Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time

Hello and welcome to the audio-described highlights of Passing Strange: British Land Art Through Time. My name is Sean Ketteringham and I am the curator of the exhibition Passing Strange. Passing Strange explores the rich collection of British land art in Leeds Museums and Galleries’ Sculpture Collections, with work by Tacita Dean, Hamish Fulton, Anya Gallaccio, Andy Goldsworthy, John Hilliard and David Nash.

There are three audio descriptions, focusing on David Nash’s The Planted Works 1977-92, Anya Gallaccio’s Six Dozen Red Roses 1992 and Andy Goldsworthy’s Leaf Sculptures 1988-89. This content has been created by writer Kimberly Campanello in collaboration with blind-led artwork description collective DesCript.

You can access the audio in the gallery by scanning QR codes next to labels using your phone or borrowing a device from the Welcome Desk. The QR codes are on yellow square stickers with black text reading ‘AD: Scan for audio description’ which are about 8cm wide by 10cm long.

You are now in the Study Gallery, a small room with warm lighting and a wooden floor. There are a few framed works on the walls and sculptures displayed on plinths.

David Nash’s The Planted Works are located on the right-hand side of the wall as you enter the room. There are five drawings in a black frame. And the QR code is on top of the label, to the left of the artwork.

Anya Gallaccio’s Six Dozen Red Roses is in the far-left corner of the room. The artwork consists of a small black box holding brown and khaki coloured sticks of pastels, displayed on a plinth under clear Perspex. The QR code is on the left side of the work, at the bottom of the label.

Andy Goldsworthy’s Leaf Sculptures are located on the large plinth against the left wall. There are six delicate sculptures made of dry leaves, also under Perspex. The QR code is on the right side of the work, at the bottom of the label.

If you need any assistance, please ask our Information Assistants in the gallery. Braille and large-print versions of the exhibition texts are available from the Welcome Desk, just outside the gallery.

Thank you and we hope you enjoy our audio highlights.

Hello, I’m Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and part of the artwork description collective DesCript.

You’re in front of five drawings from The Planted Works 1977-1992 by David Nash. They’re a display of five sketches made with charcoals and pastels, each on its own sheet of off-white drawing paper. They’re all in landscape orientation and have been mounted together in a black-edged frame measuring 95cm tall by 75cm wide. Each sketch depicts a separate sculptural work created using living trees.

The artist made these sculptures by training and fletching sapling trees to form an architectural space in the landscape near his home in North Wales. Each bears a handwritten title, as follows:

Birches Leaning Out of Square 1992
Serpentine Sycamores 1992
Divided Oaks 1992
Ash Dome 1992
Oak Bowl 1992

We asked the writer Kimberly Campanello to write a text based on an audio recording of a collaborative description conversation we held in front of these five drawings in the gallery.

Kimberly’s text, entitled ‘Framing The Planted Works 1977-92′, describes the drawings in close, evocative detail, and is written from the perspective of someone listening to the audio recording of our collaborative description conversation. The text is about seven minutes long.

Framing The Planted Works 1977-92

Frame. I push play on the recording of voices being with art in a gallery space. The voices make statements about atmosphere, about temperature, about ground beneath feet, punctuated by wood creaking. The voices are two people looking and one not looking but leading. All are leaning toward The Planted Works and asking. All voices are sensing. Their tones, like this artwork, are earthy browns and greens and black over grey and cream.

Frame. The overall picture. First, the voices overall it, and so must I. How to describe this? A pretend threat of immediate death, of my phone, or of my body, would yield a surge of words in an instant, but would such circumstances create something sufficient? Let me go ahead and try. The Planted Works are five small papers, each one a drawing, laid on cream mount. Two are at the top, one at the centre, and two at the bottom. Each drawing is on dappled greyish off-white paper with torn, or seemingly torn, edges. All this material is the flesh of trees. The five drawings of The Planted Works are arrayed within a black frame. The frame hangs in a gallery space where the voices are leaning in and speaking their experience of being with it.

Frame. The captions. Each drawing has handwritten titles and locations. The voices say that for now, the titles and locations of each work will go unmentioned and be kept separate until the end of my experience. That way I will truly lean into the work’s way of working in how and what the voices are speaking. That way of working is testing. Testing. Testing. I listen and so speak and so feel this. For you. And to you in this writing, which is another form of testing. Testing. Testing. Words describing art.

Testing. One, two, three, four, five. The Planted Works are also five tests, five works seeded, by which I mean mounted. They each depict trees and leaves and branches and soils from various vantages. Trees that have been grown or plans for them.

Frame. The one in the centre is the biggest. A double-page spread, as if lifted from an A5 notebook. Charcoal black on off-white, it plans for, or is a record of, planting. Lines shooting out from dots are disconnected and uneven. Organic, not like an axis or hands on a clock face. The lines are branches, trunks bending. Wayward and separating. They are hairy follicles growing individually though together, accumulating as if to form a jagged burnt rainbow. Collective marks for planned growth to forestall a desert. This is Divided Oaks.

Frame. Bottom left. A hand’s movement – the artist’s – yields fresh saplings on paper from a distant perspective. A feeling, a transparent gesture over black and green charcoal. A tangled mass, a cloud mushrooming, blooming, opening foliage, sparking branches. Over it, a spill, a stain, a primordial wound, marked and hazy. Perspective and scale: the hill is a cupcake, and on top is a form of trees, which is the cherry. This is Ash Dome.

Frame. Bottom right. Trees trunked brown and topped green to form cup, a copse, a ring. This one is comforting. It is trees as we know them. This is Oak Bowl.

