 Okay I think we should get started because we're kind of short on time and I would like to say welcome everybody, hello, welcome to all of you joining us. I'm Anna Reid and I'm Head of Research at the Paul Mellon Centre. Welcome to this first session of the autumn research series titled British Art and Natural Forces, A State of the Field Research Programme, and it's on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Paul Mellon Centre this year. And this year's situated in the midst of crisis, this multi-part programme of research events focuses on transformational encounters between artistic or art historical practice and nature's forces as well as the embodiment of those forces and the activities of British Art Studies. In that it will foreground a range of the most vital activities and conversations taking place within the field. Details of more than 10 events in the series can be found on the PMC website where you can also sign up and a final panel discussion will take place on the 3rd of December, 3rd of December. We're short on time, so this session of four papers will run until 2pm and I would like to introduce you to our chair for today who is Martin Myrone, welcome Martin. Martin's many exhibitions as curator at Tate Britain have included John Martin in 2011, British Folk Art in 2014 and most recently William Blake in 2019. His published work includes this year's Making the Modern Artist, Culture Class and Art Education Opportunity in Romantic Britain. Martin has recently joined the Paul Mellon Centre as convener of the British Art Network which brings together curators, researchers and academics based around the UK and internationally to share expertise, research and ideas. So I'll hand over to you, thank you Martin. Great, well thank you, thank you very much. It's a great pleasure to be able to introduce today's speakers and chair this first session in British Art and Natural Forces. We've got four speakers, they're all here, they will test this slide. So we'll be running the program as advertised with Catriona Franciosi and Stephanie O'Rourke, followed by a question session and then Joe Carr and Turbo Auckland Peck with questions for those papers and if time allows questions for the entire panel right towards the end as we due to finish at 2 o'clock. We have a housekeeping slide which hopefully you can see which I won't go through in detail because you can see what it says there but this is being run as a Zoom webinar which means that you won't be seen and you won't be heard unless we the hosts let you in. And to ask questions in those sessions after each pairing of papers we'd ask you to use the Q&A box or you can raise your hand and Danny and Ella will be monitoring those along with myself during those sessions. The chat box is to use primarily for any technical issues or any specific issues about the organisation of the event. The session is going to be recorded for the archive but we'd ask you not to take photographs yourself and it almost goes without saying but any offensive behaviour won't be tolerated. We will kick you out if that goes on and I guess that's one of my roles as chair as well. So that's ending on a rather negative note but the main thing is to really welcome our attendees. We're up to over 70 attendees, 73-72 attendees and we know from a few names that I recognise on that list and from some notes that we've been sent through that this is already an international event ranging from Bristol, Brazil, Brazil to Connecticut, Greece and all points between I believe as well as around the UK. Today's papers range across the 19th and 20th century and across a range of quite a broad range of materials relating to geomorphic forces but it occurs to me as I was reading through the abstracts and what's promised from these papers that there may be rather interesting and cross currents, points of connection across these different times and periods and cultural contexts and media particularly in the relationship between the solid and the not solid between dreams and spectacle and speculation and science and structure, the structured and the unstructured. That seems to promise to play out in the course of today's papers. As I say, we're on a fairly tight schedule so let's move straight on to our first paper which is from Catarina Pantiosi. Catarina is an incoming PhD student in the Department of History of Art at Yale University where she's going to be focusing on 19th century British art and particularly the visual culture of landscape and the environment and its intersection with the history of science. Her paper today, I imagine must arrive I think from your MA at the Court of History of Art on Edward Byrne-Jones and the Histories of the Earth and develops on that which was awarded an outstanding prize for an outstanding dissertation and she was previously awarded a BA in Art History from John Cabot University, Rome. With that out of the way, straight over to you Catarina for your paper, Hell on Earth, Edward Byrne-Jones, Perseus Series and Narratives of Geophysical Development. Thank you Martin. Hi everyone, it's really a pleasure to be here to be part of this ambitious program and of course I wish we were all in the same room but I will take Zoom or Nothing I guess and I will get right into it. The Perseus Series by Edward Byrne-Jones unfolds as a sequence of lunar settings that climaxes in a hyper-decorative realm. In this multi-part visual retelling of the Greek myth, we follow the hero as he performs a series of feats clustered around the slaying of the Medusa and the rescue of Andromeda from the sea serpent. Perseus carries out these tasks by incorporating a divinely made apparatus which lends him ultra-speed and invisibility and shields him from the petrifying gaze of the Gorgon. In the first painting of the series, The Call of Perseus, Byrne-Jones brings together the two episodes that set Perseus' string of feats in motion. In the background, the naked hero is perched on a riverbank, crouching in despair after promising the king of Seraphus, the head of the Medusa. He is visited by the silver-clogged goddess Athena. In the foreground, the fully armored goddess grants her help to a hesitating Perseus, delivering him the mirror through which he can safely look at the Medusa and the sword with which he will behead her. Byrne-Jones uses compositional distance to establish a hierarchy of occurrence of the two episodes. The barren landscape with its seniors bulges and recesses confounds our effort to scan the scene sequentially. The bending and folding of regions of matter seem to be activated by changes in the viscosity of the rocks, an action of stretching or dilution of substances. It is a landscape of visual enigma. The metallic-looking river, still and solid, the soft rocky riverbank, the patch of soil in the foreground at once modelled by shadow and instantaneously flat, the crater-like socket behind Athena's majestic beaker. These elements exist as pictorial moments of conflation of surface and depth, rendering the relationship between planar fields mobile. This range of discontinuities and movements of rocky substance is mirrored by Perseus' posture. He first doubles over and then stands in uncertain balance, the raised arm bent in protection and the rest of the body contracted inwardly. In this paper, I will look closely at the visual characterization of substances in the landscapes of the Perseus series and the relationship between the hero's action and the behaviour of inert matter. This focus can productively awaken us to the ostensibly bizarre yet utterly specific geomorphological dimension of the environment's emergence series. I propose that these environments are informed by and respond to conceptualisation of nature and the cosmos of 19th century physics of the earth and the universe. I drawn popular geophysical and metaphysical texts from the 1870s to suggest that the succession of geomorphological transformations, compositional frames and visual modes of the Perseus series harnesses ideas about matter, chaos and human agency contain impopular Victorian narratives of earth development and cosmic collapse. In the staging of the geophysical trajectory, decoration is a key pictorial mode which Brindons deploys both to inject chaos into the visual field and ultimately to rain state order. The second law of thermodynamics, variously formalised and discussed in 1860s by J. Clair Maxwell and Lord Colvin, postulated that the cosmos was steadily approaching energy impasse. This was due to the irreversible degradation of energy from usable transformable form into disordered waste or entropy. The heat death of the universe loomed large in the Victorian imagination. Even more terrifying however was the idea that mankind was precipitating cosmic breakdown by using up the earth's energy resources for the advancement of civilisation. By prophesizing the catastrophic obliteration of nature and the universe, geophysics and thermodynamics also made it possible to imagine worlds that might exist beyond visible reality. Geophysics, Balfour Stewart and Peter Tate proposed a geography and chronology of the cosmos woven together by the promise of energy regeneration and the post visible continuation of life. In their popular treaties, the Unseen Universe first published in 1875, they explained existence of multiple linked orders of reality across which energy flowed and interrupted thanks to the cementing medium of either. In their unseen universe, the energy that brings the visible world to life was not used and lost in a scenario of maximum chaos but endlessly reconverted in the genesis of invisible interconnected worlds. Their cosmology was premised on the correction of the first and second laws of thermodynamics into a principle of continuity. By positing the idea that energy was able to travel back and forth between the visible and invisible universe, Stewart and Tate hoped to reframe the occurrence of waste and loss into a narrative of endless energy transformation and regeneration. Branden says Blathers and Studio Talks reveal a preoccupation with questions of human agency within the disrupted environmental and cosmological realms of his age. He read Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos and views of nature, textual and visual accounts of the global interconnectedness of natural forces. More locally, he rejoiced in the destruction of the Brighton-Rockington Electric Railway and condemned English, the modern Carthaginians, for, quote, leaving their traces everywhere in stout and soda water bottles, end quote. His ecological anxieties existed side by side with a fretful interest in the operations of the universe. He dreaded the approach of the star Arcturus, which was due to happen hundreds of years. He's recorded as resorting, when unable to sleep, to astronomical books which triggered nightmares. With appalling things they can be, he said, as real as life itself. But with an added horror and terror, not of this life, even at its worst, but of the abysses of space and chaos. Perseus's trajectory through stages of matter, shot through with a consistent fear of material annihilation, enables the artist to fulfill his horrified desire to traverse the infinities of space and chaos. In Perseus and the Saint Names, the hero, now at Theda in his armor, is receiving from the Saint Names the gifts that will lend him divine powers throughout the journey, the winged sandals, the helmet of invisibility, and a pouch where he will safely store the Medusa's head. Here, Bern Jones creates an undulating landscape of stratified materials, layering flexible slabs of rocks into mountain-like formations, and laying a thin sheet of water in the foreground where the names stand. As Perseus pulls up his foot to tie the winged sandal, his pliable chest folds inwards and away from the nymphs. His retracted movement is an extension of the material logic of the landscape. In Perseus and the Graeae, rocks have congealed and turned malleable and elastic. An act of compression forces them into a concentric pattern which is reiterated by the figure's arrangement into a circular network of touching. In the subsequent paintings of the series, Bern Jones encodes the exploration of substances in the discontinuous plodding of space, first in terms of abstraction in the death of the Medusa on the left, and then in terms of vacuum in Perseus and Atlas on the right. Bern Jones's deployment of various pictorial modes to reveal the behavior of Burt Mather finds suggestive correspondences in scientific attempts to picture the past and future states of our planetary system. Geophysics combined the reading of the faucet record commonly practiced by geologists with novel theories of energy physics in attempt to recover the trajectory of temporal and material development of the earth and the cosmos. The British astronomer Richard Proctor was among the popularizes of the physics of the earth during the 1870s and 1880s. Proctor was a proponent of the theory of accretion as modified by the theory of contraction. He understood the formation of the earth as a combination of solidifying processes of its early nebulous state in gathering of matter from various parts of the universe and mechanical processes of contraction and expansion of its crust. His articles published in widely read Victorian journals and magazines urge readers to embark on mental journeys backwards to the beginning of all things and forward to the end of all things. Proctor conjured up vistas of a liquid earth and surveyed ongoing processes of matter solidification while offering