Issue #3 - Clare Carter Osborne

Monsterland

Video, 7:47mins

Clare Carter Osborne, 2023

https://www.clarecarter.co.uk/monsterland

 

Abstract

Monsterland is a video made in response to a key question that motivates my practice-based PhD project: what does it mean to mother in an age of ecological crisis? How is the Anthropocene shaping motherhood, and how is motherhood shaping the landscapes of the Anthropocene? For if the Anthropocene is an era defined by humans becoming a geological force throughout the world, and the womb is our first environment, we might also think of maternal agency as a generative force within this unfolding and uncertain terrain, entangled in the complexities that constitute these new - albeit potentially unhealthy and unsustainable - ecologies. The feminist writer Adrienne Rich declared that motherhood is ‘an institution with no architecture’ because it has largely happened unseen and undocumented throughout history within the dominant narratives of stories that constitute Western culture.^[1] My research aims to illuminate maternal agency in the Anthropogenic landscape by employing an auto-ethnographic methodology that bears witness to this hidden institution through uncovering the stories that are often unspoken and unwritten. The project is situated at the convergence of creative and maternal practice that is informed and supported by a theoretical framework of ecofeminist, landscape and attachment theory, cultural ecology, and the anthropology and phenomenology of landscape.

 

Article

I was coming to the end of my role of a SAHM (stay-at-home-mum) when I began this PhD project, a seven year period of investing all my energy into looking after my two children before they started school. Two of these seven years of caregiving were intensified by the isolation and uncertainty of the pandemic, bringing my immediate environment into even sharper focus through the lens of motherhood. By this point, I believe I was running out of energy from the demands of being a primary caregiver, and at the same time accumulating a sense of fear and melancholia at the loss of the natural world and the deteriorating environment in which I was mothering, something the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht has coined as Solastalgia.^[2] Our home is situated in the post-industrial, semi-rural village of Denby Dale, one of many communities nestled in the foothills of the Pennine landscape of West Yorkshire. It is the same landscape where I was raised forty years ago. Valleys once full of coal with rivers that never dried up due to the relentless rain, and fields given over to rearing cows and sheep, making the area perfect for industrialisation from the 18th Century onwards. A large Victorian viaduct looms over the valley, reminding us of this history and the generations of mill workers who once lived in these terraces, one of which I call my family’s home. The trains, once an important cog in the industrial revolution’s machine, continue to run over the sandstone legs of the viaduct, now taking residents from the village to satellite cities beyond the fields - Sheffield, Huddersfield, Leeds, Manchester. The coal and clay below our feet reveals the age and transformation this land has endured, not only since industrialisation, but over hundreds of millions of years. Geologists believe tectonic activity has gradually moved the UK to its current position from a region much further south over hundreds of million years. During the carboniferous period, over 300 million years ago, this landscape was equatorial and comprised of tropical lagoons filled with giant ferns and exotic sea creatures, whose decomposing trunks and shell bodies created the coal seams and limestone pavements in the Yorkshire landscape over the subsequent millions of years. In the village, some people still burn coal to heat their homes, but this coal now comes from deep beneath very different exotic landscapes situated thousands of miles away, such as in the Middle East. Like the crude oil needed to make the plastic landscape I venture into from time to time with my children: the local soft play.

It’s a small, friendly cafe with padded climbing frames, slides, toys and children’s books, set in a retired mill building located in the centre of the village, like a plastic capsule lodged in the cleft of this grey, muddy valley. Walking through the dimly lit and windowless corridors of the building, one can almost feel the ghosts of industry watching in disbelief as we enter the capsule and immerse ourselves in a vivid recreational landscape simulating village life. The noise of children’s chatter and shrieks of laughter are as blinding as the brightly coloured plastic that covers every accessible surface and refuses to absorb anything smeared over it; melted chocolate, an array of viruses suspended in bodily fluids, the aspartame in a can of diet coke. Every drop of matter or moisture on its surface is ready to be transferred to whoever touches it next, like a great conductor of unwanted but seemingly vital, organic sensuality. Sometimes I sense it’s an antidote to all that is missing in the otherwise clean, vacuous and virtual world of screen-based entertainment for both children and adults. It is the generative tissue of organisms beckoning us back to the muck of things, the chaos of dirt we are always trying to escape. For to stay outside too long or without purpose is simply unthinkable when we can be transported anywhere in the world - and beyond - from the comfortable containment of our homes. We go outside to get things done like walk the dog and travel to different places. It is only in the few short months of dry weather that we would consider idling outside for any length of time. During most of the year we shuttle our children from one inside space to another, avoiding the rain, the splattering of muddy puddles, the pollen and mould spores, and the blustering winds wrapping around the constant din of traffic as lorries and commuters plough through the village high street.

