CHRIS FREMANTLE

Kerry Morrison’s Open Studio as part of Spring Fling in the Byre at Corriedoo.

Anne Basley and Lewis Robertson were with Kerry Morrison talking to visitors about art and peatland restoration. All three work for the Critchton Carbon Centre’s Peatland Action project. They are all involved in practical work which needs both art and science. You’d have difficulty being sure which of them is the ‘artist’ and which is the ‘scientist’. The love of peatlands and the importance of making them matter, as well as making them healthy, means there is a common purpose. It’s brilliant to see such mutual solidarity and willingness to stand together in the context of collaborative practice.

Up until perhaps 20 years ago peatlands were considered wastelands, valueless unless drained and made productive, usually for forestry. There is no landscape the perceived value of which has changed so rapidly. Now we are spending very large sums of money on removing drainage and restoring peatlands. We are taking out forestry planted on peatlands. Kerry and her colleagues even have a ‘Spruce Plucker’ championships. Sitka spruce ‘self sets’. It may be commercially valuable and highly regarded by foresters, but for peatland restorers it is a dangerous invasive.

The peat core which is in the upper space of the Byre is sitting on paper quietly creating an image of itself as the water is absorbed by the paper and then evaporates leaving an ‘image’ very much like a vertical section cut through peatland as was done when peat was cut for heating fuel.

In the main Byre space is the large wall work I’ve become part of in the image above. It’s another ‘section’, this time of an erosion gully in a peat landscape.

There are samples of water from different sites and outside there are two demonstrations. A lot of this focuses on aspects of levels of organic carbon in water resulting from erosion.

We look in art for things that move us and the small self-set Sitka in its bed of sphagnum moss, an invasive alien to some and a productive crop to others is striking and kind of sad – whether you subscribe to the ‘right tree in the right place’ this is clearly a young tree in the wrong place. One of the other things art can do is engage with contradictions in provocative ways. The complexities of inherited cultural values (peatland as ‘wet desert’); new scientific research, being done as all conservation is, in the midst of crisis; and art as exploring ways of knowing and being (not just as communication).

There were lots of ways in which the human-peatland dynamics were present, contradictions sharply drawn, and matter made to matter. In retrospect the living otherness maybe could have been more in focus? I still focused on the single sitka self set rather than the moss it was in. Martin Avila in Designing for Interdependence talks about some fish and a fungus and points out that in exploring interdependence we still need to think about whether we are going to create conditions which are propitious for the fish or the fungus affecting the fish… It is harder to imagine caring for the fungus at the expense of the fish… and trees and much loved and easily anthropomorphised…