a metaphysical reflection on man's place among infinities. The eclectic model of the cosmos proposed by Stuart and Tate drew upon scientific evidence of impending cosmic death while inserting the spiritually comforting tannins of eternity and immortality. As I mentioned at the beginning, the ancient universe they conceived of was responsible for gradually absorbing the energy due to be wasted in its linked visible equivalent and converting it in the genesis of a new region of reality. The monstrous supposition that in due time all visible things must come to an end. What they call the sacrifice of the visible universe was necessary to imagine a world full of energy, a realm of spiritual relief and material regeneration. Persus's mythic narrative is constructed as an action packed journey through matter and space which is imbued with the conceptual proposition of Victorian geophysics. In Bern Jones' own words, the future state of the universe would be something worse than the horrors of ordinary life, something more dreadful as it encompassed the infinitude of chaos. In an attempt to negotiate this infinitude, Bern Jones orchestrated the series as an unfolding geohistorical narrative. We can therefore read the first three paintings as depicting the processes of formation of the earth, its solidification, the addition and layering up of matter, the alternation of contraction and expansion, the resulting unevenness of the earth's crust and the gradual cooling of its core. In this sequential development, the hero is physically embedded in the workings of the earth and acts as an agent of material modifications. In the rock of doom, Bern Jones seems to accelerate the process of disarray of three-dimensional pictorial rules that began in the first part of the series. A pushing and pulling of perspectival forces pivoting on the outcrop to which Andromeda's change governs the composition. Persist's forward motion is hampered by the uncertain placement of his foot in relation to the base of the rock formation. Like the illegible exchange of gazes with Andromeda, it constitutes a visual puzzle that results in narrative deadlock. The penultimate painting of the series, the Doomful Field, is an alluring visual turmoil, the ultimate displacement of spatial legibility. We see Persist's attempt into forth the multi-directional discharge of energy of the sea serpent by locking his gaze with the beasts, pushing and sliding into its coiling body as the unstable amalgamation of rocks of the cave seem to close over him. Bern Jones returns the outcrop from the previous canvas to engineer the flipping over of the unshackled body of Andromeda as well as the passage to a new visual realm. The Doomful Field corresponds to the climax of Persist's geophysical journey. Strangely enough, it is a reversal of visual agency that makes action possible in the scene. Persist had to become invisible to trigger the manifestation of the sea serpent. The defining action of this final feat is configured as a complete entanglement of bodies which speaks to suspension and connectivity rather than resistance and separation. This entanglement, I suggest, is an equivalent for the linkage of visible and invisible realms imagined by Victorian geophysics. In the Doomful Field, Bern Jones makes Persist's enacting necessary sacrifice of the visible world to use Chewart's and Tate's formulation. By abdicating normative visuality and physicality, the hero enables the genesis of a new realm. The Belfool head, the final painting of this series, is the culmination of the gradual metamorphosis of pictorial registers towards the decorative, a consistent process across the series. The reconciliation scene is set in a lush garden, helmetically sheltered by multiple layers, a burdened forest encroaching from above, a marbling closure, the foliage of an apple tree. We come to realize that the barren, threatening landscapes of the previous paintings with their unstable materiality and mobile surfaces have paved the way for a luxuriant image of nature held together by tight interdependence. The triangulation of solid heads reflected on the fountain thematizes the quintessentially decorative matrix of the painting, characterized by insistent surface materiality, geometric patterning, and bandedness. Despite the happy ending, pursuers and andromedist gazes still fail to meet. The plotting of their heads onto the water surface, jointed together by the intervention of the Medusa's head, causes the viewer to have access to only one of the figure's eyes. Reconciliation, however virtual and imperfect, is an effect of the Medusa's life-freezing powers of her capacity to bring to a halt the processes of life. In a bellful head, the end of motion, the cessation of the interactions of forces that make life on the surface of the Earth possible, presents a deadly unity and solidity, a perfect but fatal decorative form. Yet the metallic, energyzed scales of pursuers' outfit and lush foliage form a rapture in the locked, securely bounded surfaces of the visual field. I want to suggest that the role is to indicate that an activity of transformation and regeneration of the hero and of nature is still possible, that the succession of material shifts may go on. The configuration of love in late in the water surface affords a glimpse into the augmented spiritual and material dimension that the continuation of these processes may enable. The different geographies of the pursuers' theories I have surveyed respond to the hero's passage with a sequence of morphological modifications. They gain increasing mobility and instability to the point of complete disarray, but finally, they are tightly restructured. To taste down these modifications is to identify the gradual transformation of pictorial registers into a decorative realm. This trajectory and its culmination, I have argued, may be seen as visualizing the post-entropic world offered by Victorian narratives of cosmic development. The pursuit series allowed Burn Jones to play out his cosmological terror, fabricate and experience nature's doom and safely land beyond it on the realm of infinite renovation imagined by popular thermodynamics. Decoration, with its enhancement of aesthetic experience, serves as both catalyst and comforting solution to the inevitable draining away of the real. Georgina Burn Jones writes of her husband lifelong disappointment with the soft, too soft land of Surrey. She recalls Burn Jones as saying, I wanted some desolate bits and woeful tale or two and to be told at such a point where such a battle and by that tower was such a combat and in that tower such a tragedy. I like other lands better and now and then I want to see hell in a landscape. All that is like a silly heaven. The landscape described by geophysics and thermodynamics were imbued with the hellish quality that appealed to Burn Jones. To contemplate disintegration in the environment and the universe, to dive into the running down of material reality made it possible to reach a land free of waste and decay that lay beyond its boundaries. Thermodynamics ultimately delivered a prophecy not of loss but of infinite transformation. Those who ventures through the destructive workings of the physical world were to harvest the redemptive outcome of this prophecy. Burn Jones perceived an overlap between the promise of regeneration of energy physics and the reformulation of visual agency through the decorative both thrive on the final dissolution of material reality. The suspension of its spatial and temporal parameters and offer in return a superior experiential mode within a matrix of enhanced material relationships. Thank you. Terrific. Thank you. Thank you very much Catarina and of course that let's see the number of attendees is crept up. We're at 84 from all around the world listening in on that and I know from the chat box that there's already a lot of enthusiasm and interests for your paper and your topic including from at least one actual scientist who's in the room which is very nice to have so welcome to them. For anybody who's new welcome. We are running papers in pairings and we'll be taking questions. I'm sure there will be questions and comments for Catarina after the first two papers but I'm sure you'll join me in thanking Catarina very much for such a kind of rich and stimulating originally stimulating paper which really absolutely kind of tackles those relations between science and our between imagination and materiality in really fascinating ways. So we will come back to you Catarina with questions but we'll move on now to our next presenter who is Stephanie O'Rourke from the University of St Andrews lecture in history an artist from the University of St Andrews she holds a PhD from Columbia and a BA from Harvard University the paper that she's presenting today relates to a lever whom funded project on the relationship between landscape and natural history in late 18th and early 19th century Europe what a fantastic topic and she's been publishing in the series already including papers in representations eight century studies and word and image so do you join me in welcoming virtually at least Stephanie and her paper picturing the geological sublime so over to you Stephanie. Great thank you very much Martin I'm so happy to thank you Catarina for that great paper and I'm so happy to be participating in this especially because I'm sharing some very fresh research so it's very much the sort of thing that is in process and I really welcome feedback on okay right this is the historical age and this the historical nation David Hume opined in 1770 now although he was referring to Scotland rather than to England his word is nonetheless capture the ascendant cultural status of history as an intellectual practice and particularly in the first decades of the 19th century a form of popular entertainment in Great Britain if when Hume was writing it remained a bellatrous practice that century saw its consolidation and professionalization within the academy on the one hand and its growing presence in literature theater art and a wide range of cultural activities on the other this state of affairs would seem to be confirmed by the integration of key functions of history painting into early 19th century Britain's most widely produced and consumed pictorial genre the landscape but Hume writing of a historical age and a historical nation mistakenly characterized history as a singular or monolithic entity and what he failed to anticipate was that historical understanding in 19th century Britain would be not only emphatically plural but driven by conflict and contradiction this included the intellectual recognition of multiple kinds of historical pasts as well as a growing interest in pre-human natural histories so in an era in which communication and travel were precipitously accelerating the pace of daily life quote-unquote romantic Britain faced for the first time an awareness of impossibly vast expanses of geological and non-human historical time which is often referred to as deep time and there's quite a lot of good scholarship on this in the history of science such conflictual temporality surfaced in landscape paintings by figures like Turner whose canvas is registered a visual field that was transformed on the left by the disorienting pace of steam-powered locomotion and on the right by the relative insignificance of grand historical events compared with the operations of nature Turner's contemporary and sometime rival Constable another figure who treated landscape as a genre capable of performing the essential operations of history painting counterposed the cyclical temporalities of pre-industrial agricultural labor and the social formations they undergirded against the fleeting effects of meteorological conditions and slower if no less disorienting effects of social change and beneath the conflictual temporalities I've alluded to in the works of Turner and Constable though lay a more fundamental challenge to the experiential and epistemological primacy of the human vantage point and its narrative historical framework in the early 19th century as well as what I'm going to explore today the incredibly fragile ground upon which it was located the artist whose landscapes I believe are most thoroughly embroiled in this deeper challenge was also an artist famous for painting scenes not just of catastrophe but of episodes in which the literal ground often in the surface of the earth itself is thrown into disorder I refer you to John Martin an artist few have done more to further our understanding of than today's moderator Martin Mayrone who's helped us to understand Martin's work not only in relation to social and economic transformations taking place in an industrializing Britain but also to the embeddedness of traditional artistic production in a modernizing marketplace of visual entertainment consider Martin's 1822 painting of the eruption of Mount Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD quite monstrously large canvas stretching to 1.6 by 2.5 meters portraying a landscape and turmoil you can see vertical jets of light shoot up from the distant volcano illuminating from below the swirling vortices of ash and cloud that encircle the scene and beneath it lies the finely rendered city of Pompeii and Herculaneum is a bit harder to see closer to us the chaotic swells of the Bay of Naples and on a narrow wedge of firm land in the foreground various human figures fleeing the volcano's destructive powers in portraying this famous eruption Martin was appealing to a subject that had proven