I find a seat at a free table, steering clear from other SAHMs or caregivers, those whom I consider might be here to take a break from being constantly and consistently present with their little ones. Only the elderly seem keen to attempt conversation, taking their grandchildren out for the day as a treat. The rest of the caregivers are here in the vain hope that some kind of natural kinship will evolve in this setting, such as their child finding a friend to play with, or the chance to burn off some energy climbing a rope ladder above the safety of a padded floor, or simply enjoying unfamiliar toys in a new environment. This is why I am here. To abscond the relentless duty of trying to recreate village life inside my own home. Being a primary caregiver means not only being the child’s mother, but also the child’s friend, teacher, grandparent and next-door neighbour, cousins and uncles, village eccentric. There are no children living on our terrace, and my extended family all work or are too busy to call by regularly. I only reach out to them when I really need to.

I am not alone in my isolation, but it comes with an unspoken rule: I chose this life, therefore I should be enjoying it.

 

This plastic landscape is the closest thing to a village many caregivers get. Here we are sheltered, we are hidden, like a shoal of little fish resting in the shadow of a rock. We are taking a deep breath before returning to our performance of simulating the village. But what does this sanctuary mean for our children? Like the supermarket, inside this plastic village there is no depth, only the commodity of things positioned in space, enough to orientate us, but within a vacuum that has opened up, what was once the outside filling the space with the friction of sensation and chaos. The wind, the sunlight interrupted by moving clouds, the sound of a distant river, the smell of rotting leaves. In the world of soft play, I’m reminded of French sociologist Jean Baudrillard’s essay about the centralising effect and acculturation of hypermarkets and the hyperspace of commodity, a place where there is “no risk, no perspective, no vanishing point where the gaze might lose itself.”^[3] Where does a child go from here? How does a child that climbs a plastic ladder in a cushioned, plastic world then climb a tree with its branches covered in slime and lichen, and the leaves blowing around, hitting their face and noisily scrunching in their ears? Nobody in this plastic land seems to talk about this, and perhaps they don’t mind this duality of experience and sensory knowledge. Besides, this soft play was created by a mother, for other mothers and caregivers. It’s a village with our best interests at heart, to help us get through the isolation and marginalisation of full-time caregiving. The children enjoy this landscape, but is it really for them?

 

Why do we fear the outside now? Is even the wind too loud for us to bear?

 

I am presented with two different landscapes, realities, choices, rules, materials, modes of parenting. I have merged these dualisms together in Monsterland, comprising of where I want to be, and where I find myself. I want to enjoy the outside world with my children and endure the cold drizzle, walk through the muddy fields pointing out plants and animals, becoming embodied within the post-industrial landscape - or staying with the trouble, as the Ecofeminist scholar Donna Haraway might say.^[4] I thought I would reproduce my own history of adventuring in the fields, building dens and spontaneously calling on friends. This is the reason why I moved from an adulthood spent making kin in the city to begin family life with the intention of becoming more entangled in the natural world. However, the reality is a lurid, plastic-wrapped controlled freedom that I have introduced and advocated to them, and I don’t yet know the truth about why I have done this.

