16th November 2024
Research: Soil, a material underfoot - writings on.
Soil, often regarded as a passive layer beneath our feet, holds a wealth of unseen life and energy that connects deeply with the natural environment and the human experience. In the landscapes I explore, I have come to view soil as a profound material, essential to understanding the intimate connection between the natural world and the sensations it evokes within me. Within this blog entry, I am dedicating it to my research into soil, I will examine and demonstrate how soil serves as a significant contributing factor to my thesis question. This entry will also explore how soil, with its invisible energies and complex, living nature, plays a central role in revealing the sensations and feelings that I seek to translate into installation art. By delving into the material properties and emotional resonance of soil, I will highlight its crucial influence on my understanding of the landscape and its connection to the sensory experiences I encounter.
As outlined in early blog posts on my walking in the landscapes of northern England and southern Scotland, I have reflected on how I perceive my walking sites as natural landscapes, some bearing traces of human intervention, others seemingly untouched. Each landscape, in my view, fits into Allen Carlson’s Functional Fit model [1], where natural elements work harmoniously to sustain an ecological system (2009, P.58). During my time in these landscapes, I encounter them as peaceful, remote, and isolated spaces, what Raymond Williams refers to in Ideas of Nature as a ‘kind of primal settlement’ (2005, p.77). Within these primal spaces, natural materials interact and co-exist. Early stages of my research evidenced my fascination with the sublime, which traditionally highlights vast and awe-inspiring landscapes that evoke both wonder and terror. The sublime, however, often views nature from a distance, presenting it on a large, overwhelming scale. This grandeur can be too immense to fully examine or engage with, leaving much of its intricate detail overlooked. It was a kind of distant admiration too vast to grasp intimately, making the minute processes within the landscape hard to appreciate. However, as my perception of landscape deepened, I began to focus on the smaller, often overlooked materials within nature. This shift in perspective aligns with what British explorer Robert Macfarlane might describe as moments of ‘myopia’ [2] (Macfarlane, 2008). In A Lone Enraptured Male, Kathleen Jamie discusses Macfarlane’s revelation, noting, ‘he discovers that, in pursuit of the wild, he’s been looking too much into the apparently empty distance. Wildness can be small and is maybe better described as a process than a place’ (2024, p.78). This concept of wildness speaks to the idea that true engagement with nature involves attentiveness to both the large and the small, and to the processes of change and life that occur at different scales.
Through my focussed awareness at varying scales, I find my walks to be intimate experiences across the landscapes of northern England and southern Scotland. I utilise intimacy as method of connecting to the landscape at a highly personal level, one separated and removed from any external influence. I explored intimacy during the earlier stages of the PhD journey when reading Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’ in which the human has the ability to compose his own depth and in turn measure their own depth of nature. Through methods of contemplation, intimacy can be magnified to allow a being to transcend further into a space that is more than what is presented to them in the now (1994, p.186). I have shifted my focus to both the macro and micro compositions of natural materials, which has directed my research towards soil and its unique qualities. From each walk, each step has deepened my sensitivity to the subtle and dynamic presence of soil beneath my feet. The landscapes walked, with their varied terrains, from the windy moors of North Yorkshire to the dense woodlands of Greenskyes Forest and the rocky coastline of Pettico wick-Bay, have enabled me to reveal soil to be more than just ‘dirt’. Soil is a living, breathing medium that both shapes and reflects the landscape. Walking through these spaces, I began to notice how the soil changes in texture, colour, and composition depending on the environment and how the rich, peaty earth of a bog holds water and life differently from the sandy soil of a hillside. The way soil interacts with the flora and fauna, how it smells, and how it can feel cool or warm, alive with the processes of nature, became impossible to ignore. It holds stories of the land’s history, a record of natural processes and human interventions. These observations have led me to understand soil not just as a passive backdrop but as an active, transformative force within the landscape. Soil carries and influences the sensations I experience as I move through the land, shaping how the environment feels, whether it is the softness underfoot in a forest or the rugged firmness from the moorland. It became clear that soil is not only a foundation for life but also a repository of invisible energies that influence our emotional and sensory engagement with the natural world.
