A e R i a L S
A e R i a L S
by Alison Scott
Aerial is the thing that pierces the sky. It’s anything existing, happening, growing, or operating in the air. Elevated, ethereal, insubstantial, imaginary.
I’ve been thinking about writing as a form of documentation. Not quite minutes, not quite a transcript, complete record, nor accurate. Documentation as a mode of writing and thinking. Not concerned with offering judgement, or anything but fragments. Getting it down, setting into text, presenting. Settling words into place.
I stumble upon something at Birsay Books – ‘Science and the Weather’. It’s not shelved in the children’s section but it’s from the 50s and has the feel of an exercise book. It has experiments that feel like prompts for writing or performances I could do with stuff I have at home. Feathers and bottles of water. Domestic science? I remember as a kid having a set called ‘Science in the Bathtub’. Waterwheels and gauges. The encounter awakes a wary fascination with basic science. The political prioritisation of STEM subjects - science, technology, engineering and mathematics - over the arts and humanities bubbles away. An internal wrestle with my attraction for dabbling in what would have been called ‘natural history’. Something facilitated by having the time to indulge in bourgeoise romanticisation. In the bookshop we also find a book called ‘Science for Children: Our Good Slave Electricity’. It showcases some of the 19th Century’s classifying, racist paradigms that lurk still. Electricity is framed as a moral, hardworking, and incarcerated energy. The world at the service of man. A kitchen poker becomes a magnet. Two ways of making waves. Charging a girl with electricity.
The first book, I take. I walk it back along the cliffs via Marwick Head – where rabbits flit ahead of us and we hug the fence, peeping down gullies through our eyelashes. I say, I wouldn’t want to be here on a windy day, but really it’s already pretty blowy. Peewits sail low to the ground over fields. Seals escape the surf. Getting the book back inside, I read out the exercises to some of the group. They are absurd to say aloud, feeble inside games, in the shelter from the wind and rain that thrashes the windows and has wet out our coats and skin.
I recall the feeling of Margaret Tait’s writing about science in ‘Origins and Elements’1. Titles like ‘Elasticity’, ‘Carbon’, ‘The Unbreakable-up’. ‘Storms’. A child-like eye, perhaps. Of wonder and straightforwardness and a will to enter the world as fully as possible. Away from Orkney, in the weather station of an old observatory near Liverpool, I watch Tait’s film Aerial as the defunct instruments swing outside. I write a few words for each shot very quickly – running it again in my head as I read them back.
A tv aerial on a roof/ looking up/ yellow clouds searched/ above grass blown in wind/ yellow cast due to age in film or seasons/ leaves shake/ snow falls on a winding street/ a man with dogs/ a spry older person sweeps the snow from their stoop/ filmed from a window/ slightly detached/ children play/ water pools on slabs/ weedy in their crevices/ droplets gather on a branch/ earth is turned firmly by unseen hands/ metal prongs of a fork shine in dark earth/ a branch bounces with the wind/ buoyant/ seed pods pinkish and ready to drop/ then littering the ground/ dead bird/ last flight had and grounded/ a worm wiggles in spindly roots/ fire fingers flick in a smoky hearth/ a blackbird through a window/ and then a gaggle, feeding/ back to snow/ orange sky at sunset/ pans across the flat/ vast and open air.
The weather station is full of small fruit flies. I watch them gather at the top of the windows, inside and out. A lady bird prowls, flies, and lands on the ceiling. It’s coated in moving dots. I wince and notice them in the air around me. A big blue bottle launches from the window and buzzes against the glass pane of another. I think of inhaling them, my shoulders jerk. That’s enough. Into the wind and onto the roof.
In the Pier Arts Centre when I arrive at Stromness I take a quick look around the temporary exhibition, which borrows material from University of Dundee relating to the polymath D’Arcy Thompson, pairing these with Scottish modernist works influenced by his work ‘On Growth and Form’ that are held in the Pier collection2. Scientific models and diagrams. Geometric patterns and biomorphic shapes. Brass. Copper. Paolozzi. Hepworth. Maclean. Wearing their intellectual scaffolding and influence heavily, when you know it.
A few months later I see ‘Aerial’ again, this time in an exhibition at Cooper Gallery DJCAD in Dundee titled ‘The Scale of Things’, taken from one of her other poems3. In the main gallery is a piece by Grace Ndiritu, ‘Becoming Plant’, with choreographed nude dancers in a disused power plant and a voiceover about the commercialisation of narcotics4. In the stairwell, Tait’s work feels distinctly quiet in contrast and there’s something about the shift that makes me think of my presbyterian Great Aunties. A direct mode. Documentation, with poetry. Saying back what was understood. The film is projected far beyond the scale of my laptop, expanding the 16mm noise and forcing my eyes to flit across the screen, as the birds do.