Frame. Top left. In the bottom right of this one, a bird’s eye view of a pencil grid. Sixteen holes indicating spacing for planting. This grid happens across the rest of the page from an angled line of sight. It’s a flying kite of trees tendrilling. Dusty and browning. This is Birches Leaning Out of Square.

Frame. Top right. This one demonstrates how a widening green river marked with reddish brown growths is in fact a plan for how to plant trees in the shape of a serpent. This is Serpentine Sycamores.

Frame. Step back again for all in relation. The entirety in its frame is a cosy map of an island that floats on requisite gallery whiteness.

These five drawings call to mind reasons for leaning and successions in timing and where each tree is located and where we are now, whether we are kneeling or standing or flying.

In the room where the voices go on speaking a sound piece is playing. In the room where you are, my voice sounds this distillation. Thus beginning the end that replants it.

Hello, my name is Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and part of the artwork description collective DesCript. You’re looking at Six Dozen Red Roses by Anya Gallaccio. It consists of a small black presentation box housing two cylindrical pastels or chalks, one a muddy red and the other a dull green. The box is made from matte black card and has its lid open to display the pastels. They nestle side by side on a bespoke black card insert. On the inside of the box’s lid, an inscription printed in white ink reads:

Red on Green
10,000 red roses, large bloomed and fragrant.
The heads pulled from their stems then placed side by side forming a dense cover over a rectangular bed of the stalks.
The Nash Room, ICA, London. July 1992.

Red and Green
Two pastels, one red, one green made from the ground remains of six dozen of these roses.

Below this paragraph is the artist’s signature and their printed name, Anya Gallaccio.

We asked the writer Kimberly Campanello to write a text based on a collaborative description conversation we held in front of this artwork. Kimberly’s text, called ‘Result of Six Dozen Red Roses, 1992’, reflects on the role of process, transformation and presentation in the creation of this artwork. The text is about two and a half minutes long.

Result of Six Dozen Red Roses, 1992

The result is found in this room, inside a lidded black box inside a waist high vitrine on a plinth.

The result is in two pieces.

The result’s two pieces are held inside the box’s specially formed spaces like a gift of expensive electronics, or a rare, though probably mass-produced specialty precious object.

The resulting gift is two chalks, one mouldy green, one brown. They could be, but have not been, used for marking. Though one seems flaky, both are sleeved in see-through material.

Such special treatment of a result results in at least one question. Where did the process begin to garner such packaged reverence?

There are several possible responses.

That numbers speak for themselves. As do materials. As does timing. As does location, both of making and displaying. And the name of the person doing the signing.

I suggest we emphasise the artist’s self-made caption. A gift in itself. This language covering the lid of the box that holds this result’s two objects.

Language. That mass-produced precious object. It flowers and decays as we go on specially sharing it. Though bound with transparent wrapping where we try to hold it, it is always possible it may mark others as it marks us.

Mark these words. My interior changed through what has resulted.

Hello, my name’s Joseph Rizzo Naudi. I’m a blind writer and part of the artwork description collective DesCript.

These are six small sculptural objects made from folded golden-brown tree leaves, fixed in place with thorns. They are displayed in two rows on a white plinth covered by a Perspex lid, located against the left-hand wall as you enter the gallery.

Three of the objects are box-shaped; one takes the form of a standing cone, one is an oval ball shape with a narrow opening at the top, and one is shaped like a horn. The objects transform the natural materials of the leaves and thorns into uncanny shapes that invite touch but threaten to crumble. They are titled:

Penpont Sycamore 1989
Penpont Sycamore Summer 1988
Drumlanrig Sweet Chestnut Summer 1989
Yorkshire Sculpture Park Sweet Chestnut Summer 1988
London Plane Leaves Summer 1988
Drumlanrig Sweet Chestnut Summer 1989

We asked the writer Kimberly Campanello to write a text based on a collaborative description conversation we held in front of these artworks. Kimberly’s text, called ‘Troving leaf sculptures 1988-89′ closely describes the artworks, evoking the tactile allure of these delicate objects. The text is about four minutes long.

Troving leaf sculptures, 1988-89

Galleried in the centre of the wall, tabernacled in glass, there are ritual objects, delicate, golden and pale as lace or pastry. I can only approach from the front or the sides.

Front left is the most important, a hollow vessel made of leaves. It could never hold water. A cornucopia tempting a peek inside to see its way of making. Thorns pin folded leaves into coning swirls, toward a curling tip. Imagine rhizome tracks the horizontal and then up to create this, a fresh sucker. Considering this, I’m gone, transported and troving for a discovery, a finding in past times. A ram’s horn. Of course I always looked inside it or imagined drinking from it. This one’s curve recalls a mermaid seated on a rocky promontory, tail fountaining skyward to hold up the body. It’s the sort of thing I might shelve for future purposes, a wind instrument bending to sing of the leaves that make it. Imbricate plates roof a space for resonant feeling.

I won’t smudge or break the glass, though I could palm two of the others: same materials, different directions and angles. Leaves form a cube small enough to hold in the hand but too large to cast. Its stems leg it upward from where they bind it. And to the right: another cube, its stems splaying like sinews branching outward the first time someone ever butchered. And behind that a large hat, golden and shimmering. And next to that, an open-topped sphere veined singly, you could hang it as a lantern from your ceiling. And then in front, a cube like a pinched box of tissues. A body breathing in, it hovers on the stems that made it.

I so want to touch these, but if I did, I could destroy them.

Ah! Just then which is now, someone sneezes.

And then. And now. Bless you. Bless you.

These once-green dried leaves require special handlers. There are cracks on several individuals and broken edges. All were made during my first few summers.

Someone here remembers them changing colours.