popular among British and French artists for several decades. J.M.W. Turner and Joseph Wright of Derby were both drawn to volcanoes as a pictorial engine of extraordinary luminous and coloristic effects widely cited as an example of the sublime it was a subject treated most extensively by the French artist Pierre-Jacques Volair I see his work below in many portrayals a spectrum of warm incandescent hues is contrasted with the blue tonalities of moonlight much as the pyrotechnic heat of the eruption is set against the watery expanse of the Bay of Naples now in the early 19th century volcanic eruptions had become a fairly prominent metaphor for radical political change especially in relation to the French Revolution now although the European political order was decidedly more stable by the time Martin was painting in the early 1820s social reform movements and millenarianism were palpably present in British life and there remain some debate at least about the extent to which Martin was sympathetic to either cause but more immediately and more concretely in Martin's case volcanoes had become a spectacular and scientific attraction that could be found in pyrotechnic displays at London pleasure gardens learned debates in the newly founded geological society a range of theatrical productions epic poems and more its multi-valent cultural presence was fairly typical in this regard of scientific phenomena such as electricity that we might now designate as popular and this is something I write about more extensively in a book that I have coming out next year on Cambridge EP much of the fascination with volcanoes resided in the idea that an apparently fixed topographical formation concealed within it surging forces capable of fantastical destruction the mountain almost a byword for a permanent solidity and mass could be revealed as nearly a shell an outer covering under which molten powers churned it indicated that beneath one's feet lay a world whose combustive heat and power were antithetical to the conditions of human life a world moreover in which latent pressures and unseen forces could gather undetected only to suddenly burst forth and break open a formerly continuous material narrative and visual field the pamphlet that was published to accompany the exhibition of martin's paintings at the gyption hall in london underscored several of these very features so it describes and these are some quotes were effulgent expanses of fire burst from every part of the suvious and internal convulsions of the earth it notes that during the eruption houses no longer afforded security and chariots were not to be kept steady these concerns were surely remote for martin's contemporary viewers unlike london of course of the pamphlet notes quote the city of pompeh is founded upon a stratum of lava and quote yet those of us familiar with martin's efforts to transform britain the british capital's water supply and waste disposal systems detailed in a dozen plus civil engineering texts he published about which we know a great deal more thanks to the invaluable work of the ycda's laris cocanon will also recognize that martin not only understood the fabric of british urban life as something situated atop a sprawling network of subterranean flows but that he was unusually alive to the risks of letting such forces flow or build up unchecked because the volcano revealed its subterranean mechanisms through a sudden intrusion into the surface of the visible it also presupposes forces and causalities that normally reside beyond the threshold of ordinary human perception like the ancient depths of the geological past such forces were inaccessible to the system of direct observation that was essential to empirical scientific knowledge production the more dominant of the primary two views of geological history in britain at the time uniformitarianism held that the same operations that shape the earth in the deep pre-human past were in effect today so consequently to get to this past you would extrapolate from what could be seen in the present and use that to kind of infer causalities and events that could not be seen and while i don't have time to detail martin's more concrete historical links with geology and paleontology about which david bindman and others have written such as his printed illustrations for geological books it does seem fitting that martin deployed precisely this strategy when painting visuvius drawing upon that which could be known through direct observation and then extrapolating from there the pamphlet stressed that quote the painter has sedulously consulted every source of information within his right which might enable him to complete his task with strict attention to historical truth end quote including an 1819 text by william gel and john peter gandy as well as william hamilton's earlier and quite famous campy flegray from the 1770s one of the unusual things about martin is that to the extent that we can even really call his paintings landscapes they were rarely of environments that he would have observed firsthand included in the exhibition pamphlet was an outline engraving produced by martin of the painting identifying its major features and instructing the viewer how to move their eye through the scene now martin was not the first artist in britain to produce an engraved numerical key to his painting i should underscore that this was not common practice really at the time we also know that he displayed maps and plans of the region in the exhibition space which viewers were encouraged to consult in order to better imaginatively locate themselves within the scene such supplements seem to presuppose that the painting lacks a degree of visual self-evidence or at least that there are unavoidable limits to its availability to visually communicate information there is more to a volcano after all that meets the eye but by far the strangest though of martin's techniques for rendering visible and comprehensible an event whose historical occurrence and structural causalities were both inaccessible to contemporary british viewers can be found in his recourse to scale here's a quote that i'm showing you from the pamphlet in which he says the elevation of the foreground in which the principal figures are seen is 348 feet above the level of the sea this elevation he continues makes it more than sufficient to enable the spectator to take in uh taken to view every city within the angle of vision represented in this picture and as you can see he he goes on um to some uh to some extensive detail and the quote actually about scale continues on from there so here martin employs scale as the defining frame of reference for the viewer exhorting them to recall objects from the direct lived experience and you can see from the bottom of the quote i've included the magnitude of two remote objects may be formed from more remote objects or may be formed from the building's trees etc he's talking about what happens in the distance so he's i'm asking the viewer to recall objects from their direct lived experience the height of a man the size of a tree and to imaginatively project the relative size of epic and superhuman natural forces it will be tempting to call this a deeply humanistic enterprise in which the measure of the human becomes an ordering principle for the entire visual field but as i suggested at the beginning of my paper the primacy of the human vantage point might actually prove to be far from secure in painting the eruption of Vesuvius martin conveyed a scene in which the gradual accumulation of unseen pressures violently break open the surface of the earth in doing so they mark a rupture within once continuous visual and narrative expanses and picture the transformative power of phenomena that cannot be directly apprehended until it is too late as if to shore up or to stabilize the viewer's relationship to these effects the painting appeals to an elaborate scaffolding of extra pictorial information firstly through a sigiouis reference to documentary evidence grounded where possible in direct observation secondly through an outline engraving a numerical key and thirdly through strict adherence to a principle of uniform scale secured through objects available to the viewer's everyday frame of visual experience these features i propose are recurrent in his larger body of work which itself takes on something of the volcanic not obviously in a sense of portraying volcanoes but rather in possessing some of the structural characteristics that i have been outlining as well as luminous extrusions latent flows invisible powers causalities and temporalities that fall out with ordinary human perceptual powers the upending of previously stable boundaries and dramatic breaks within narrative continuity and likewise we can identify similar compensatory pictorial and explanatory strategies that are invoked by martin to manage them so mentioned just one more example in the time remaining which is belchazar's feast produced not long before his pyrotechnic homage to the suvious of course one of his most successful and today most famous paintings first exhibited at the british institution in 1821 the canvas portrays a biblical event set in ancient babalon on the left you can see rays of light emanating from text inscribed on the wall by the hand of god which foretell the fall of belchazar the astonished babalonian king who's in the lower right and in the center lower center of the composition draped draped in dark robes that set him apart from the gold flex blender of the feasting scene the prophet daniel interprets the script once again we encounter the kind of vastness and immensity of space for which martin was known as well as the vertiginous repetition of architectural units by which its depth is plumbed for the viewer the painting is also remarkable for its narrative simultaneity its condensation of discrete narrative moments within a unifying spatial enclosure and as the pamphlet which was produced for the initial exhibition the pamphlet would go on to at least 29 uh additions we know uh as the pamphlet noted the painting has quote its proteases beginning its epithesis unfolding and catastrophe which the artist had the boldness and felicity of concentrating under the same point of view end quote so both continuity and its catastrophic disruption were united within a single visual field in belchazar's feast and situated in a graphic enclosure whose relationships were as we might well anticipate secured again by effects of scale the outline engraving martin produced for the catalog draws the viewer's attention to number 17 you can't see it in this but he's one of the small figures sort of uh in the in the center um under the arc uh quote number 17 scale of proportion a figure six feet high by which the length of the halls is found to be one mile end quote that's from the pamphlet as in the case of eruption of the suvious quantitative relationality was invoked between a human figure and its non-human surroundings at once an admission of their uneasy coexistence and an attempt to provide a framework through which they could be made mutually comprehensible it was an awkward conceit to be sure and regarded moreover as an intellectual and artistic failing by several of martin's contemporaries so the artist um benjamin robber hayden wrote of this mezzotint from a later um uh paradise law series that martin did quote it is the grossest of all gross ideas to make the power and essence of the creator depend on size it is vulgar to say there that horizon is 20 miles long therefore god's leg must be 16 relative to the horizon the artist deserves as much pity as the poorest maniac in bedlam end quote it's not pulling any punches uh so rather than transcend the quotidian metricized factual parameters of ordinary life martin seems to have installed them in the heart of a fantastical biblical epic a disjunction to ss charles lamb would call in 1833 martin's impoverished appointment of the quote unquote material sublime but scales served a very practical function in this moment too as a mediator of temporal multiplicity and graphic unity with regard to the study of history the most influential cartographic illustrations of the 18th century joseph priestly's timelines of biographic and imperial history introduced as you can see here dates running at regular intervals along the top and bottom margins of his prince of his timelines as dan rosenberg and anthony grafting have argued this set a new standard practice for the 19th century in which it was widely assumed that uniformity of scale in chronographic diagrams secured the visual analogy between graphic space and historical time so just a few words by way of closing scale effects made it possible to picture the historical unfolding of western knowledge about remote regions and past events seen on the left for instance in edward quinn's and historical atlas from around 1830 in which the device of dark clouds being peeled back diagrams which portion of the world was known to the west at different moments in time although hayden lamb and others impugned martin's recourse to scale effects they were aligned with a much broader intensifying of scale thinking in historical knowledge as well as a range of other fields in the early 19th century john clencher writes quote scale became not only the measure of fixed spaces but also of moving and multiple liable spaces and times it thus became one of modernity's fundamental keywords for addressing an increasingly vast set of shifting relationships across the space and time of capitalist development and global