BEHIND THE WHEEL

Photo credit: Somewhere in Suffolk by Robin Deacon

I am learning to drive again. It’s taken a while to even find an instructor – most seemed to end up cancelling without explanation or just stopped returning emails before we’d even arranged a first lesson. This time I’m learning in an automatic. Having tried manual before, I quickly gave up having spent the majority of these expensive two-hour lessons stalling the car and getting into a terrible muddle with the gear stick. So far so good with this latest attempt though; I’m happy to report I am managing to keep the wheels turning for more than a few seconds. Plus, the gear stick only goes in two directions.

The reason I’m telling you all this is because as I approach the end of my fourth year living in Ipswich, I still have people expressing genuine surprise that I can’t drive. With the knowledge that I lived in America for a decade, it is perhaps surprising that I never acquired this skill in a country so built around car culture. The best I could say is that I never really associated myself with driving. When I lived in London, it was always near a tube station, or in Chicago, the ‘L’ train station. Either way, this always seemed enough for me to get around.

My initial assumption that one could live a life in Suffolk whilst relying on public transportation was met with incredulity when I shared this with the Ipswich ‘born and bred’ people I have met since coming here. This was especially the case if the desire was to explore beyond the boundaries of Ipswich and experience the rural landscape that surrounds it. The first thing I had to do was change my expectations regarding frequency. In my former city life, I was used to trains that would come six (or more) times an hour. I came to realise that to get out from Ipswich into the proper countryside, I was often waiting for buses that came six (or less) times a day. And sometimes, these buses would not come. I would regale various listeners with my occasional stories detailing near misses of being stranded. The response was always the same:

You really need a car, Robin.

I was recently going through some old notes and found a planning document with a section entitled ‘SPILL into Suffolk’. I will often find these kinds of things lurking on my hard drive – little notes to self, imagining initiatives or possible programming strands. These ideas don’t necessarily come to fruition. At least not in the short term. But I seem to remember the thinking behind this phrase ‘SPILL into Suffolk’ was that having embedded myself in the town, and committed to Ipswich as home to the festival, it would be interesting to start exploring what SPILL might do in the future over this wider geographical area – or, as I phrased it in the document:

IDEA: Expanding SPILL beyond the borders of Ipswich into rural contexts…

The document was dated as 2021, so I have a feeling that my inspiration for this came from my attendance of the Artangel project Afterness, which happened in the same year. The exhibition:

‘…took place on Orford Ness, a windswept strip of land stretching several miles along the Suffolk coast with a unique path of white shingle reaching the North Sea. Protected by the National Trust as a nature reserve since 1995, the Ness is a decommissioned military testing site known locally as the ‘island of secrets’, where research into weaponry and covert radio systems was conducted between the First World War and the Cold War. This was the first time visitors discovered sited large-scale artworks by artists…at Orford Ness.’ 

The journey to get there involved walking, a train, a taxi and finally a small boat to get you over to the island. I think this was the first time I really saw Suffolk as a unique visual experience.

Photo credit: Orford Ness, Suffolk by Robin Deacon

Instead of walking from room to room as you would in a gallery, the walk between the artworks (which took the form of sculptures, drawings and sound installations) would last several minutes through a flat terrain of sand and stones. These walks would be interspersed with strange, deserted buildings; concrete shells implying some kind of former military usage.

Photo credit: Orford Ness, Suffolk by Robin Deacon

This was the same territory described by German writer W.G. Sebald’s novel The Rings of Saturn that described his own walks through Suffolk. From this perspective, there was a strange sort of recognition of what I saw that began with my familiarity with this book. Outside, in this strange, flat deserted landscape, I was now able to experience for myself what Sebald had described. I presume it was the flatness of the land that made the sky seem so enormous. It almost made the ‘art’ I was here to see beside the point. Although my experience of visiting Afterness was profound, I remember the terror of missing the last boat (and being stranded on this windswept island) was hard to shake.

Photo credit: Orford Ness, Suffolk by Robin Deacon

I will still often find myself thinking about that afternoon spent on the coastal margins of Suffolk, and how the idea of ‘SPILL into Suffolk’ might one day be realised. Perhaps a step towards this might be found in two events we have at the Think Tank. Both include artists who are not only based in Suffolk, but who also use the landscape and history of this county as subject matter.

Last week we welcomed Matthew Shenton to the Think Tank to present Shifting Soundscapes, a sound-based performance exploring how the sounds of the Suffolk village of Holbrook have changed over the past hundred years. Matthew suggests that whilst pictures of this village may give some indication of its life in the past, images will not help us understand what the village might have sounded like.