More words always already exist in writing, and more are left in the air. Succinctly, the BFI says of ‘Aerial’, “Drawing from [Tait’s] background as a scientist, it narrows the gap between art and science by bringing together images of nature’s elements (earth, water, air and fire).”5 I find an article on MAP Magazine by Sarah Neely, titled ‘The Bits of Ourselves We Leave Behind.’ In it she says:
“Tait’s favourite beach to scour for bits and pieces was at the Brough of Birsay, a tidal island situated off the west mainland of Orkney. When the tide is out you can cross over to the island, or, as Tait did, search for bits of treasure hidden in the rock pools scattered across the causeway.”6
I don’t bring my radio antenna to Orkney, which I use to listen to analogue weather satellites and decode their images. But I imagine its familiar shape poking into view, four spindly arms off a central trunk, held in a hand. Paying attention to what happens in the air around me. There are wind turbines on the horizon, some at land and some at sea. Some are a sole sentry on private land and others a community of slowly whirling blades, like strong gull’s wings filmed at a high frame rate.
I don’t know about Tait’s beachcombing at the time, when we stoop for groatie buckies with Becky, and gather shells in iridescent pink and matte orange, slithers of sea urchin in their full array of pinks and purples. Later I send this finding to Rosie – who so gleefully gathers fragments here. Legacy looms large. Footsteps gone in waves but heavily felt. Always In repeat. Not a re-enactment, just a shared desire through time and place. Doing as many do, not a rarefied pursuit. We do and you can (if you can get to Orkney). Documentation, telling the story, just marks the repetition.
At Birsay, evidence of past atmospherics are visible in the stone. Ripples in the sandstone slabs. Trace fossils. Documents of some past creaturely performance.
Willing the limits of written documentation to burst into full colour documentary, I picture a shot in a film. It’s soundtracked by the whistle of the wind that’s coming in a gap in the window frame. I said to someone else it’s a musical house, its tone and tune shifting with the outside conditions. I’ve been trying to film rain on the windows and now it’s running in rivulets. My swimming costume is on the line which from where I look seems to meet the horizon on the sea. The costume makes acrobatic moves, deliciously light movements my body cannot, like a gymnast whipping round parallel bars and dipping again and again into a plane of water and out into the patched sky. Maybe it would look better in 16mm.
I become engrossed in a booklet found in the bookshelves in the house, a catalogue from a 1984 exhibition at Pier Arts Centre, titled ‘Art in the Flow’. Becky lists to me who she thinks would be in it before I show her. Moberg. Wishart. Brown. Etc. We talk about energy and wind, about access to, ownership and visibility of energy infrastructure. For the exhibition, artists living nearby are given access to the oil terminal at Flotta to make new work – run at the time by Occidental. I read about Orkney’s part in the establishment of North Sea oil, of pay-outs to dispossessed farmers and crofters. A Disturbance Fund. Among the work I study paintings of a disused cinema, quiet photographs of flares on a dark night’s sky, drawings that map the cycles of farming in parallel with those of oil processing. Documenting the work of the fire department, Gunnie Moberg writes: “I have also used the flare, which has become as dominant a feature in Orkney’s landscape as the Standing Stones.”7
We watch the rain coming in sheets from the shore. We stop in our tracks to gaze at rainbows and to observe the sun’s rays beaming through clouds, like stage lighting, shifting where on the land or sea our eyes focus.
One of the group is very cold. I discover hot water bottles are not so commonplace in America. Another person caringly brings me one to aid pain. I don’t think it’s ever brought up as a topic per say, but the weather pervades. Talking about the weather is an act of empathy building, enacting bonds. We acknowledge the unevenness in our situations. I recall Roland Barthes’ words:
“To discuss the weather together = this it’s all the same of talking/ not talking about love.”8
One of our group positions a portable air purifier near them and I’m always opening and closing windows. The air here is shared by those who gather from disparate climes and who come from down the road to meet us.
We are led in breath exercises. Not speaking, I try to focus on my own breath but always struggle with these things. Instead I listen to the intake and release of air from my companions, fit my rhythm somewhere in the midst.
I had to get nearer the sky.9
1
Margaret Tait, ‘Origins and Elements’, self published, 1959
2
‘The Growth of New Ideas – The Legacy of D’Arcy Thompson in Modern and Contemporary Art’, Pier Arts Centre, in collaboration with University of Dundee Museums, 2023. Available at: https://www.pierartscentre.com/current-upcoming-exhibition/10/8/2023/the-growth-of-new-ideas-the-legacy-of-darcy-thompson-in-modern-and-contemporary-art
3
‘The Scale of Things’, a group exhibition featuring moving image works by Saodat Ismailova, Grace Ndiritu and Margaret Tait, Cooper Gallery DJCAD, 2024.
Available at: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/events/scale-things
4
Grace Ndiritu, ‘Becoming Plant’, 2022.
5
Georgia Korossi, ‘Remembering Scotland’s Film Poet’, BFI, 2016. Available at: https://www.bfi.org.uk/lists/remembering-scotlands-film-poet-margaret-tait
6
Sarah Neely, ‘The Bits of Ourselves We Leave Behind’, MAP Magazine, 2016. Available at: https://mapmagazine.co.uk/bits-ourselves-we-leave-behind
7
Gunnie Moberg in ‘Art in the Flow’, Pier Arts Centre, 1984.
8
Roland Barthes, ‘The Preparation of The Novel’, trans. Kate Briggs, Columbia University Press, 2011
9
Margaret Tait, ‘A Poem for a Morning’, from ‘Margaret Tait: poems, stories and writings’, edited with an introduction by Sarah Neely, Carcanet Press, 2012. Originally published in ‘Subjects and Sequences’ (1960)
Available at: https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/poem-morning/