To contextualise soil as an artistic material within my research and within the work of other artists, it is essential to first define what soil is particularly in relation to the landscapes I have walked through. This grounding will help align soil with both my practice and the broader context of artistic exploration. Soil is defined by the Cosmic-Ray Soil Moisture Monitoring Network as ‘a mixture of mineral and organic matter that contains air, water, and micro-organisms’ (cosmos.ceh.ac.uk, 2022). Within the UK, the landscape is made up of seven hundred different types of soil (Whitehead, 2023). These soils range from a dry chalk type formation to a very moist peat bog material. From such a wide, differentiating variety of soils that make up the UK landscape, there is a wealth of opportunities to engage with how soil functions. Common types of soil found within the UK are podzols, brown earths, gleys, peats, clays, chalks and sands. The soils I encounter through my walking experiences vary greatly, but to highlight one of the most common types, the North Yorkshire Moors are largely covered by peaty gley soils. Peaty gley soils typically form under conditions of intermittent or permanent waterlogging in areas of lower rainfall. This type of soil is not originally in this state but develops over time as oxygen levels deplete within it. Its colour is often a grey or blue-grey mix, quite different from the familiar brown tones typically associated with soil. Due to its acidic tendencies, heather grows across the moorland in large quantities. Because of its wet and dense nature, peaty gley soil is rich in organic matter, which contributes to its unique texture and composition (Gauld and Dawson, n.d.). Too further illustrate my personal encounters with soil, I will also reference the type of soil I engaged with during my walks through Eskdalemuir and Greensykes in Scotland. The area was primarily characterised by brown earth soil with non-calcareous gleys which are mineral rich soils, distinguished by non-calcareous loamy or clayey subsoils, making them essential for plant growth [fig 1]. These soils are typically found in landscapes consisting of foothills and undulating lowlands, with both gentle and steep slopes. The presence of various rock formations, such as greywackes and shales, plays a significant role in determining the soil type in these areas. These formations belong to the Lower Paleozoic sedimentary strata, which include limestone, dolomite, and sandstone, further contributing to the soil's composition and characteristics (soils.environment.gov.scot, 2024). Through bringing attention to the earth across which I traverse, I have sought to translate my intimate walking experiences through this medium. Exploring soil samples in such diverse landscapes has informed my understanding of the material beyond its surface qualities. In alignment with my thesis question, where I seek to uncover an invisible network of sensations and feelings, the physical properties of these soils offer a starting point. They serve as the tactile and geological foundation that influences the sensory and emotional reactions I experience during my walks.
Although my walks allow me to identify and understand the types of soils I walk upon, I was intrigued by the role the soil plays in multiple ecosystems including human cultivated ecosystems as well as broader references. Through my reading of Soil Culture: Bringing the Arts Down to Earth, I became aware of the concerns raised by Patrick Holden, CBE, Chief Executive of the Sustainable Food Trust, in his text piece Homage to Soil (2016). I found interest in Holden as he highlighted the daily connection humans have with soil, despite our disconnection from it. Drawing a parallel between the human digestive system and the ‘stomach’ of a plant, he emphasises the crucial relationship between soil and humans in sustaining life. He explains that organically grown food can benefit human health, noting, ‘the human digestive organ is unable to function effectively without the presence of a vastly complex community of symbiotic organisms which play a central and dynamic role in maintaining [my] health’ (CCANW, 2016). Within this statement, Holden encourages us to consider soil not merely as a foundation to grow from but to view it as part of a vast, interconnected system that includes the need for human relationships with soil. Further reflecting on the hidden nature of soil’s importance, Holden recalls a Christian hymn: ‘Immortal, invisible, God only wise, in light inaccessible, hid from our eyes’ (2016, p.7). Holden uses this hymn to remind us of the unseen but vital presence of soil in our lives. His work underscores the intricate complexities that lie within soil, inviting a deeper engagement with this often-overlooked resource.
While my research does not aim to challenge others' perspectives on soil directly, I acknowledge that it opens up space for examining the potential intertwining of how researchers, artists and farmers are shaping and evolving their views and orientations. This dialogue highlights the growing focus on bringing soil into focus and deepening our collective understanding of its significance. Most people view soil as simply a muddy substance that supports plant growth, enables food production, and serves as a foundation for urban and architectural developments. While this perspective is widely accepted, there is much more to soil than these conventional roles. Beneath the surface, soil holds a wealth of information living, life giving, and yet often invisible to us. One of the unseen components of soil is carbon. As the fourth most abundant element in the universe, following oxygen, hydrogen, and helium, carbon plays a crucial role in sustaining life on Earth. Without it, life as we know it would be impossible. Carbon forms bonds with other atoms, enabling the flexible development of essential biomolecules that serve as the building blocks of life. In the UK alone, approximately 10 billion tonnes of carbon are stored in the soil, with half of this amount concentrated in peat communities (Dutton, A. Trenbirth, H. 2019). It is easy to overlook the invisible aspects of soil including the carbon value however, we often limit our understanding of it to the familiar roles it plays in our development as a species, paving over it, building on it, farming it, and using it to grow plants for aesthetic purposes. Yet, soil is a living system, rich with energies, and holds the potential to guide us toward a deeper reconnection with the landscape beneath our feet. This shift in perspective opens up new possibilities for understanding and engaging with soil in ways that transcend its utilitarian functions and has proved mesmerising for thinking through my own relationship with landscape.
Footnotes
[1] Originally applied to a human environment but to help clarify the application Carlson examines the functional fit model against a natural world. ‘Concerning the natural world, the concept of the functional fit is meant to roughly capture the in which the natural environment is composed of many-layered, interlocking ecosystems.’
[2] Myopia defined as seeing objects clearly up close but struggle to see objects that are at a distance.
Comments