reach end quote multi-scalar interactions were instrumental in conceptualizing relationships within large multi-level systems this included energy regimes colonial networks economic structures and increasingly diverse polities scale was not merely a cheap ploy to invite martin's viewer to imagine that god's legs are 16 miles long it was a major conceptual and graphic tool with which to think across large differentials of space magnitude and time and in this way it's precisely the kind of device that one might turn to in order to articulate remote historical depths so vast as to be otherwise unreachable to the human observer and martin was unusually preoccupied with the barriers to human observation and human understanding both historical and phenomena sorry phenomenal and many of the spectacular episodes he pictured including the eruption of the suvious were about the violent or sudden overturning of such barriers his was a world in which subterranean flows latent forces and powerful accumulations broke through the fragile barrier human civilization had erected against them his paintings revealed the thinness the precarity of the paving that separated the space of human life human history and human monuments from the swelling mass of non-human forces and immense if not to say immeasurable spatial and temporal expanses from this vantage point martin's recourse to scale and related informational supports acquires the status of a desperate even quixotic effort to research the priority of the human vantage point against a stunning profusion of histories and causalities as if to throw a bottle stopper into the gaping mouth of a volcano great thanks thank you very much stephanie i'm sure everybody will join in thank you for such an exciting paper navigating space and time along with john martin and digging deep to real effect we've got will allow us some sort of 10 minutes or so to take some questions if that's okay with katerina and and stephanie if you've got new questions do post them in the q and a box we've got a couple of questions posted up already and a hand up which we'll try to get to first if we may so first up was posted by jenny gashka it's for katerina katerina you should unmute there you go in relation to your argument could you please say something about the relationship between the southampton images of the per se series you showed us i believe they are the cartoons and the more finished series in the starts gallery schtuttgart what happened between the two versions of burn jones's approach or two burn jones's approach or i was just saying thank you for your exciting paper thank you for the question this is this is a good question i guess one of the the main reason why i chose to focus on the southampton cartoons was because they make the most complete record of the series and burn jones never finished the commission so i decided to focus on this because they gave me the kind of like expands of burn jones's attempts to reimagine the world of geophysics but i would say that if we consider the totality of the series including the the stuttgart canvassists i guess they they really speak to burn jones's interest in the analysis of change and the idea of redressing the earth in a way that shows its sequential development and i mean we can we can we could argue that you know he was never able to attain the perfect description of you know a geophysical journey that i argued that he had in mind by sort of like going back and forth between the cartoons and and the canvassists and i hope that that answers your question all right thank you off the back of that i've put a question a point before we move on to the next one for both stefanie and katerina about burn jones and john martin both have very kind of distinctive ways of painting their surfaces are very distinctive and seem to relate have a kind of relationship with with with stony materials whether it's architecture or sculpture well i wonder if you've got any observations or anything to do to comment on that in terms of the kind of geological qualities of of either of these artists as painters stefanie do you want to go first sure well um i have been thinking not so much about the paintings i mean i started this project at the very beginning of the first lockdown so i haven't i haven't seen one of these in person since i since i started this about six months ago um but i have been thinking a lot about the mesotensin particular in relation to um and this is more of a bit of a metaphorical lark but i'm thinking about lamp lamp black as this kind of carbonic um you know product of combustion and the paintings are these sort of big luminous spectacular events that then get distributed and consolidated through lamp black in the form of these mesotens and i also find it very intriguing that his contemporaries and many can many in the present i think that those compositions are sort of less um less tacky or more acceptable more kind of refined less awkward than than those some of the objections that were made to the paintings yeah that's yeah i am definitely thinking still thinking through the materiality of bernjens's paintings and i guess the most interesting moment in the series would be actually not in the cartoons but in the jesso panels that are part of bernjens's um um elaboration of the series and yeah i'm i'm thinking about jesso as this material that needs to set and solidify uh to be able to create the kind of stony surface that you are talking about and is again a strange you know transformation of matter from animate into inanimate and back into animate again at the moment of a taste of aesthetic encounter so that that's definitely something that i am still exploring the sort of transformative processes in turning mud into paint or uh but we'll move on to we've got another um posted question for for katerina from pola durand asker i'm sorry if i'm not quite that right i'm thinking you for a fascinating paper and asking um i was wondering if you have perhaps explored any recorded interactions of burn jones with the scientific victorian scientific world which would underscore further his artistic acknowledgement of the latest revelations brought by the developing field of physics so are there recorded interactions of burn jones with um the victorian scientific world uh where there are in the memorials and in his studio talks uh several hands at burn jones's interest in astronomy and especially uh with the person series there's a posthumous um um article about burn jones that talks about he the way he was thinking about great mythology and constellations in relation to the the the story of persis and andromeda and i would say that um if we want to kind of um if if we're thinking about the like burn jones's interaction with the victorian scientific world at large and of course caroline arascad has done magnificent work about underscoring this relationship so that that would be a good place to start to sort of start to locate burn jones within the larger um scientific milieu of his time okay okay thank you um we've got a hand up from sandra gomez um todo um i don't want to have dany or um ella could unmute sandra to bring them in no problem sandra you're now unmuted sandra want to ask you a question uh she's appearing as muted still for me all right sorry i'm having trouble with uh i'm meeting her unfortunately okay um has anybody got got further questions that can post in the q and a because otherwise we may move on and that will allow us time for um stefanie and katarina to pick up any questions as well as the other panelists towards the end so i'm sorry sandra we seem to be challenged by um zoom format don't be going too smoothly as well no i think i think rather than hold things up let let let's hopefully come back to your question um as we as we approach two o'clock um because now we've got two more um papers again well we'll have the papers as a pairing and then move to questions for those two um panelists and as time allows pick up any questions um after that for for the other speakers as well we're moving now to um uh joe car who is uh adjunct professor of architectural history at syracuse university london and previously head of critical and historical studies program at the royal college of art um he is uh uh uh the public uh uh uh writer and uh as a curator and his publications include the endome city contesting architecture and space 2000 utopia cars and culture 2002 and bus fare um i think you probably get the prize for the best um title um of of the day bus fare collected writings on london's most loved and means of transport um 2018 and here's a book um forthcoming with um stranger tractor press uh on alfred wattkins uh manner vision and it's alfred wattkins which is your topic today so over to you um joe many thanks martin and good after everyone so as you rightly say my subject is alfred wattkins a name that um is reasonably familiar in england but for our international audience he was uh a late 19th and early 20th century photographer a scientist inventor an all-round polymath and the reason i i'm uh searching here at the moment is that next year is a very significant centenary of something that he's associated with which i will discuss in the paper so as celebrates its 50th it is celebrating the upcoming tenary of a particular event which has both catapulted alfred wattkins from local interest to international significance or perhaps even notoriety um and one of the concerns about that is that this event i'm sorry to be coy but we will get to it um has kind of rather distorted his reputation and has deflected from his i think deserved reputation at one time of being a major photographer and photographic innovator um we are a book and we are doing we hope an exhibition in herford which is a figure from herfordshire uh next year to mark this event and the reason i suggested this paper was i quite like the idea um he i mentioned alfred wattkins originally as a photographer working very much in the english picturesque tradition and now i'm failing to move this forward um the the english picturesque artistic tradition which of course is very closely associated with his native herfordshire the picturesque was originally articulated by two herfordshire squires in the late 18th century and remained the kind of foremost artistic pursuit and here is a work of a near contemporary of alfred wattkins painter brian hatton who sadly killed in the first world war um but whose work very much followed that notion of the picturesque of landscapes that some that somehow sat between the beautiful and the sublime but in which the forces of nature were particularly strong and i think this the idea of the relationship with the forces of nature is particularly important because of course the picturesque was being theorized at the time of the industrial revolution and it was exactly those forces particularly water and a rugged topography that were being exploited by the pioneering iron masters of this region and then it'll quote from wattkins's obituary to emphasize that he was such a supremely local figure first and foremost he was a herfordshire man as native to the county as oh my god i realized that my the video is is obscuring my screen so i need to somehow reconfigure that so i can't actually see the end of my own quote which is likely unfortunate um but that and the the thing that's important about the centenary is it catapulted this local figure and his relationship to the natural world into something very very different indeed he becomes somebody who represents the idea of the supernatural as a force within the English landscape and i'd like that little dualism in that in in terms of the subject matter of natural forces of looking instead at at the rise of an interest in supernatural forces in the English language in English culture but of course simple dualisms rarely have ever worked satisfactorily and in the course of my research i've come to realize increasingly that whilst wattkins fits into the picturesque tradition and there is this interesting contrast between the natural and the supernatural nonetheless there's a third force at work which is deeply important and of course is deeply important to the picturesque which is that this is as much about human intervention in the landscape about subtle um and the subtle symbiotic relationships between landscape and its human occupants so if you look at one of wattkins's images here an image taken in the very early years of the 20th century um it could be read purely as a landscape image it is about the vastness of the Welsh borderlands and the vastness of of the sky above it but the subject that the the title Cole's Tump suggests something that of course this is actually about the prehistoric interventions in the landscape it is a prehistoric mound that is at least part of the subject and the trees themselves are things that grow there because it is a prehistoric site and if we were to look at another of his images um one that i will return to later because it's a particular significance to me um this image makes it very much clearer that this is about a complex tripartite relationship between nature natural forces and human interventions here both in the case of an artificial ancient mound and the eager members of the local uh history and archaeological society the woolhope club of which wattkins was the leading member but the other interesting thing about these images is that they were taken purely in the context of art and archaeology but because of what happens to Watkins later these images get reused by him and become imbued