Art in an Emergency

Artist Jenny Pope talks about finding resilience and buoyancy through making

Hello friends

First, an invitation. I will be showing a new series of paintings in the exhibition “To the Sea, From the Land” at Tatha Gallery, Newport-on-Tay, now available to view online. I’ll be at the gallery preview on the 10th October. If you’re in the area do come and say hello! RSVP below.

Meanwhile this week in Orkney I was delighted to have another conversation with the artist Jenny Pope, an Edinburgh-based artist with a background in mental health, advocacy and social work. She has recently turned her focus towards making objects in response to living by the sea in our age of climate anxiety and rising sea levels.

Long time subscribers might remember that Jenny has been aboard the Life Boat before, talking about her earlier project to build her own little coracle. She was in Orkney again last week launching, quite literally, the first part of her new project ‘Shoogly Holm’ and we met for a catch up.

You can listen to the recording of our conversation by clicking above, or you can read the transcript below which also has lots of pictures of Jenny’s project, and the launch that happened this week.

Sam:

This week we have a guest crew member on The Lifeboat who has been here before - the artist Jenny Pope, who’s based in Edinburgh, but has become quite a regular visit to Orkney’s Shores.

Jenny:

That’s right, yes.

Sam:

Jenny, the last time we spoke on The Lifeboat, you were here doing some research for what has become this new project, Shoogly Holm, that you’re here working on now.

Jenny:

Yes, yeah. Thank you. Good to be here! Thanks for inviting me.

Sam:

Do you want to tell us a little bit about this amazing project that you’re here working on?

Launch of Shoogly Holm mooring from outside Stromness Museum

Jenny:

I think when we last spoke, I was doing research around my sort of overarching practice-based research project on ‘Buoyancy and Unprecedented Times.’ And within that, Shoogly Holm has developed, in particular, in relation to floating and the idea of buoyancy and resilience. And the title Shoogly Holm comes from the Scottish word ‘shoogly’, which means wobbly, uncertain, ‘shoogly pegs’, and holm, which is ‘home,’ where we live, our place of sort of safety and security. In Orcadian ‘holm’ means island, so it’s an idea of a sort of wobbly island, which we might be on metaphorically in terms of climate change, what happens next, how we feel emotionally inside and also physically as well.

Diorama of Orcadian Arctic explorer Dr John Rae in an inflatable Halkett Boat, Stromness Museum

So this project, Shoogly Holm, is an 18-month project which has been funded by Creative Scotland and I’m working in partnership with a few organisations here in Orkney. I’m working with the Stromness Museum, and I’m working with Katie Firth there, who’s the climate engagement officer, and I’m working with the Blide Trust, the mental health organisation. I’m working with Aquatera and I’m working with Art Ecology, who are an organisation down in the Isle of Wight who specialise in intentional habitats, marine habitats. And I’m also working with the Orkney International Science Festival, because this 18-month project is going to end next year at the Science Festival.

Sam:

So there’s a lot of moving parts to this project, but also the thing that you’re making has moving parts as well. Do you want to tell us what will be visible by the end of the project?

Jenny:

Yes, so what I’m making is a floating sculpture with a mooring which is going to be in Stromness Harbour, just out from the pier at the Museum. What I’ve done this time, now in September, is we’ve launched the mooring part, and then the floating part (will come later). The mooring part is under the water and permanently immersed so you can’t see it now. It’s under the water. And then what will come in March will be the floating part, which I’ll be making over the winter.

Ceramic objects to be immersed in Stromness harbour, providing habitat for marine life.

In July I came up and I ran workshops with the Blide Trust and some different community groups and the general public and these workshops we made lots of little ceramic objects which are to be surfaces for marine creatures to live on and to make a textured, holey sort of interesting surface for marine creatures to live on. So they’ve all been fired by Kerrianne Flett, who’s a ceramic artist here in Stromness. And we have mounted all those pieces on concrete blocks in a frame, which was donated by EMEC [European Marine Energy Centre, based in Stromness) and we launched that just last week.

Frame to be submerged as a mooring for the Shoogly Holm floating sculpture

Sam:

That was a team effort to do that.

Jenny:

Big team effort. A lot of planning and thinking and scratching heads and drawing diagrams. And it actually went really, really well. It was a very good, calm, lovely, calm day, or two days. I had to assemble everything on the beach at high tide just by the museum. So we assembled the concrete pieces and the metal frame and all the ceramic pieces, on the beach at high tide, and then when low tide came six people carried it down to the low water mark. Then the tide came in and submerged it and then the next day James Burgin who works at the Nav School (Marine Studies department) and somebody from Sula diving, Malcolm and then Baptiste who works at EMEC were in the boat and they sort of took, lifted the mooring up and then sunk it in its location.

