mature trees already in declining health, ivy can also often remain on the trunk of a tree without causing damage to the tree’s health, it is not a parasite, and does provides wildlife value. In the case of the Dryad sculpture, the presence of ivy may herald a melancholic turn of events for the tree nymph and her interdependent lifeforms, a concept played out within Andresen’s story of symbiotic tragedy. Conversely, the ivy can be perceived as symbol of loyalty, femininity and the bonds of friendship or marriage – language of flowers publications of the nineteenth century often attribute these meanings to the ivy: see, for example, ‘Ivy’ in Miss Ildrewe’s The Language of Flowers (1874), depicted as bestowing grace and beauty on the dead or dying, a sign of loyalty and devotion3. ‘Ivy’ for Robert Tyas (1875) again emblematises friendship in The Language of Flowers: Or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings and Sentiments4. Tyas contests the idea of ivy as a parasite and links the plant to sites of ruin in its constancy and ornamentation. The language of flowers anthologies occasionally include a poem from Charles Dickens’ The Pickwick Papers (1836) called ‘The Ivy Green’ – in a nice link to discard studies this positions the plant as a survivor, a resilient natural entity haunting the relics and human waste of bygone eras of mankind: ‘For the stateliest building man can raise / Is the Ivy’s food at last. / Creeping where no life is seen, / A rare old plant is the Ivy Green’5. I’ve used ‘The Dryad’ sculpture here to show how just one aspect of the trail can prompt associations and imaginative digressions that may fruitfully inspire ‘reconnections’.
Chloé Germaine Buckley’s Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic (2018) situates the Gothic genre in relation to children and their reading habits:
Children’s Gothic fiction delights in the form’s ‘inauthentic’ elements, combining these alongside Gothic’s excessive energies to challenge traditional pedagogical ideas about children’s reading. In doing so, children’s fiction announces Gothic’s continued power to unsettle totalising narratives offered on both the left and the right of politics […].6
In her reappraisal of well-worn clichés about the nature of the Gothic on the political spectrum and its symptomatic emergence at particular historical moments, Buckley notes that the Gothic has always been a popular genre. A popular generic device, whether applied to literature or art, may hold the key to inspiring imaginative engagement. If the Gothic can popularise interest in and respect for nature this is one demonstrable way that art, literature and culture can contribute towards alleviating the current climate crisis and influence a re-evaluation of human attitudes about the natural world. According to Elizabeth Parker, Gothic Nature has the ‘potential to re-enliven and reenchant our relationship to Nature as it is made “strange and monstrous” once again’ (p. 67). The Pendle Sculpture Trail, with its eclectic mix of beautiful and monstrous artworks in a woodland setting, is undoubtedly enchanting. As a means of engaging children with nature through art, this is an important way that representations of Gothic Nature can have a positive impact on cultural attitudes and actions.
Due to the popularity of the Pendle Sculpture trail, 2019 saw the expansion of the Pendle Sculpture Trail to Letcliffe Park, Barnoldswick. More information can be found on both parts of the trail from: www.visitpendle.com/things-to-do/new-sculpture-trail-at-letcliffe-park.
Special thanks to Mike Williams, Tourism and Events Officer at Pendle Borough Council, and George Crumbleholme for contributing some of the images for the post.
Contributing artists:
- Philippe Handford: http://handforddesign.co.uk/home.html
- Martyn Bednarczuk: http://www.martynbednarczuk.50megs.com/, http://www.martynbednarczuk.co.uk
- Steve Blaylock: https://metalsculpture.co.uk/work
- Ben Gates
- Joe Hesketh: https://www.riseart.com/artist/joe-hesketh
- Ngaire Jackson
- Sarah McDade: http://sarahmcdade.co.uk/public%20art.html
- Victoria Morris & Lee Nicholson: http://incredible-creations.com/
- Peter Naylor: https://www.peternaylor.co.uk/
Biography
Jemma Stewart is currently a PhD student at Birkbeck College, University of London. Her project asks how the language of flowers is articulated in the Victorian Gothic.
You can read her article about the symbolism of the garlic flower in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in Gothic Studies: Jemma Stewart, ‘Blooming Marvel: the Garlic Flower in Bram Stoker’s Hermeneutic Garden’, Gothic Studies, 20.2 (2018), 326-45.
End Notes
1 Catherine Spooner (2018) ‘Dark, and cold, and rugged is the North’: Regionalism,
Folklore and Elizabeth Gaskell’s ‘Northern’ Gothic. In Gothic Britain: Dark Places in the Provinces and Margins of the British Isles, William Hughes and Ruth Heholt (eds.). Cardiff, University of Wales Press, pp. 27-43.
2 Elizabeth Parker (2020) Why We Fear the Forest (Seven Theses). In The Forest and the EcoGothic: The Deep Dark Woods in the Popular Imagination. Cham, Palgrave Macmillan, pp.47-66 (p. 47).
3 Miss Ildrewe (1874) The Language of Flowers with an Introduction by Thomas Miller. New York: Lee, Shepard and Dillingham, pp. 66-68, available online here at books.google.co.uk [accessed 05/03/20].
4 Robert Tyas (1875) The Language of Flowers: Or, Floral Emblems of Thoughts, Feelings and Sentiments. London: George Routledge and Sons, pp. 118-19, available online here at books.google.co.uk [accessed 05/03/20].
5 Charles Dickens (1836) The Ivy Green. In Anon. (1877) The Language and Poetry of Flowers; with a Complete Vocabulary; Quotations Illustrating the Various Sentiments and Meanings Attached to Flowers and Plants; Flower Language in Bouquets etc.; Together with a Collection of Selected Poem Illustrating the Nature, Beauty, Sentiments, Teachings, and Associations of the Floral World etc. London: Ward, Lock and Tyler, pp. 52-54, available online here at books.google.co.uk [accessed 05/03/20].
6 Chloé Germaine Buckley (2018) Introduction: From Gothic Wanderer to Nomadic Subject. In Twenty-First-Century Children’s Gothic: From the Wanderer to Nomadic Subject. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, (pp. 1-39) pp. 5-6.