with a whole different set of meanings as well um and the other thing that's really important about Watkins is that as well as being um an artistic photographer and he was very much recognized he won the he won a major award from the royal photographic society uh in 1910 is that he was someone who was also whilst looking backwards often he photographed uh elements of the landscape and of human architecture and archaeology that were rapidly disappearing he was part of that movement in the early 20th century to record the traces of pre-industrial society just as they disappeared nonetheless he was someone who also looked forward he was an important scientific inventor and this has a particular kind of resonance within the subject in its kind of most literal form he was he pursued all kinds of slightly eccentric causes these are his own photographs of a of a vehicle that he paid for and built the heritature b van that went around educating in his mind kind of rather superstitious and primitive villages with proper scientific methodologies for the cultivation of bees but rather more important he became an inventor of photographic equipment this is significant because photography was an elite pursuit not just because it was expensive which it undoubtedly was the equipment was beyond the means of most people but because it required uh specialist knowledge without which you could not practice not knowledge that was published knowledge that had to be learned and acquired so it is an elite practice Watkins despite being an elite photographer believe very strongly that photography should be popularized and made a variety of important innovations in photography he wrote the first manual on how to take photographs literally the first one that was ever published making allowing photography to become a more popular medium and then he invented equipment such as this this is the first effective light meter for the first 70 or 80 years of photography you didn't have light meters that could scientifically codify the intensity of light and therefore allow you to set the correct aperture and and speed of your photographs this is interesting it's own right but what of course catapulted him into and this is him writing very very simple manuals explaining how the arch happened but on the right is him making use of the thing that kind of catapulted him in the first instance into an international realm is that the photographer uh Ponting took one of these bee meters with him on Captain Scott's disastrous exhibition to the South Pole in 1910 and it was these things this invention that enabled Ponting to take his extraordinary images at the Antarctic and you see here Ponting's own endorsements of the meter so in a sense Watkins was directly responsible for the recording and for the transmission of perhaps the last great exploration of a part of the world where natural forces were overwhelming and of course what's really interesting about these images is that they were intended to be celebratory the book that Ponting was to produce was to be a triumphant celebration of Scott's intrepid and heroic adventure to the South Pole of course he died in that attempt along with the surviving members of his team and as a consequence these images hold all those kinds of resonances of recording of being a kind of images of mourning and of loss but they still resonate very very powerfully these things they are some of the most extraordinary images to be taken of the natural landscape in its entirely unaltered form with no human intervention of the Antarctic but then comes the event the centenary which transforms everything it's an event that is familiar to many people but I need to rehearse briefly also the event has been like many damascene moments and it really is presented as a kind of damascene moment a moment of intense and immediate revelation um sorry I understand I'm being told my internet connection is unstable can you still hear me it seems fine at the moment to me yeah yeah that's fine at this moment of revelation which transforms everything the simple explanation of this is that Watkins on commercial business was passing over a hill in Herriford Church and was interested in objects in the landscape the things that he had often photographed and researched in his antiquarian practices and suddenly realized or thought that he realized that they lined in a straight line and he immediately pursued this apparent kind of insight into the relationship between human artifacts and the landscape very very rapidly he presented his findings in a paper delivered to the Woolhoek Club of which he was a principal member and I can only imagine that these men and they were exclusively men of learning and of kind of rational science and history were astounded by this now increasingly aged old buffer making essentially making a fool of himself with his outlandish theory but he quickly developed it um and published it uh within a year of his revelation in the book the early British takeaways which found immense and immediate interest uh a lot of criticism um but he then very very quickly developed and produced in 1925 the book by which he is always remembered the old straight track um and this book expounds this idea that the landscape is actually conceals and largely conceals a network of ancient trunkways he takes a very kind of literal interpretation of it that the elements of the landscape that he's interested in prehistoric monuments standing stones fragments of track and topographical features of the landscape all align to create a series of of connections for the purposes of travel and communication um the experience is a deeply poetic one um and the the passage that's often quoted in the old straight track is this one imagine a fairy chain stretched from mountain peak to mountain peak as far as the eye could reach and paid out until it reaches the high places of the earth at a number of ridges banks and knolls then visualize a mound circular earthquake earthwork or clump of trees planted etc etc etc it's an extraordinarily uh evocative uh and a rather beautiful description of the landscape and it could be uh simply uh a descriptive account of what's seen from the high points of herifice in the other areas that he investigated but of course there is this um bigger explanation that comes not surprisingly uh there is an immediate reaction against Watkins's ideas because they come as a popular and non-academic challenge to the orthodoxies particularly at the disciplines of archaeology and of ancient history and most famously uh the wonderful figure of OGS Crawford uh goes on the attack against Watkins famously OGS Crawford who was uh an archaeologist and set up a magazine for archaeology that still exists refused an advert from Matthew in the publishers of the old straight track on the basis that this was cranky stuff and cranky was a word that OGS Crawford used and but what's really interesting is that Crawford himself was had had a revelatory experience in relationship to the landscape sensational revelations do not often appeal to archaeologists but when an air force friend showed photographs taken for practice near Winchester I realized that they marked the beginning of a new epoch in archaeology so Crawford using the innovation during the First World War of aerial photography has himself become someone whose whose revelations are revealing patterns in the ancient landscape and I suspect his his antipathy to Watkins was not just on the basis of academic orthodoxy and rationality versus kind of amateur romanticism but also on the fact that they were competing revelations about essentially the same subject it was of course a period in which things were being found under the earth that was transforming our understanding of matters above the earth whether it's Howard Carter and Tutankhamun or on the right exactly contemporary with much of this debate Mortimer Wheeler excavating Maiden Castle the great prehistoric earthwork in the south of England and one of the interesting things about this two of the interesting things is firstly that it inflicts artistic practice quite a lot and so of course Paul Nash creates an artistic image of the landscape and the human intervention in it just as on the right Watkins's photographs were doing in a different context in the old straight track but also of course it tapped into a popular relationship with the landscape that had vividly grown in the interwar years with government support and sanction in reaction to the unhealthiness discovered in the population during the First World War people were encouraged to move outdoors and of course this took on not only a popular but a political aspect as well one last thing about the two of them is that what they were concerned with doing was actually providing methodologies and this is important because this is often what Watkins was picked up on for later so just as Crawford explains in very technical terms how you use aerial photography to invest in ancient remains so Watkins explains in great detail how you use equipment in the home and the Ordnance Survey map and of course the delicious irony is that OGS Crawford was one of the people who had who worked for the Ordnance Survey and had created the maps that Watkins and his enthusiastic followers used Watkins shows how you do lay lines so they're both technical minds addressing the same subject but from very very different viewpoints but in terms of this relationship to a popular embracing of nature of course this is famously expressed in the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1932 the event at which the private ownership of the great landscapes of England is challenged by a mass movement but I ask you briefly and I can't afford to analyse this now in terms of time these images of enthusiastically striped landscape or listening to impassioned speakers explaining what they're seeing is paralleled almost exactly by Watkins' Straight Track Club the the organisation he set up for for essentially amateurs and enthusiasts to go and explore the landscape through the medium of lay lines and once again we don't see people in athletic equipment or in hiking gear we see people rather overdressed for the activity of of yomping up an old man or in the bottom image of listening to Mr Watkins eulogising about the objects that they're seeing and but what transforms this subject is the way that very quickly a supernatural element creeps into the idea of the lay line I'm sorry I should have mentioned of course many of you all know that Watkins caught his tracks lay lines and it happens very quickly and to an international audience the Daily Express is not normally a place the letters page of the Daily Express is not normally where you would look for any form of academic wisdom but it's extraordinary how very early on within a year of Watkins' revelation being made public somebody in a newspaper suggesting one might almost reconstruct a forgotten and obliterated road from the evidence of the ghostly legends attached to it etc and then recent scholarship has shown that the famous academic and ghost story writer Emma James at that time was researching a book on abbeys a kind of guidebook to abbeys that meant that he had to travel to lots of places and books at the old remains there wrote perhaps his most celebrated ghost story a view from a hill in 1925 it's impossible that he'd seen the old stroke track because that published in the same year but recent scholarship has suggested that actually the story is based on a knowledge of it was certainly written in Hereafter and recent scholarship has found that a that it details the Hereafter landscape altering it slightly for for narrative purposes but that it was also written after a visit that James made to stay with friends in the local landscape and indeed it's been suggested that the view that he describes here looking out from a high ground across evocatively again in the same language that Alfred Watkins had used similar language that the view actually came from the tump that we've already seen Coles tump and a recent paper has suggested has shown how this is probably the place that Emma James was evoking albeit with a degree of uh literal uh of liberality from there unfortunately the subject kind of escalates into what today is often known as woo woo um an early novel by an extraordinary woman Dion Fortune in 1936 the goat food god um she was one of the high a kind of coraleous uh high priestess of paganism and magic and the goat food god for the first time suggest the idea that actually lay lines suggest invisible invisible forces within the earth forces of power possibly magnetic forces and underneath our feet underneath buried beneath our landscape um are these very very powerful forces not only did it suggest that something that that has still not gone away today but also um she takes it to an international footing and links it of course not just back to prehistoric artifacts but to prehistoric deities as well the whole thing kind of died um with Watkins's death in 1935 um but after the second world war it becomes part of kind of cold war culture in the most old-fashioned firstly this French author Emma Michel uh writing first in French this is a translation writes about how flying sources he believes seem to have followed straight lines in the landscape and therefore that probably the lay lines were some kind of navigational directional device for unexplained uh inter intergalactic objects taken up by again a kind of classic cold war thing by an x-ray of pilot Tony wedd in 1961 who wrote a book called Starways