Currently showing as part of Art for Today at Mannington Hall, Norfolk (previously at Cley 21 – 'Nowhere' and the Black Barn near Swaffham) Places Been is a sculptural expression of conversations between artist James Kessell and poet Joe Hedinger around the themes and ideas in Hedinger's poem of the same title.

The Poem

Hedinger wrote 'Places Been' to explore 'a sense of vertigo experienced when remembering that every place I've ever been is still there. Bedrooms of school friends. Restaurants on holiday. Remote stretches of coastline. They may have changed, but they all still are - and were, and will be. Spaces don't disappear because we aren't experiencing them. There is no 'nowhere'.'

This sense of vertigo can feel immense and vast, but also intense and claustrophobic. 'If there is no 'nowhere', our sense of 'over there' collapses. Everything is right...here.' As Hedinger explains, this uncanny feeling is important. 'It makes us environmentally aware: we are coexisting with everything, always. This awareness, not necessarily pleasant, is a good thing; a lack of it arguably contributed to our current climate disaster.'

The poem experiments with form. As well as the content of writing, Hedinger is interested in the space around words (the page, the screen, etc); something which, as readers, we may not consider. 'This space isn't a 'void', a 'nowhere', with words on top. It's something arranged by the words; something that reaches into the lines, something the lines reach out into.'

Sometimes, as in 'places been', we're exposed to how uncanny this can be. 'Are there boundaries between the words and the space? Where does the writing end, the space begin? What's 'included' in the poem?' Definite edges soften; it's hard to say what's distinct or whether everything is part of everything else, always.

'By drawing attention to space, 'places been' isn't just talking about coexisting, it is coexisting: with the surface it appears on, with the structures and landscape around it, with the reader.'

Below: 'places been' in its original printed page layout.

The Collaboration

In December 2019, Hedinger approached artist James Kessell. Together, they proposed that Kessell might conceive a creative response to 'places been' for Cley Contemporary's exhibition titled 'nowhere' – curated by Amanda Geitner.

The themes of 'places been' resonate with Kessell's own recurring exploration of memory and loss, as presented in his solo exhibition 'Gethsemane' at Norwich Cathedral. This featured an 'active memory space' whose focus was the daily making, in situ, of a monumental drawing, and a digital, web-based text piece projected directly onto the masonry wall.

Hedinger was intrigued to see how the initial impetus of his poem fused and developed with Kessell's response, and with the context and concept of the 'nowhere' exhibition.

In the months before the UK's first Covid lockdown, Hedinger and Kessell met a number of times, including at St. Margaret's church in Cley, to discuss the themes of 'places been'. Topics of conversation included boundaries, blurs, separation and connection, with many lateral leaps – the 'dark ecology' of philosopher Timothy Morton; many worlds theory, quantum physics, particle entanglement and the life of Einstein; John Berger's ideas about likeness, essence and interrelation.

While executional concepts for the Cley exhibition were loosely discussed, this was never the goal of their conversation: instead, it was intended as a seed bed from which Kessell's response would emerge.

The Response

Intrigued by Hedinger's approach and invitation, Kessell was certain from the outset that his response would not merely be a form of representation of the words of 'places been'. He was keen to explore and communicate the concepts and ideas of the poem in a work that had individual presence while resonating with his own themes and explorations.

Kessell was also mindful of the context in which the work would first be shown. 'The place where art is shown inevitably becomes part of the work and vice versa. I wanted to respect and reference the architecture, tradition and Christian ethos of this space in the nature of the work I made – I certainly didn't want to ignore or overwhelm it.'

He also maintains that an artist should leave space for the viewer. 'The best art, I think, engages by acknowledging that the viewer shares a language they can bring to the work from their own valuable life experience. I also think that it's difficult to set out to create an engaging work, or a work that is meaningful or beautiful or that is 'transcendent'. But you can recognise when there is beauty or meaning developing in something being created and to follow that. I think engaging others often has a lot to do with not having too much to say and being open to what viewers of the work bring to it themselves.'

In their exploratory conversations Kessell and Hedinger brought together ideas about the transcendence of language over time and place, and the ancient human need to memorialise, with the mysteries of quantum physics – the notion that something can physically exist in more than one state, place or dimension at once, as well as experientially in memory, in language and in time. These thoughts led eventually to the finished piece – a panel of rusting corten steel from which the words of the poem have been removed and relocated.

Above: The classical typography of the poem resonates with memorials in and around the church.

'I redesigned the typographical layout of the poem to resonate with that of a memorial inscription and enlarged and positioned the two square brackets (which in the poem Hedinger uses to 'contain' unexpressed thoughts) to allude to the classic double-slit experiment of physics (where individual photons of light are demonstrated to behave as both waves and as particles and in multiple positions). As an extension of that connection, I thought it would be fascinating for light to be involved in the production of the piece – consequently a high-powered laser was used to excise the individual letter-forms from the panel.'

In its semi-outdoors position at St Margaret's Church in Cley, the surface of the panel and the individual 'fallen' letters continued to age and rust over the course of the exhibition. The fallen letters were arranged differently each day and some were 'relocated' entirely by visitors who could not resist the temptation to remove and keep the ones that meant something to them. This was anticipated and further adds to the meaning of the work. 'Although many letters are now in other locations and contexts unknown to us, the 'memory' of them persists in the empty spaces in the panel – they exist simultaneously in multiple locations.'

Mannington Hall

Having aged further, and in its current location in Mannington's formal gardens, Places Been has a different presence. Yet it now resonates with centuries of the site's history, particularly with the inscribed stone memorial texts embedded in the aged brick and flint walls of the house and with discovered artefacts from Mannington's past which are placed around the grounds.

(See Contacts below for exhibition details.)

Contacts

Mannington Hall – Art for Today features a variety of work including sculpture, painting and drawing, textiles and glass from more than 30 invited East Anglian artists in the Mannington gardens and stable gallery. It will be open every Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday from 11am to 5pm from July 27th to August 28th.

James Kessell has been Norwich based since 2017 – his creative practice spans art and design. He has exhibited widely and is currently working on a themed collection of large figurative drawings, and with Archaeology and 'World Arts' academics from UEA on an international collaboration exploring the value of culture in the context of climate change.
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Joe Hedinger lives in Norwich, and works in the city's celebrated, independent bookshop, the Book Hive.
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(With thanks to Stark & Greensmith for their technical and production advice.)
© 2021 - 2022 James Kessell and Joe Hedinger
Website and photography by Kessell.Studio