Preparing to sink the mooring.

Then people can go and dive and snorkel and see it, and see what little creatures are stuck to make their homes there, because it’s a home/holm not just for us, but also for the marine life.

Sam:

There’s a science aspect to it.

Jenny:

Yes, yes. Because I was really struck when I came last, or whenever we last spoke, I went to the Orkney Historic Boat Society and was really fascinated by the boats. They’ve a beautiful collection of boats there. But I was really interested in the fact that they spend a lot of time, boat owners, scraping their boats and scraping all the marine life off. And I really was struck by this thought, what would it be like if I allowed marine life to grow and in fact encourage it?

Tide coming in..

And then I did lots of research about that because that was a new idea for me to think about, encouraging marine life and making things by a receptive. In fact, there’s lots going on already and Art Ecology down in the Isle of Wight are very thoughtful about this and have got lots of experience. So I’m one of their co-create artists, who they’ve taught me how to run workshops and think about the concrete bases and the ceramic parts on top. And then I’ve adapted that within a frame to go out to sea.

Sam:

Great. And there’s a lovely sort of overarching idea in a lot of the work that you have been doing lately, which is about art in an emergency, and what is the place that art can have in an emergency? And I find that really the way that you’re exploring it is really thought-provoking, but also inclusive. Does that seem to speak to what you’re really interested in as an artist?

Shoogly Holm mooring in situ

Jenny:

Yes, yeah, because the main idea here is about anxiety and well-being, and the idea of floating as a metaphor for well-being, and being at odds or at the mercy of what’s going on around in terms of weather or politics or global situations, and thinking about what we can do in small steps in citizen science and making a small difference.

Me making a a metre squared little environment is a very small drop in the ocean compared to all the difficult things that are going on, but it’s about trying to focus what I can do on a very small, positive thing and including other people in that.

Helpers and onlookers at the Museum pier in Stromness during the launch of the mooring

And along with that, process is about learning about and understanding about all the marine life and all what goes on underneath the sea, because we’re used to seeing big whales and dolphins, and being interested in those, but we often forget the really small details and they’re really important and beautiful and they get overlooked.

So by having conversations about marine life and about what can grow and what might inhabit the space and how fascinating it is, it’s about, I suppose, bringing alive an environment which is unfamiliar to most of us, apart from people who dive or snorkel. So it’s about bringing that alive and bringing it closer to us and feeling like we can make a difference.

Shoogly Holm buoy marker, awaiting the floating sculpture

Sam:

Yeah, I think it seems to be also about valuing the small, that we can feel really disempowered, because we do feel really small. We do feel really insignificant. The forces that are stacked against us just seem so overwhelming. What you’re doing here is like a shift of scale, because when we think in that global scale, it is really overwhelming. But when you think about a conversation or, like you say, a one square metre, and address that, that’s so much better for our mental well-being, but it’s also builds community. It builds resilience in ourselves and it seems to be a lot of what’s driving the way that you’re working with this project.

Jenny:

Yes, absolutely. And you can buy 3D printed concrete wobbly surfaces to put under the sea that are bio receptive, and that’s great, but that’s not what this is. This is about small-scale individual people doing small acts.

They’re like small acts of kindness. It’s a small act, which is really important. I mean, for me, it keeps me going. It’s what helps me cope with feeling overwhelmed. What I can do in terms of my artwork and the voice I do have? You know, I have a voice as a citizen, and I also have a voice as an artist, and how I use that as best I can to make a difference, and to just bring people together I suppose.

Sam:

So this is quite a big long-term project that involves a lot of collaborators in both the making of it, and in the workshops that you’re running around it, and the conversations that are going on around it, but I think some of your other work is lighter on its feet, perhaps, and you can make the thing yourself. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the other projects that you do?

Jenny:

What I’m thinking about at the moment is garments to wear, or individual life jackets, or individual flotation immersion jackets that I could make, which would be in some ways ridiculous or some ways certainly non-functional, but allude to the need to look after ourselves, and the need to be cared for and care for each other.

Illustrations from an 1844 book showing Lieutenant Halkett’s amazing inflatable ‘boat cloak’

So I’m thinking about life jackets and these breeches at the museum, and going back again to Stromness Museum, which is a brilliant museum, and they’ve got these...

Sam:

For those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s a lovely old-fashioned kind of museum with glass cases and drawers full of little objects and it’s great, isn’t it? Old school.

