The London based artist collective, Changeable Beast (25 artists and 4 guest artists), bring their ambitious site-specific exhibition Second Nature to Tremenheere, offering the viewer an opportunity to see it from a new perspective. Whilst it might provoke a cognisance of familiarity by drawing upon Tremenheere’s existing sociocultural, geographical and geological significance, it also challenges and disrupts any assumptions about it as an historical site fixed in a moment in time. Born from the vibrant mutability of Changeable Beast, Second Nature transcends the enduring statis of the granite formation upon which it is assembled, transgressing the boundaries of materiality and process and slipping between the cracks in time and space. Consequently, the viewer is exposed to a rich repertoire of paradoxical tensions; urban and rural, man-made and organic, past and present. The relationship between humans, nature and material culture, as well as the meaning and quality of time invested in nurturing an artistic collaboration, are inextricably woven into the fabric of Second Nature.
I had the opportunity to catch up with the lead curator, Tessa Garland, who explained how Changeable Beast and Second Nature have evolved over time and how her long-established relationship with Tremenheere is very much part of that trajectory.
Tremenheere – A Shared History
RH: How has your personal relationship with and knowledge of Tremenheere’s history shaped your decision to curate Second Nature?
TG: A long friendship and connection with Jane and Neil, who were always really supportive of the arts and myself as an artist have played a big part in this.
Also, the place Tremenheere is very special. My family has roots in Mounts Bay and my dad used to play in Tremenheere field and woods as a boy, living in Long Rock.
I grew up in Penzance and then went away for many years until I returned in the ‘90s. I embedded myself in West Penwith culture, because it was/is such a rich environment – so many artists – a wonderful place to exist and life just took off with artists and events. I was a founding member of this group called PALP which ran artists led projects and like a lot of artists we started to look for opportunities to show work, have dialogue together and to share our work.
Jane and Neil said they had some land where they lived in Heamoor, where PALP had its first show called Shed. They were very generous, giving us donkey sheds and their sprawling garden. We then created all of these amazing site-specific works. I think they enjoyed it; they enjoyed being with artists.
Neil and Jane then acquired the land belonging to Tremenheere. These were the early days, but Neil always had the vision to make it into a sculpture garden right from the word go. He was very ambitious, and he started to talk to us about James Turrell and somehow, he managed to bring in and build the amazing Skyspace. Having already created Shed, PALP then went on to ask whether we could use the land at Tremenheere. We’d been invited to a few outdoor BBQs and were amazed at its beauty and keen to make site responsive work. At that stage a few pathways were being built so we were guided by these to build works, create a sculpture trail and formed an exhibition called, Field of Vision.
So right from the word go there was this vision from Neil and Jane – a marriage of art and plants and it’s been interesting over the years, to watch this come into fruition.
RH: It’s great that you experienced it at that time in its raw state, before it became landscaped.
TG: The café and gallery weren’t there. I remember for Field of Vision we invited lots of artists down from all over the UK and hired an old marquee from somewhere in Pendeen and put it up very badly. Lots of the artists were sleeping in it and it blew down on top of them in the night. It was all quite chaotic, but we had the will and the energy to put the exhibition together. We had a lot of fun in the early years. The exhibition, Field of Vision which included a twist on the village fete, with artists and plant stalls and of course performances that sprung up across the events. The public came, it was good fun and very successful. So, through these events, I got to know Jane and Neil quite well and that cemented our relationship.
In 2002 I moved away to London but regularly return to Penwith. It’s been great to keep visiting Tremenheere and watch it evolve.
In London, I have been making films mainly, but a few years ago I joined MASS a mentoring group for artists and sculptors to share their studio practice and became more interested in form and materiality. Out of MASS, we formed the collective Changeable Beast. We’ve all been out there looking for exhibition opportunities, so I contacted Neil to see about the possibility of showing at Tremenheere which he has kindly agreed to.
Changeable Beast – A Collaboration
RH: Why did you name the collective Changeable Beast?
TG: It was a collective decision. The group often makes site sensitive work, so the work can often develop from their response to a site rather than imposing an idea upon it. The work continues to be tweaked and edited within the exhibition site itself. Therefore, it is still alive and changing, always in a state of mutability – hence the name Changeable Beast.
RH: So, what would you say feeds the collaboration?
TG: Well, I would say that within the group everyone has an interest in the material and materiality of things and because we visit each other’s studios, a kind of magpieing takes place, where we bring what we have seen and heard back into our own practice. We do a lot of sharing and we have a WhatsApp group, which is constantly pinging with information. The studio practice is key to all this because there are lots of conversations being had as people are making and using materials, giving feedback or prompts and deciding how to move forward with their work.
RH: So, there’s a real generosity within the group and a sense of reflecting and sharing in real time.