and Lands and Landmarks which as a later writer says it was like a satin rocky it propelled the entire subject out of the post-edwardian world of galoshes and cherubines and rural rambles straight into the age of aquarius and him and his organization were preparing for the eventual encounters the close encounter uh with extraterrestrial beings um who would come in flying sources and follow lay lines and then in 1969 this famous book the view over at Lantis by Jean-Michel um takes lay lines and places them in a whole wider body of ideas and theories about uh sacred places in the world places of magic and ritual and religion that are linked by kind of mega global lay lines and as one of his uh followers said uh in more recent years that this view re-enchanted the British landscape and empowered a generation to seek out and appreciate the spiritual dimensions of the countryside not least attract them to reawaken the sleepy town of Glastonbury and of course we all know what links then come between Glastonbury as this site of ancient worship and more more recent cultures and but equally and this is really important and it's important to the way in which we'll be treating the subject next year in exhibition and book we hope is that Watkins becomes appreciated increasingly not for the kind of the more mystical or supernatural ideas but for the technologies that he promoted for examining and analyzing and treating the landscape and only the most famous example here and I'm sorry to do the the awful art historical thing of looks like but nonetheless lunch is evident here on the left one of Watkins's images taken earlier but used in the old straight track showing a straight track arriving at a neolithic or burial mound Richard Long from 1967 and on the right we have Hamish Fulton from 2011 and the Richard Long claims that he hadn't heard of uh lay lines when he exhibited this piece for the first time somebody at the opening said yeah you should find out about lay lines nonetheless they are an influence and in Fulton's case the influence is very strong indeed not only does he acknowledge it but he came to Hereford to the extraordinary archive of material relating to Watkins that is held in Hereford not just to examine material about lay lines but because he loved the typography and organization and layout of the works that Watkins and people of his era had produced and there's something self-conscious in Fulton's work of reproducing the visual appearance of that material from the 1920s and I I need to finish and I need to paint over a lot of material but the the only thing about Watkins and his relationship to nature and to natural horses and to the supernatural is that 100 years after his revelation the debate continues it won't die down at various times there have been academic attempts to kind of destroy this but you know to put it to a side for all time bad archaeology columns and this on the left lay lines in question written in the early 1980s by two landscape academics actually just destroys mathematical basis for the lines and they thought that it would put it to bed they realized afterwards that a archaeologists weren't interested even in disproving the lay lines and people who believed in them were hostile and defensive about these criticisms but on the other side the science that pursues the popular art of lay lines continues and this is a book written within the last decade which attempts to kind of put the whole thing on a more rational basis and I quote briefly lay lines have been the subject of heated debate between lay hunters and archaeologists ever since their discovery by Alfred Watkins in the 1920s in the 75 years since their discovery they've been attributed mystical meaning been associated with prehistoric travelers UFOs invisible earth energies ghosts marauding spirits shamans madmen and the feet of angels many attempts have been made to understand and explain the extraordinary phenomenon of dead straight lines of prehistoric monuments etc etc etc not until now has it been possible to look back over the years of research speculation and theorizing to paint a coherent picture of the colorful history of lay hunting and to come close to an understanding of the phenomenon so we are now in an age where they should not disappeared and people are attempting explanations of them and interpretations of them that that pull back from the outpost of Wu Wu and this has been reinforced in particular by their their re-adoption by writers like Robert McFarlane who is a quintessential writer about the English landscape and his book The Old Lays is a self-conscious I think reference to Alfred Watkins and in the most recent edition of The Old Straight Track published five years ago McFarlane writes the introduction but McFarlane does something else as well he has this new idea which I think is very interesting and we will use next year which is that the English landscape is eerie he writes very well about the eeriness of the English landscape writers and artists have long been fascinated by the idea of an English eerie the skull beneath the skin of the countryside but for a new generation this has nothing to do with hokey supernaturalism it's a cultural and political response to contemporary crises and fears so laylines becomes reinvested as a response to particularly ecological anxieties of our present age great thanks very much Joe there was some sort of warning alarm going off at some point I don't know who's that was but that's there was a noise interrupting us there because we should try to be that was me actually my own well there you go you you heated your warning very well thank you very much for such a brilliant kind of recovery of a rather than fairly neglected or maltreated maltreated figure and I thought all sorts of interesting resonances as well with John Martin as Stephanie was discussing in terms of the kind of sublime aesthetics of his imagery but also that perhaps kind of rather unjust reputation for crankiness and next centricity which is probably overshadowed overshadowed is proper appreciation and understanding so thank you very much for that do please post questions for Joe or indeed for our next speaker we'll come back to them at the end but we'll move on straight away now to our next contributor who is a Tobar Auckland Peck who is a fifth year PhD student in art history at the graduate centre of the City University of New York whose dissertation focuses on images of extraction mines miners and mining infrastructure and interwar Britain and locates the figure of the miner as an alter ego for the artist tracing the ways in which both instances of labour are engaged with the translation of landscape and raw material into productive commodities she has an essay forthcoming in a quarter of books online imagining the apocalypse the Abbey in ruins and a blaze station disaster at the British Empire exhibitions and speaking today on minerals of the island tracing the fossil landscapes of the 1951 festival of Britain so over to you Tobar great thank you so much Martin and also thank you to Anna Danny and Ella for all your organization and to Caterino Stephanie and Joe it's been such a pleasure listening to all of your papers so today I'll be speaking as Martin said on minerals of the island tracing the fossil landscapes of the 1951 festival of Britain the pterodactyl in Graham Sutherland's 1951 origins of the land floats in the central strata of the massive yellow and orange canvas its wings outstretched and its towns breaching the horizontal dividing line above its head its bright red eye and vicious teeth draw the viewer towards this incarnation of a familiar ancient fossil rendered here in its corporeal form commissioned to decorate the entryway of the land pavilion at the 1951 festival of Britain Sutherland leveraged the inclusion of the mesoziac body to in his words provide a hint of prehistory he rooted his audience in a moment proceeding both the human body and the nation state the pterodactyl an indicator of this ancient past is visually distinct from the other inhabitants of the picture plane mysterious hybrid forms which waiver evasively between geologic roads and mechanical monsters in his work of the 1940s Sutherland experimented with metamorphosizing human bodies into natural motifs in this oove the pterodactyl stood out as an unusual moment of realistic rendition the very physicality of this aberrant body is key to origins of the land which itself at 14 feet stands over human scale I argue that the dinosaurs form encompass multiple incarnations simultaneously fossil living body and combustible commodity Sutherland had a unique personal exposure to the forms of geological substance the natural the corporeal and the manufactured that are present in the body of the pterodactyl employed by the british government as a war artist during world war two Sutherland documented the work of mines and factories an endeavor that resulted in a rich archive of geological sketches and individual portraits as well as a familiarity with the transformative relationship between mind objects and industrial production the precedent of this undertaking reconstitutes origins of the land as an image implicated in modern modes of energy production and tied to the teleological undertaking of the festival itself the festival of britain was planned by the labor government as a centennial celebration of the great exhibition of 1851 the festival exhibitions were oriented towards british scientific and industrial progress an intended antidote to the privations of post-war austerity and the waning power of the empire the three primary experiences were the upstream circuit devoted to the land of britain in which origins of the land was the first object encountered the dome of discovery which narrated british achievement in terrestrial and space exploration and the downstream circuit dedicated to the people the two circuits enforced a deterministic narrative of british history ending in modern industrial might however the glorification of the worker implied in this progression was contested by the opposition conservative party with an unconfirmed quote from winston churchell dismissing the venture as three-dimensional socialist propaganda in october 1951 soon after the festival's closing churchell's conservative party won the national election the dismantling of the festival grounds in the fall of 1951 if not an active rebuke to the implied socialist leanings of the labor platform was a clear symbolic rejection of the festival's aims addressing origins of the land critic tony del renzio posited that quote it was perhaps the most impressive failure of the south bank and quote a monumental 14 by 11 feet the canvas of the wash and brash oranges and yellows and divided with dull gray lines that recall the shades of sedimentary rock layers the highest layer recalls a fractured landscape with jagged geometric shapes rooted in the strata of great paint the placement of this semi abstraction at the beginning of the exhibition's didactic circuit disconcerted visitors and critics alike acting as the first image of a procession encapsulating the origins of british identity the painting appeared to refute the accessible triumphalism of the fairground southerland encountered the model chris pterodactyl in the halls of the natural history museum an 1881 romanesque edifice in south kensington the institution was born of the victorian obsession with scientific progress and national achievement presenting scientific specimens both local and imported as confirmation of britain's extraordinary imperial power inside displays of subterranean entities from coal to gemstones to fossils were martial as evidence of the wealth of britain's geological landscape origins of the land visualized the nationalist alchemy of the museum where the exhibition of objects of very provenance and value transformed each into a patrimonial treasure the pterodactyl's fossil form remained a steady presence in southerland's preparatory sketches as you can see here but the final iteration of the dinosaur as cartoonish rather than scientifically accurate accentuated a museological construction the same overemphasized features appeared on a figure not within the building but on a sculpture adorning the front entrance transforming ecclesiastical elements into a scientific repository gargoyles representing extinct animals were used in the buildings ornamental scheme the physical similarity of southerland's pterodactyl to this pterodactyl sculpture which sits near the front entrance manifested the political relationship between prehistory and the museum as a space of anthropocentric historical progression just as geological specimens and fossils shared the interior space of the museum simultaneously scientific treasures and commodities so did the pterodactyl sculpture troubled this distinction in echoing the distinct visual attributes of a figure and meshed in the fabric of the building including its bulbous eyes and webbed wings southerland embedded the institutional construction of scientific knowledge in the space of the composition southerland's interest in the metamorphic potential of the human body began with his experiments with digital motifs in the mid 1940s the artist explained quote why use these forms instead of human figures because i find it necessary to catch the essence of the presence of the human figure in its mysterious immediacy by a substitution these organic forms give me a sense of the shock of surprise which direct evocation could not possibly do and quote the surprise of the