Jenny:

Absolutely old school and the best for it as well. But they’ve got these breeks, I can’t I can’t remember what they’re called now, life breeks or buoyancy breeks. Big trousers, a big pair of pants, basically that are hung up in the reception area and they’re just fantastic and ridiculous and they save people’s lives as well. And they’re sort of floating. They float if you wear them, and you can get pulled up by ropes on them. They’re brilliant.

So I’m going to be making some ridiculous/sensible, useful objects. A bit like going back to the sort of the core of what started this whole journey for me was the Halkett Airboat, which is an object in the Stromness Museum. It was an inflatable boat, which is a bit sofa-like and ridiculous, a Victorian contrivance, which went out into the Arctic. Now, out of context, it’s a very odd object, but it was really creative and inventive and useful at the time.

I actually love making things. For me, the making process and the tactile quality of materials and the actual physical doing stuff is very therapeutic for me to do and very much part of the process. So I’m really looking forward to making the floating part of this sculpture for Shoogly Holm, as well as making these life jacket forms, however they might take. I’ve been gathering materials for those.

Jenny’s sketch plan outlining the Shoogly Holm project

Sam:

So that kind of speaks to the more introspective side of creativity where you are on your own with your thoughts, working out ideas, testing out materials and making things. And then there is this more convivial aspect because you often do workshops and places around the work, don’t you? So that conversation that comes out of the work is really important to you too.

Jenny:

Yes, yeah. And they’re often side by side, the making part and the making and the thinking and the doing, and then the talking and making with people. And then that sort of feeds in again and then goes back to me making. They’re both important parts of my practice.

Sam:

And there’s a nice lightness, I think, that you bring to it as well, because there’s a bit of humour too, you know, the ‘Shoogly Holm.’ It’s funny as well, this idea and the emergency breeks, which brings a kind of breath of oxygen to what can be very heavy kind of conversations. Do you find that allows people to come close to these ideas, which perhaps we might rather just not think or talk about?

Jenny’s sketch utline for the Shoogly Holm floating sculpture

Jenny:

Yes, yeah, I think that level of humour is a very good way to get into difficult subjects. And often when I run workshops about climate change and climate anxiety, where they’re making tools that people might use to deal with climate change on a very personal level, and people come up with these absolutely fantastic objects.

I’ve run them in many different places, and people really say that it’s a great way to get into something which actually is quite deep and heavy, and watching and doing it alongside other people. But the conversations that people have with the materials, because the materials are found objects and beach finds and a whole load of junk stuff, by having non-precious materials, people are able to come up with quite creative ideas that are not precious, and so they have a bit more of a flow with their ideas.

And then other people are doing something in parallel. And then the conversations people have, they’re really rich. And I think that in some ways that’s often missed, because what afterwards, because what you’re left with is these funny things made out of screwed up bits of paper and bits of plastic. But they’ve really meant something to somebody in that moment.

So it’s very interesting running those workshops, and I’ll be running some of those again, hopefully next year. I thought we’d bring in some artists in Orkney, and some marine scientists together to have a conversation.

Jenny’s sketch outline of the citizen science aspect of Shoogly Holm

Sam:

That sounds like fun.

Jenny:

Yes, well it is about being fun, but being serious within that. Because otherwise we’ll all drown in the difficultness of it all. So it’s about raising up, yeah, almost like you said, coming up for oxygen, coming up for air.

Sam:

So what’s next for you? You’re away on the boat tomorrow. But you’re back again.

Jenny:

Yes, yes. Back again in March. I’ll be making the floating part over the winter in Edinburgh. I’m going to hire an industrial sewing machine. I’ve been learning how to make, I’ve been learning some sail making techniques with Mark Shiner at the Nav School. So I’ve been putting those into practice. I’ll be making some life jacket-y type things as well and some tools for another project. So I’ve got quite a few making things going on over the winter, and then I’ll come back next March, next July and next September to Stromness, to Orkney.

Sam:

Well, we’ll get you back on board for another chat.

Jenny:

Thank you very much. That would be lovely.

Sam:

Well, thanks for coming along. Thanks very much, Jenny Pope.

Jenny:

Thank you.

You can follow Shoogly Holm’s evolution at Jenny’s Instagram and learn more about her art practice at her website.

The Life Raft Co-Creating Community

You are warmly welcomed to join our weekly creative co-working session on Zoom. Our meetings are a little Life Raft of shared creativity in these stormy times. It’s very simple. We just say hello at the start and say what we plan to work on and then leave our cameras on and work together in companionable silence. We start at 3pm UK time and finish around 4.30pm. Just click the link below to join us. If you can’t make it live I share a recording to the paid subscriber chat each week.

That’s all for this week!

Sam