Still Life
Still Life is an intertidal performance created for the sands of Morecambe Bay and the shoreline at Far Arnside, Lancashire. Co-produced by Sap Dance and Louise Ann Wilson Company, it explores how we frame nature and what lies beyond the frame.
The performance takes small groups of participants from cliff-top to sandy shore, across limestone rock and salt-marsh grass. Guided by installations made from objects discovered on site—including fallen apples, pottery fragments, feathers, plastic bottles, flowers and blackberries—they encounter digital recordings, verbal descriptions, framed views, and photographs of objects no longer present. As they walk, a story unfolds concerning an eighteenth-century woman seen running out across the sands and a weathered, washed-up man from the present, dancing on the rocks.
Central to Still Life is the way participants experience the landscape. Drawing on artistic and scientific methods of observation, the work combines movement, sound, installation and found objects to shape perception before allowing the landscape itself—through weather, tide, gravity and time—to gradually disrupt those carefully constructed ways of seeing. The work explores the relationship between composition and decomposition, revealing both the otherness of place and the interdependence of landscape and people.
Created and performed by Louise Ann Wilson and Nigel Stewart (Sap Dance).
Guide Derek Tarr.
Produced by Louise Ann Wilson Company and Sap Dance.
Developed through the AHRC-funded Re-enchantment & Reclamation: Landscape and Environment Programme.
Funded by Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts (LICA) and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS), Lancaster University.
I have never seen a piece of work in such a setting before and the performance heightened my immediate perception of it.
Nigel [Stewart] dancing on the rocks [...] opened up the focus and eye line of the audience to take in the enormity of the space [...] The environment as a whole felt very charged.
Louise Ann [Wilson's] hanting stillness was quite ominous and powerful. It was as if she was part of the surroundings, a presence that is always there and always watching – much like nature itself.
Audience Responses, Far Arnside, 2008.
Production Photographs
The following photographs document Still Life as it unfolded across the shoreline at Far Arnside.
They trace participants' journey from cliff-top to shore, through a sequence of installations, movement, found objects and performance
that explored how landscape is observed, framed and experienced.
Production Photographs
The following photographs document Still Life as it unfolded across the shoreline at Far Arnside.
They trace participants' journey from cliff-top to shore, through a sequence of installations, movement, found objects and performance
that explored how landscape is observed, framed and experienced.
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Central to Still Life was the way in which spectators experienced the three locations. That experience was built from the creative tension between composition and decomposition.
A number of scientific and artistic techniques were used to guide and shape spectators' perceptions of the natural world as they were led on a specially prepared journey through the landscape. Along the way they encountered the story of an eighteenth-century woman running out onto the sands and a weathered, washed-up man from the present seen close and afar on the rocks and beach; dances based on biomechanical studies and the movement notation of bird flight; tape recordings concerning visual composition in landscape painting; arrangements of maritime artefacts including pottery and glass; and installations that framed found and gathered objects, drawing on scientific methods of categorising flora and fauna and re-presenting spatio-temporal patterns in nature.
In one way or another, these techniques and devices organised what was present in the landscape into a series of oppositions: human and other-than-human; indigenous and alien flora and fauna; symptoms and signs; planned and accidental acts. Through this binary logic, each location was mapped, composed, understood and made observable.
At the same time, spectators witnessed the outcome of the company's time spent working in situ before the performance. During this period, the company experimented with the ways in which prepared material, the binary logic on which it was based, and the performers themselves were gradually decomposed or weathered by the physical conditions of the location. Through the pull of water, the effects of sun and rain, and the withering of dead things, the work made way for a new, if sometimes disorientating, perception of the otherness of place and, paradoxically, of the interdependence of place and person.
Central to Still Life was the way in which spectators experienced the three locations. That experience was built from the creative tension between composition and decomposition.
A number of scientific and artistic techniques were used to guide and shape spectators' perceptions of the natural world as they were led on a specially prepared journey through the landscape. Along the way they encountered the story of an eighteenth-century woman running out onto the sands and a weathered, washed-up man from the present seen close and afar on the rocks and beach; dances based on biomechanical studies and the movement notation of bird flight; tape recordings concerning visual composition in landscape painting; arrangements of maritime artefacts including pottery and glass; and installations that framed found and gathered objects, drawing on scientific methods of categorising flora and fauna and re-presenting spatio-temporal patterns in nature.
In one way or another, these techniques and devices organised what was present in the landscape into a series of oppositions: human and other-than-human; indigenous and alien flora and fauna; symptoms and signs; planned and accidental acts. Through this binary logic, each location was mapped, composed, understood and made observable.