standing forms in origins of the land was accentuated by the bodily realism of the pterodactyl a juxtaposition that added another dimension of physical substitution but before the standing forms entered southerland's quest to jolt the viewer into a visual reinterpretation of the familiar his encounter with rural industrial spaces during world war two gave him a mode of visually decontextualizing both the landscape and the human figure these mine shafts and factory floors would typically for reasons of safety class and national security have been closed to southerland however his status as a war artist brokered entry into a hidden space that in the case of the mine was a part of the natural landscapes of his earlier work this subterranean spatial parallel opened up new representational possibilities southerland's landscapes in the 1930s and early 1940s had veered from his early etching practice seen here towards a scenery stripped of topographical specificity and identity the open vistas and articulated botanical figures of the conventional british landscape were in notable examples such as entrance to a lane and black landscape both from 1939 flattened and reduced the attention to textural layering rather than scenic expanse resonated with the limited framing necessitated by the looming walls of the mine in compositions such as the 1942 minor probing a drill hole in the enclosed space of the mine southerland found the visual resolution of his experiments with landscape the mineral language of the mine shaft setting was perfectly suited to southerland's metamorphic project he said in 1944 i feel compelled to make the object once removed from nature end quote the mine defined this space of removal it was a material component of the visible landscape but remained disconnected from the structures of the built environment though southerland focused on the textural possibilities of dirt rock and metal his mining sketches included many human figures this was unusual for the artist who evidenced a great discomfort with picturing the human body it is notable then that southerland's interest in the minor was significant enough to give rise to the series's unusual synthesis between landscape and portraiture underground southerland could repudiate the artistic divisions between body and earth there the miners headlamps were the only source of light giving rise to a visual symbiosis between the mine and the miners the miners gave form and visibility to the subterranean world and the mine gave the miners an identity that transcended the everyday quote is it was as if they were a kind of different species the artist later wrote ennobled underground and with an added stature which above ground they lacked the transition of the minor in southerland's mind from an inconsequential labor above ground to a primordial giant below was an act of both radical sublimation and political distancing edward sackle west wrote of the series in 1943 quote the mystique of nature which southerland has expressed so eloquently in his landscapes lives again in the inky gloom of the subterranean galleries and the miners themselves helmeted and crested with a subtle inflame look as if they were made of the ore they are engaged in extracting we are back among the primitive gods end quote sackle west conflated the body of the miner constituted in the terrestrial realm by their labor and class with the accessories of their trade the acetylene flame and the products of their work the ore to create the hybridic figures of mysterious primitive gods southerland's uncharacteristic inclusion of the figure is born of the subterranean disintegration of their perceptible human form an illusion that liberates the artist to sackle west points out few is the miners indistinct bodies with the material of the earth as the battle of britain raged the incarnation of primitive gods opened up an unchanging ancient landscape that could be marshaled as both a fundamental national identity and a military asset fueling the machines of war yet southerland's politically determined presence in the mine was evidence of an anxiety over domestic production that despite the metamorphic intent of the artist's work tethered the miners to their identity as laborers though profitability of british mines had steadily declined from the end of the 19th century undercut by international trade the outbreak of world war two prompted a renewed investment despite this demand old tensions between miners and owners over wages and workplace safety measures continued the necessity of mine commodities to the war effort pushed these struggles into a space of conflicted nationalism with newspapers pitting workers against the ongoing war effort strikes in northern england and kent in spring 1942 while southerland was in cornwall working on his mining sketches underscore the volatile atmosphere labor advocates called for nationalization and eventually the 1946 coal industry act codified the inextricable relationship between national power and commodity production by 1951 government investment and post war international demand had remade the flagging coal industry into a vital symbol of british power central to the newly established national coal board was the miner as a central driver of the british economy the festival of britain was a celebration of the productive power of the worker in this political setting southerland's miners performed a dramatic transformation reemerging in origins of the land as i argue the standing forms southerland fashioned the grammar of these figures in the decade following his work in the mines pushing the integration of organic form and human visage that he had first established in his sketches of the miners liberated from the small-scale pages of the sketchbook the confronting human dimension of the standing forms and origins of the land transposed the bodies of the subterranean gods out of the ancient enclosure of the mine into the expanse of the modern city the animated pterodactyl also performed this transition signaling both the primitive past and through its association with the museum contemporary times the rounded objects placed at odd intervals in each figure recalled the rounded brightness of the miners lamps while southerland's multi-textured rendering of the mines walls floors and ceiling appeared in the dot lines and dark sections of the figure on the right the synthesis of body tool and rocks is completed in the 1951 standing forms it echoed the economic synthesis of minor government and mine achieved through the process of natural nationalization the standing forms however clearly superseded or an organic fusion southerland's composition demonstrated an awareness of the texture and form of industrial products pushed out of their elemental state this ultimate metamorphosis turned a raw geological product into a utilitarian commodity the factory induced transformation constituted the final iteration of the pterodactyl's prehistoric body ancient fossil matter was transformed into fuel the land pavilion's brochures stated 220 million years ago britain was coated with jungle swamps now dead forests entombed by rocks from their rich black holes we unlock the power of the primeval sun the pterodactyl appeared as a mirage from the living forests and jungle swamps but what was valuable in 1951 was the abstract disarticulation of smoke that could be achieved through the burning of rich black holes the dissolution of the pterodactyl's body thrust into the energy politics of 1951 the pterodactyl as the indexical incarnation of the prehistoric moment was stripped of its temporal specificity and reduced to an ornamental symbol akin to the sculpture on the natural history museum's facade southerland retained the physical components of production in the standing forms pushing the narrative function of origin out of the prehistoric sphere of the pterodactyl and into the modern moment the striated metallic figures shared the defining lines and complicated upper layer of southerland's wartime sketches of blast furnaces he experimented with outlining these striking anthropomorphic objects in red chalk against unnaturally colored backgrounds a relationship between form and color that he repeated in origins of the land the washed ink in the blast furnace sketches defamiliarize their physical placement just as the oranges and yellows of origins of the land mirrored the fires of creation and the fires of production without providing a legible backdrop southerland's practice of substitution enacted the same metamorphosis as the factory process decontextualizing objects from their original settings and reconfiguring them as utilitarian products southerland wrote basic industries such as furnaces mines and quarries symbolize a kind of eternal war a constant conflict between the forces of man and nature's intractable material the hybridity of his standing forms as figures cast from human natural and machine elements facilitated a possibility of success against this intractability of nature here it is useful to bring in another mural work from the festival as a dialectical pendant to origins of the land at first glance joseph herman's mural miners pushed against the inhuman abstraction of southerland's mythic gods herman was a polish jewish artist who immigrated to england during world war two his interest in depictions of labor led him to settle in a mining town in southern wales for 11 years a stark contrast to southerland's quick artistic sojourn herman won a commission to produce a mural for the minerals of the island pavilion the festival posited a natural landscape that materially supported the aims of the nation just as a museum leveraged scientific discovery as a confirmation of british exceptionalism from the land pavilion visitors would eventually process to minerals of the island and power and production this path reified the conversion of natural products into britain's nationhood herman's six-panel mural depicted six crouching miners their body's crowd the claustrophobic picture plane the smoothly rendered floor and wall provide no visual relief and instead instead seemed to suspend the figures of the miner in space the man on the far left gained little height by standing his very stature becomes defined by the constraint of the mine as opposed to southerland's symbolic oranges and yellows herman's palette evoked the dark and the dirt of the mine this realism is echoed in his treatment of the miners who have cold darken faces rough clothes and bright headlamps however his rendering of their bodies as rough geometric blocks with overly large hands and exaggerated facial features forestalled an affinity between the viewer and these subjects the static figures set on the rectangular panel with its simple background turn into a modern ornamental freeze a decorative gesture akin to southerland's use of the pterodactyl southerland's canvas the so-called great failure was an uneasy introduction to a celebration of modern britain this is i argue due to the simultaneous identification with an alienation from the human body evident in the three central standing figures though southerland was a socialist his writings on the transformative quality of the subterranean sphere posited the power of the miner as derived not from an individual or class identity but from a consolidation of their bodies with the ore they were tasked to produce while the labor organized festival of britain produced a narrative centered on the national interdependence of nature and worker southerland's composition destabilized this government sanctioned power dynamic his formal solution to the perpetual conflict between worker and nature was the disintegration of the human form a rejoinder to realism as a popular political gesture of popular legibility the cartoonish familiarity of the pterodactyl was an insufficient distraction from the impending entrance of these uncanny life-sized standing forms with their fragmented human-like visages into the present moment herman's miners however did not correct this alienation in some ways miners reiterated the nationalist teleology of the festival in which the worker was the inheritor of the wealth and potential of history and nature yet both miners and origins of the land argued that the actual body of the worker could be master of neither nature nor industry in herman's mural the blocky workers were cast as base material the identification between worker and landscape so strong that their bodies seem to be made of earth while southerland pushed the standing figures into the metamorphic metal world of the factory herman's miners were no less constituted by excavated material the disjuncture between the aims of the festival and these murals was evident in the festival's model of a working coal mine which used a tall tower to simulate the experience of standing in the depth of a mine through the display visitors could embody southerland's vision of the underground primitive gods while also staying tethered to their everyday identities this experience evoked a subliminal feeling of the subterranean world that was tied to the power of the working class outside the tower were wax models of miners photographs of mining communities didactics about mining practices and herman's mural the trick of the festival was to maintain the illusion of the integrity of the modern british body it argued that the transformation into modern divinity could be achieved with the retention of individual subjectivity this episode of optimistic self-determination was ultimately undercut by the imminent transition of the energy