‘Matthew’s interest began after he read the Sounds and Noise chapter in the book Holbrook, The Story of a Village 1900-1983 by local author Warrenton Page. [He] was inspired by the book’s descriptions of a rich tapestry of working noises and sounds that drifted over the landscape; most, if not all, of these sounds are no longer heard.’

If you have followed the development of my artistic and curatorial thinking in recent years, you’ll know of my interest in things that are missing or removed, and what their absence represents. A  good example of this is our project from last year on the Ipswich Caribbean Association, a building demolished in 2012 for which the history of sound (systems) is central.

Photo credit: Matthew Shenton by Robin Deacon

Matthew is an alum of SPILL’s 2023 artist residency programme, and I have a distinct memory of visiting him in the Think Tank when  his Holbrook project was in its very early stages. I remember discussing changes in agricultural methods, the loss of industries and the loss of sounds associated with these abandoned practices. It was fascinating to see how the project has developed in the interim, with Matthew now presenting a live sound-piece (using field recordings, modified electronics and homemade instruments) depicting a gradual transition over a 100 year period; from the sounds of manual labour to increasingly digital noises toward the end.

Photo credit: One of Matthew Shenton’s homemade instruments  by Robin Deacon

 In the question and answer session that followed Matthew’s performance, I suggested that perhaps we all have our own equivalents of what he was researching. As an  example, I recalled my own childhood memories of frequently visiting my aunt who lived in Southall, West London – this would have been during the 1980s. Her flat overlooked a busy railway line, and I clearly recall the sight – and the noises – of the diesel trains speeding by the window as they made their way to places I’d never visited, like Cornwall and Devon. Believe it or not, I was even able to distinguish between the different kinds of locomotives, without looking, based on their distinct sounds as they thundered past. I especially loved the sound of the Class 50 locomotives. It's hard to describe, but knowing they were nicknamed ‘hoovers’ should give you some indication of what I was hearing.

Years passed by, my aunt passed away, and this railway line became electrified. The soundscape had changed from the growl of diesel engines to the whirr of the electric trains that now ply this route. 

I don’t know why, but describing this change always makes me feel sad.

The first time I saw the Sizewell nuclear power station was during another exploration of the Suffolk coastline. This time it was a walking holiday in Dunwich – this was sometime in 2023. Early morning walks along the beach with wife and dog would be overseen by a pale white dome on the horizon marking the location of the UK’s only pressurised water nuclear reactor. I remember the strange sense that no matter how far we walked, the dome never seemed to get closer.

Photo credit: Emily Richardson

Suffolk-based filmmaker Emily Richardson has documented similar walks she has made around Sizewell; walks that she has described as both ‘pilgrimages and acts of protest’. Emily will join us at the Think Tank on the evening of Thursday 5 June (along with her collaborator Jonathan P. Watts) to show her film Immaterial Terrain, and other works shot at other locations in Suffolk, including Orford Ness. I have long admired Emily’s work, not least because of her ability to reveal the extraordinary beauty of the landscape in this part of the world. 

And yet, in my experience, there is also something unsettling at being in these kinds of places. In getting to the heart of what this feeling might be, Mark Fisher’s 2016 writings on the weird and the eerie spring to mind. On the one hand, according to Fisher, there is the weird – ‘that which does not belong.’ I could speculate that as a quintessential urban dweller, my presence in these rural places could certainly be seen as weird to some. But from my own perspective, perhaps it is the image of the nuclear power station in this otherwise empty landscape that seems somehow weird. I have had the same feeling of things being out of place when visiting Dungeness in Kent, another strange windswept landscape where a nuclear power station is located.

Then, there is the eerie. This is a notion that Fisher claims is fundamentally to do with both the outside and with absence. He writes, ‘The sense of the eerie seldom clings to enclosed and inhabited domestic spaces; we find the eerie more readily in landscapes partially emptied of the human.’

I think about this as the difference between, on the one hand, being in a warm, comfortably furnished room, looking out of a window into a dark and forbidding landscape beyond the glass. Then, on the other hand is the image of standing outside in that same landscape (it's cold), and seeing the glow of warm light emerging from a single window in the distance.

But like the dome of Sizewell, no matter how far and quickly I walk toward it, the window never seems to get any closer. 

Perhaps it is this image that best encapsulates my fear of missing the last bus home.

Of course, once I am able to drive, it will all be different.