At the Edge of the [North] East

continued from back page

Once it is gone, it will never come back – perhaps though we have already passed the point of resignation, allowing it to gradually sink into the encroaching sea. There is no beginning, middle or end. Just the present and the possible. In a digital age, there is no need for the real and instead we live vicariously through the television, despite how close the real may be. The real, the physical, will eventually be for the privileged few that can afford it, whilst everyone else makes do with a digital version, intangible. The reproducible image has meant that we no longer have to go to see something, and our presence be there, whilst the reproducing of the image has meant that no longer the piece of art is the object.

As the coastline retracts, and barren lands are lost, the portraits will all be unhung, and put into private collections. Without profit there will be no other motive, and without profit there will no longer be a need to protect.

The more that private is brought into the public, the less that it means. The image is now more significant than the object or place, and with that we lose those places which otherwise do not have absolute significance to us now.

at the edge of the [north] east OS grid reference 53.578996°N

wes foster TA399108 0.118325°E

Three miles into water, with sand lashing up, carried in part by the West wind as it rips across the vulnerable land, stretched across the estuary. This is the edge, and signs remain of the land trying to be tamed and controlled, but every time the sea has washed it away, getting rid of most of the human imprints as if they were nothing but footprints in sand. Remnants of a railway, a road, and coastal defenses remain, scattered easily by the sea along the thin peninsula which extends into the gaping mouth of the Humber. Barren, there are footsteps around, but no owners. Land is thought of as solid, and we become attached to that land which surrounds us, something unmoving, and dependable. But we are not attached to that land – it constantly changes, disappears and reappears, it just doesn’t happen within our lifetimes, and we do not bear direct witness to it happening. This distance from us, from our reality, from our perception, makes it easy for us to see our place as concrete, as unmoving. Nowhere is this clearer than at the edge of the east, along the Holderness coastline, where villages are eaten by the weather, caravans dangle on precipices and the bowels of hotels can be seen smashed along the rocks. Our sense of place should be fluid: we only stay in one place as long as the environment is hospitable. Cities prosper because they’re in land, ports prosper because they are built in harbours – slowly though, land is being eaten away, and the place that we belong to changes.

Out in what feels like the middle of the sea, in a place that can be cut off, left with the bracken, the exsignposts, and the driftwood, you are

more than alone. The electricity and the lines of communication have ended along with the mainland in the salty sand that divides, and after heavy feet slip amongst rocks and seaweed solid ground is found once again. A strange height contributes to the mass of land which still exists – jutting out of the sea, at points, by a few meters, invading a space in which it should not exist and a horizon that should not contain it. Buses are scarce, the nearest train station is across at the other side of the river.

The head is visible from there, but too far away to mean anything significant.

Distant and intangible – known but unfamiliar. Raw bones of foundations and structures still remain, a premonition perhaps of what is to come, as austerity worsens accessibility. There is no longer the same value that there was there – these places do not exist in our reality, and are separate to the spaces that we occupy. As these places become more abstracted, and more unfamiliar, their significance decreases – their special interest becomes specialised, and of interest only to the specialist.

Our relationship to these spaces is ever changing, but most likely deteriorating as profit is ever the most pressing motive, and as privatization and commercialization are allowed to seep in through cracks the relationship is lost.

Is it something that can be saved? As tides rise our relationship might eventually be completely severed.

Already most of what was once there has been destroyed, and once the head is completely severed from the mainland there will only be the lighthouse remaining, and those that work on it.