TG: I think this point about real time is important. I think sculpture offers that, because a lot of it is process led. It takes time to build up, research the materials and let people into the discussion during the process of making. I think sculpture is one of those things that does often slow things down to allow for things to break open and be dissected.
The Evolution of the Concepts
RH: I was wondering how the four concepts that run throughout the show; Living Surfaces, Human Nature, Locus Solus and Postnature evolved?
TG: Because there is a lot of us and there are lots of voices. At the beginning of June, we set up a whole day where we got together and shared our ideas, works in progress and what we might want to show at Tremenheere.
Some of the artists had a few ideas on the go but weren’t sure which one to focus on or wanted a bit of feedback about what they were doing. We each talked for about 15/20 mins while one of our guest artists and author of the catalogue essay, Ian Dawson, listened and made notes. The concepts became Ian’s way of organising the works into mini accessible parts in order to make sense of them, which really helped the curation.
So, these parts are Ian’s constructs and through his interpretation and writing, he was able to look at the common threads and draw them together. It was a nice way of grouping the artists and forming connections.
RH: Did identifying and naming these connections enhance the development of new ideas?
TG: Yes. I would say that the thing all artists like to do is make new work, because it makes them feel like they are always moving forward. I find whenever I curate a show, very few artists want to show old work. They always see it as an opportunity for development.
Some people had a sketch of an idea, while others had gone a bit further. Some people are very research based – for example Tina Culverhouse who is very into process, does lots of tests and has shared her processes throughout the show’s development. And then you have artists such as Katie Houston, who works in a very emotional responsive way, so ideas will just emerge and arrive quite intuitively, often through performance.
The key to it has been the sharing. Ian was able to have conversations with us throughout the process of making. A shared Google Drive really enhanced this process – that’s the brilliant thing about the internet, you don’t always have to be together to see what one another is doing.
RH: It’s interesting that relationship between writing and making. The writing in a sense became an extension of the work. The essay is in the end also an art object in and of itself – perhaps a conclusive statement of Changeable Beast’s collaboration would you say?
TG: In a sense, Ian was curating the writing – the essay is a curated piece of work. He set out the environment and then grouped and threaded together the artwork’s concepts to shape and form the essay.
Tremenheere As Seen Through City Eyes
RH: The man-made and the organic seem to coexist in a state of contradiction.
TG: Yes, I think that runs through all the work.
RH: Ian’s point about ‘the nature of one thing can only be thought of through its relation to an expanded universe of other things’ (Dawson, 2024, p.2) made me think about the juxtaposition of the urban and the rural and how one might perceive and experience Tremenheere from a city perspective?
TG: I suppose, it’s tricky, us coming from London, a very different place. I think that the key to it was that lots of the artists made the visit to Tremenheere and have done their own bits of research. I think all of those things that you have said have sort of come together in the exhibition, but what is also interesting is the perspective of the artists as city dwellers. Will this show look quite different to the local shows?
RH: How do you think this is reflected in the work?
TG: I suppose in a way it’s all site-specific to Tremenheere. There are artists who are more interested in the ready-made such as Nicky Hirst, whose Out with Lanterns gives a new life and meaning to ordinary objects, in this case walking sticks, which when assembled together seem to represent new growth, defying their association with old age (Postnature). Whilst others such as Carolyn Whittaker and Jen Moore are interested in industry and the human labour that drives it (Human Nature).
Carolyn’s flattened wheelbarrows, Regroup II brings to Tremenheere the elements of industrial labour, which have been acquired from the city, but are equally relevant to the rural industry of mining. She has formed a relationship with a scrap merchant in London, who flattened the wheelbarrows for her. She discussed with them how the pieces have been flattened and involved them in the decision-making. So, there is a continuum from a place of industry into the studio and then the art gallery. It was suggested that the piece be placed outside, but Carolyn insisted that it be exhibited inside. She wanted to elevate the status of labour by placing it in an art gallery and reminding the viewer of how the labour that goes into the manufacturing of materials, is often rendered invisible and those that carry it out are often excluded from art galleries.
Jen has been down to make a site visit which has enabled her to carry out research on mine structures in Cornwall. Her large construction of a post-industrial relic/structure Weighted Decay, which resembles a tipple, references the copper and tin mining industry and its demise, but unlike Carolyn, Jen is building Weighted Decay outside.
For others such as Rachael Causer, Ellie Reid and Chuting Lee it is more about the evocative nature of surfaces and their associations (Living Surfaces). For example, Rachael Causer’s stack of stones covered in what looks like lichen are plaster casts, cast onto found blankets and wool that she then peels off to create what looks like biomorphic texture. She is creating surfaces that are slightly otherworldly. One can’t quite work out what they are, because they are referencing both thrown away man-made things as well as organic things. So, they almost exist between worlds.