sector from coal to foreign derived oil origin of the land was too close to the waning domestic industry of post war britain and the marked unpopularity of southerland's version of the prehistoric landscape is evidence of the uneasy place of the worker's body in the post war struggle between the individual and modern industrial production thank you really thank you thank you very much topper for rounding off today in terms of presentations thank you for that another paper again sort of focusing on transformations and really embedding that in its historical moment and meaning so so thank you for that do we've got that's kind of 10 minutes or so um which we could use up for questions and comments more broadly but um any questions for joe and topper please do picture man we've got a couple of lined up um which we'll move on to now if we may um one of which is the kind of question that curators really love um is for joe it's from uh julia elkington who um there sorry who uh who is a malvern resident and asks um says she'd be very interested in attending your herford exhibition if it comes off um where will it be advertised so i suppose joe is it's a good question of of of where of when and where and very briefly the exhibition will at least start in the herford city art gallery and museum which is the appropriate place whatkins was heavily involved in it it's where the willhope club lives and the exhibition would have been uh next june to mark the centenary of his damocene moment but it may get shoved back simply because of the problems uh for the moment of research and funding caused by our current situation great um i've no idea where we'll advertise it well okay thank you for the interest yeah that was um lined up now we've got a question which has just come in there'll be there's a question which we'll go back to from roberto from andes um but the question has just come in i think not quite clear about the format from mark hallett but anyway it's for tober um does sutherland's picture of a piece of statuary in three four grand figures understood as standing on a kind of plinth um a painted monument following on from modernist public sculpture more and headworth and from ancient monuments too so again is this sort of question about relationship between sculpture and and and uh graphic or painted art tober great thanks so much for the question and i will note and many of you might also be familiar with henry moore's drawings from his time as a war artist he also completed a very similar series to sutherland and there's a lot of scholarship saying that sutherland was actually looking to moore as he is going down into the mines himself so i think that there's definitely an awareness in sutherland's part of moore's work building on to that experience after the war and moore of course does also have a um quite large monumental sculpture at the festival of britain so i think that certainly there's a way in which the frontality and the size of the standing forms have a sculptural element and i think that my argument about the material and thinking about the way that that is built up from these factory materials the metals as well as the bodies of the miners really do speak to that as well and and another thing i'll note that i've been thinking of this image in terms of is actually a museum display case as well the way that the strata actually also can be read as shelving so i think that sutherland here as you point you does have really an awareness of the display and the bodily form of these figures coming into the space of the viewer in a really three-dimensional way so thank you right thank you for that um we'll go back to a question from Roberto Fernandez which was pitched earlier on and is directed to anyone and everyone so it's for all the panelists but it may maybe actually toba you might want to lead on this as well straight on from your paper Roberto says he is a geomorphologist interested in the processes that shape the landscape of particular interest are meandering forms formed by sorry meandering rivers formed by erosion of loose sediment abrasion of bedrock melting of ice or dissolution of limestone how interested are artists in the actual processes that shape that shape the landscape as opposed to only their visual and perhaps obvious outputs perhaps you could share examples of artists depicting the processes themselves and not only their consequences so it's yeah so there's a question about about the the the actual processes that that shape the landscape well I mean I would say in my context that in a way there's this middle question of artists looking at mind materials as a way of accessing and thinking about the landscape so in a sense the understanding of the actual processes at least for the groups of people that I'm looking at for my dissertation really are looking towards the use of the materials in a factory transformation in that process so I think that in my case at least they're less knowledgeable about or interested in the scientific ideas that undergird the creation of something like coal and rather it becomes this fantastical process of thinking about the pterodactyl and the ancient forests and jungle swamps so the metaphorical quality I think is forefront rather than the actual scientific knowledge press so Anna yeah I was hoping to comment on just how I guess one thing that seemed to pull all of the papers together was your sense of sort of um the productive force of kind of speculation when it comes to each of the artists encountering the data of of science and well with Taubert you know Graeme Sutherland's kind of pointing out of the constructed nature of the of this of the history of the kind of natural history science that he's he's referencing the pterodactyl I wondered if any of you could comment on that um those kind of uses of theological speculation magical speculation and more broadly and in relation to this um well I would certainly say that speculation was was was seen as Alfred Watkins's Achilles heel it's where he was most obviously attacked and reading the book I mean the book is and his literature is more interesting as a series of speculations than it is as the kind of rational coherent argument and there are leaps of fancy that go from the geology of the soil through to prehistoric archaeology through to etymology he looks at links in the landscape with language all of which are fascinating but all of which are highly speculative and of course are very easy to shoot down with with modern science I think the interesting thing for Watkins is that he was a scientist as well as an artist so I think he must have been very difficult for him to to involve himself in a body of ideas that actually contradicted that confounded the rationality of his otherwise rather scientific brain. Maybe I'll start to pick up on that because we've got another question come which is coming in which actually relates back to this which is from Julia Elkendon again it's directed at that Caterina but I think that opens up something rather interesting. Caterina asked I'm sorry Julia asked Caterina how did Bern Jones reconcile his interest and interaction with the scientific world with his very romanticised depiction of the pursuit story and actually I think that that maybe opens up a question for the day as a whole around how the interest in the geomorphic or the engagement in the geomorphic seems I mean does it does it highlight a divide between the scientific world and the world of imagination does that actually form a kind of bridge does it does it bring those worlds together which might otherwise seem to be distinct and apart and really what are the what are the tensions and what are the conflicts that might be involved in that? Caterina as it was asked to you Yeah I think your point Martin that really the like geomorphic knowledge is really a bridge between Bern Jones's imagination and you know his more sort of scientific or scientific related interest in fabrication and transformation and metamorphosis and I think with the pursuit series what is interesting is that and with Bern Jones in general that his landscape his painted worlds have been variously interpreted as this you know dream lands this fantasy worlds this visions and I think that I do agree that they are romanticised but they're also shot through with this consistent fear of the solution and instability and annihilation which I think speaks to the kind of scientific anxieties and concerns that geophysics and descriptions of geomorphological transformations were really bringing to the forefront of Victorian culture. Would anybody else like to like to speak to that topic Stephanie, even thinking about John Martin sitting I mean I would say that's awkwardly between civil engineering and scientific worlds and the world of spectacle and artistic spectacle. Yeah absolutely I mean I think few know more about this really than you do of course and it's also you know over the course of the 19th century we see the professionalisation of a lot of these practices so engineering is a very kind of amateur pursuit and something that I was thinking of with Tobos paper as well is there the really rich tradition of the sort of poet mining engineer so you may know that Gerta and the German poet Novalis were both kind of actually civil mining engineers they sort of oversaw regional mines. In terms of the extent to which these are ever resolved I mean obviously in the case of Martin his efforts were very unsuccessful in his immediate horizon of experience but later were later had kind of greater recognition but I don't know if we really need to or if we can resolve these I think what I was trying to do and what the other panelists were surely doing as well as thinking of these sort of different spheres of cultural activity that will kind of be cross-contaminating but never can be sort of fully resolved or one explained by the other. Okay thank you very much we're running a little bit over time so I think this will have to be the how to be the last question which is from Stefan Greene I think identified themselves earlier as a physicist as one of the scientists in the room and it's for Joe I have a question for you for Joe your talk has opened my eyes by Alfred Watkins I was brought up through my interest in archaeology to look down on his ideas and view him as rather a crank would you agree that Watkins' reputation has to a large extent been sullied by an association with those who later picked up his ideas but has tended them too far. And well in the in the business at the same time of answering somebody's comment that they're quite upset by what they perceived as my dismissiveness about the more esoteric elements of Watkins' ideas. I actually don't think I'm interested in either proving or disproving Watkins' theories or even the later interpretations in fact one of the things we want to do is to bring these ideas together for the first time. There's been a lot of interest in the various elements either on the supernatural end or on the rather more rational end of Leyline kind of discourse but they're kind of pursued separately and I would like to bring them together. What I do think is that Watkins' revelations and you know his writings about Leylines have obscured his own reputation as an important innovator and pioneer and indeed as an extremely fine photographic artist whose reputation in his own day was considerable as the producer of landscape photography and so forth. I'm really interested in in the kind of more extreme elements of Leyline theory and I think that it's almost impossible to detach the debates about Leylines from either end of that kind of spectrum. Does that make sense? Yeah and thank you Jo for picking up on that earlier comment which I hadn't seen which I think was going to address to you privately but was was in the chat there as well. So I think thank you for that and for running off and also kind of emphasising you know the sense that that today has been about recovery across the board really and actually recovering links between science and art and between imagination and science and recovering figures that sometimes have been rather overlooked or overshadowed by their reputations and bringing them back into kind of art historical interest and historical importance. That alongside the richness of the individual papers and the amount that's been covered I see we're seven minutes running over but I have a feeling that we've covered so much ground in terms of time and space and cultural and political context. It's amazing that it's only only seven minutes and any any set of academic papers that manage to pack in dinosaurs, UFOs, volcanoes, magic and Leylines I think is actually doing a pretty good job. I think we can't be I think we can feel that there's been some some some real kind of achievements today alongside all that all the great kind of art historical analysis and and insight that we've seen. So do join me in these thanking for contributors today for such fantastic rich and thought-provoking materials so thank you thank you all. I will close the seminar at that point but point you to the next event which is on the 8th of October plants and animals. Today is been rocky but in the very best sense next time is going to be a bit more fleshy and and and organic but that is on the 8th of October at four o'clock so I'm sure many will be returning to that on the basis of what you've seen today so thank you to all our speakers and thank you to everybody in the room for your contributions and for your attention through through today's event so thank you very much.