I began to film this simulation of village life. Through the lens of my grief for the loss of the natural world, the plastic land appears monstrous. Monster, from latin monstrum - the verb moneo - to warn or demonstrate something, is used in this context to describe the merging of two things that form a new place, a hybrid landscape, spawning new practices and knowledge about the ethics of care and how we relate to landscape. Monsters are doorways to transitions, asking questions about established cultures in stories.^[5] In her essay ‘Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction’, American writer Ursula le Guin presents a framework for a counter-story to the heroic saga: the patriarchal, violent, arrow-shooting perception of time that constitutes the dominant narrative reproduced by culture in the West.^[6] Her carrier bag theory suggests stories of collecting oats and spaceships breaking down, deemed as tales of failure in the face of a western notion of progress. It carries the kind of story I imagine is being written, and surreptitiously told to us, in the world of soft play. It is the landscape of hybrids, of cuddly pretend-monsters made from fossil fuels, of collapsing time in the human-made outer-inner spaces that have no horizon. It might one day tell us something significant about where landscape and motherhood is going in the Anthropocene.

 

I often project my films onto paper because I am endlessly thrilled by the shimmer of an image being thrown across the room and hitting a surface, animating it and transforming the raw footage in the process. This analogue capturing and holding of ambience and the intangible, speaks to me of a cosmological magic reified through aesthetic experience. It makes me think of bir’yun, the sparkle of light attributed to sunlight hitting the surface of a dabbling brook, a visual phenomenon that the Yolŋu of Northeastern Australia recreate through cross-hatching or layering spots of paint on surfaces in ceremony.^[7] I take the sparkle of the projection in the room and film it, then re-project this footage onto the paper, again and again until the moving image absorbs so much of the ambience of the room that it is rendered abstract and eventually disappears completely into a kind of white matter. It’s like sending the information in a feedback loop, returning it to the sun.

And it mirrors my own internal projection onto the world; I experience the outside world and my body holds all these sensations as information I have absorbed from being in the world. It is Phenomenologist Merleau Ponty’s notion of embodiment, that the body is a medium for having a world.^[8] It is knowledge - unwritten, free-flowing and in abundance - so that when I retreat inside to shelter from the world, this knowledge must be translated and transmuted in to something, then in turn transmitted somewhere, somehow.

 

A plastic capsule, a simulated village, a reusable carrier bag, a hybrid body-land, a deep-time corridor, will it eventually go back to the earth and one day be excavated, documented, archived as a site of cultural interest of significance? A new quarry in which to mine strange plastic soils - like plastiglomerates - that tell future stories of the post-Anthropocene?^[9] After thousands or millions of years, will these layers of colourful plastic sit forever amongst the future fossilised leaves and tree bark, still clinging to our DNA and reminding us of the inescapable intimacy of being in the world?

 

 

^[1] ‘Motherhood - intentioned in the histories of conquest and serfdom, wars and treaties, exploration and imperialism - has a history, it has an ideology, it is more fundamental than tribalism or nationalism.’ Adrienne Rich, Essential Essays: Culture, Politics, and the Art of Poetry, ed. by Sandra M. Gilbert, First edition (New York London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2018) p.99

^[2] “Solastalgia, in contrast to the dislocated spatial and temporal dimensions of nostalgia, relates to a different set of circumstances. It is the pain experienced when there is recognition that the place where one resides and that one loves is under immediate assault (physical desolation). It is manifest in an attack on one's sense of place, in the erosion of the sense of belonging (identity) to a particular place and a feeling of distress (psychological desolation) about its transformation. In short, solastalgia is a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at 'home.." Albrecht, Glenn, ‘“Solastalgia” A New Concept in Health and Identity’, PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 3, 2005, p.48

^[3] Baudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, The Body, in Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994) p.75

^[4] Haraway, Donna Jeanne, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Experimental Futures: Technological Lives, Scientific Arts, Anthropological Voices (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016)

^[5]  “The Monster is born (only) at this metamorphic crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment - of a time a feeling, and a place. The monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy (…) the monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read.” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 1996), p.4

^[6] le Guin, Ursula K, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (Terra Ignota) (Ignota Books, 2019).

^[7] see Morphy, Howard, ‘From Dull to Brilliant: The Aesthetics of Spiritual Power Among the Yolngu’, Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 24.1 (1989), doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2802545

^[8] See Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Colin Smith, Phenomenology of Perception: An Introduction, Routledge Classics, Repr (Routledge, 2006)

^[9] The term ‘plastiglomerate’ refers to material comprised of plastic that has fused with rock by being melted, eroded or compressed. See Cresswell, Tim, Plastiglomerate: 3 (Earthworks),(Penned in the Margins, 2020)