Although Ellie is looking at surfaces, she has taken photographs of shadows of plants at Tremenheere and replicated the images into kind of signboards made up of found sequins. Many years ago in St.Ives, there was a festival called The Quality of Light, and of course, artists used to go to Newlyn and St.Ives for the quality of light. So, Ellie in a sense is perhaps referencing the quality of light in a modern-day world, working with the natural sunshine and the light to activate a man-made surface.
Chuting has rescued an abandoned old Christmas tree, which was left outside. She often rescues discarded things. Christmas trees are cut down and we all have them, but in London people don’t clear them away quite so quickly, so they act as tumbleweed. Chuting has taken one of these in and given it life, whilst drawing our attention to the natural bifurcation of its branches, using synthetic colours, again referencing the tension between the urban and rural as well as the organic and man-made.
RH: Ian writes that Second Nature is ‘posing questions that must be grappled with.’ as we enter the ‘second quarter of the millennium…’ (Dawson, 2024, p.1). I guess the Anthropocene through which we have all been living for the last 70 plus years has raised big questions about climate change and the ever-increasing reduction in resources. How do you think Second Nature might be addressing such questions?
TG: I did take on those questions as I was thinking about Tremenheere, and how I would make a work beside the coast and create a place that is perhaps in the future that makes us think about what would be left. Although I haven’t been too pointed about climate change, people can pick up on that reference if they want to.
RH: Ian likens your film and Andy Gomez’s drawings (Locus Solus) to portals through which the viewer might fall to an ‘elsewhere’ twinned with Tremenheere (Dawson, 2024, p.4). I was wondering where that ‘elsewhere’ might be – is it conjured in the viewer’s mind, an actual elsewhere within the world or an elsewhere in another time?
TG: Andy references a lot of different periods in history by collaging or montaging fragments of the past, including elements of architecture, in order to create something new – beautiful expansive drawings that act as portals to shrines of historical relics.
My film is a portal that takes you to an unknown place and time. You don’t know where you are or whether you are in the past of the future. I use Super8 film, which evokes this strange timeless quality. It could be in the 1950s, it has that feel about it or it could be in the future because the place where I have set the work is slightly like a moonscape and other-worldly.
The contraptions depicted in the film have been made by a man called Mauricio who lives on a low-lying sandbank Portuguese island. He collects found materials from the shore and the beach to make these contraptions that spin which look a little bit like the clunky contraptions used in the 1950s to depict the future. His garden is a garden of drift plastic. He’s also a weather watcher because he lives on an island and therefore very aware of the changes in climate and the sea levels rising. With the frequency of more extreme weather and storms, he worries that one day his house and garden will be swept away. I go to Portugal quite a lot and have visited this place and seen his garden ever evolving across the years. I wanted to make a link with Tremenheere, so for my film project, Island Garden, I approached him to see if I could collect footage in his garden. So, over a period of time, I went back and forth to shoot the film. I didn’t want any people in it. It’s a portrait of him and his garden, but without him in it. However, it’s very much about the world too.
RH: It’s as though it could either be the beginning of time or post-apocalyptic. Ian beautifully describes how you achieve this sense of ‘lost time’ when he draws our attention to the trance like state the film induces (Dawson, 2024, p.4). I wonder if you might expand upon this.
TG: The work is certainly other-worldly. It has a lot of spinning things in it, it’s very rhythmic and references the wind, the solar system and the sun, Mauricio in his garden has constructed many contraptions reminiscent of miniature planetariums and wind vanes that are continually whirling. There’s lots of things orbiting and the shadows of these also reference the position of the sun. I guess the sun is key to the work, for example in the soundscape that accompanies the film, I sourced audio recordings from NASA of the sun’s sonification which I have layered into field recordings made on site. These field recordings from Mauricio’s garden are of wind chimes and noise emitted from his contraptions. These I have mixed to form a mesmeric soundscape, which goes someway to induce this trance-like state that Ian is referring to.
RH: What would you like Second Nature’s lasting legacy to be?
TG: For all the artists in Changeable Beast and as a collective, I hope we make positive connections with the Cornish art scene where future conversations and even projects might happen. In the past 20 years since I was in Penzance so much has changed, the infrastructure and opportunities for contemporary artists have grown tenfold. So, who knows, maybe something might ignite again in Cornwall. We have the private view coming up, a couple of public talks, plus of course our Instagram account @changeable_beast where we will be posting all the work from Second Nature. So, there are plenty of strands via which audiences can comment and share ideas with the public both locally and beyond.
Rachel Hindley – is an art writer with a background in art history and visual practice. She specialises in working collaboratively with artists to promote their work through exhibition reviews, catalogue essays, interviews and web copy.