At the same time, spectators witnessed the outcome of the company's time spent working in situ before the performance. During this period, the company experimented with the ways in which prepared material, the binary logic on which it was based, and the performers themselves were gradually decomposed or weathered by the physical conditions of the location. Through the pull of water, the effects of sun and rain, and the withering of dead things, the work made way for a new, if sometimes disorientating, perception of the otherness of place and, paradoxically, of the interdependence of place and person.
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Audience Responses
[...]. I loved how I was able to look far out to sea and then narrow my focus to the dancers, photographs or installations. The whole experience had a great sense of texture not possible in theatre. And I was gripped by the tension between the natural and the man-made.
[...]. Perhaps the most engaging impression for me was the sense of movement through space and thinking in very large compositional terms. [But] I cannot get the sound of Lou [Wilson’s] feet slap, slapping through the water’s edge, out of my mind.
Louise running in the water […] the sound, the movement, the dress, the human shape in the huge horizon and the Bay, and my recollections of the historical narratives of children dying in the sands, feeling that Louise represented their mother looking for them.
I loved the recordings. I really like that they were juxtaposed against our live experience. […] The recordings made me see the surroundings […] in a different way […]. They also spoke to me about how the manmade can never mimic the power of nature…..For the [recording] on bird flight a flock of oystercatchers rise from nowhere on the flats and circle twice over the finger of sky-coloured water - perfectly timed to the length of the spoken text!
I interpreted the empty photo frames as trying to frame nature and therefore de-naturalise the natural. Is this what the performance was doing by making us look at nature in a different way?....The placing/framing is clever and makes me see particular things among the infinite possible things and I'm drawn in. […]. The ‘framing’ of certain things led me to question whether/if some of those things framed were placed or found. It made me think about the way we take in and acknowledge our surroundings (or not).
I felt I had been given the time and focus to have a true experience of that location I found it affecting, and I thought the relation of figures to the Bay was very good sculpturally. It was very emotive and evocative - and unsentimental. The visual imagery made by the figures and movement, especially, did make me feel differently about that horizon.
The final tableau. Shocking, shocking. She is dead, her hair in the water, the […] wildflowers in her hand yet also in the water. Drowned? Almost certainly. Washed there and left there by the tide? Maybe.
How did it end? […] The guide leads me back to the real world. We say “wasn't it beautiful?” The beauty of the Bay and the sunset is so perfect. We alternate between awestruck wonder […] and delight.
Audience Responses
[...]. I loved how I was able to look far out to sea and then narrow my focus to the dancers, photographs or installations. The whole experience had a great sense of texture not possible in theatre. And I was gripped by the tension between the natural and the man-made.
[...]. Perhaps the most engaging impression for me was the sense of movement through space and thinking in very large compositional terms. [But] I cannot get the sound of Lou [Wilson’s] feet slap, slapping through the water’s edge, out of my mind.
Louise running in the water […] the sound, the movement, the dress, the human shape in the huge horizon and the Bay, and my recollections of the historical narratives of children dying in the sands, feeling that Louise represented their mother looking for them.
I loved the recordings. I really like that they were juxtaposed against our live experience. […] The recordings made me see the surroundings […] in a different way […]. They also spoke to me about how the manmade can never mimic the power of nature…..For the [recording] on bird flight a flock of oystercatchers rise from nowhere on the flats and circle twice over the finger of sky-coloured water - perfectly timed to the length of the spoken text!
I interpreted the empty photo frames as trying to frame nature and therefore de-naturalise the natural. Is this what the performance was doing by making us look at nature in a different way?....The placing/framing is clever and makes me see particular things among the infinite possible things and I'm drawn in. […]. The ‘framing’ of certain things led me to question whether/if some of those things framed were placed or found. It made me think about the way we take in and acknowledge our surroundings (or not).
I felt I had been given the time and focus to have a true experience of that location I found it affecting, and I thought the relation of figures to the Bay was very good sculpturally. It was very emotive and evocative - and unsentimental. The visual imagery made by the figures and movement, especially, did make me feel differently about that horizon.
The final tableau. Shocking, shocking. She is dead, her hair in the water, the […] wildflowers in her hand yet also in the water. Drowned? Almost certainly. Washed there and left there by the tide? Maybe.
How did it end? […] The guide leads me back to the real world. We say “wasn't it beautiful?” The beauty of the Bay and the sunset is so perfect. We alternate between awestruck wonder […] and delight.
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Research Process
The photographs below document the research and development of Still Life.
Taken during extended periods of working on site, they record observations, experiments, collected objects, early installations and studies of the landscape that informed the performance.
Together they reveal how the work evolved through sustained attention to the changing conditions of Morecambe Bay.
Research Process
The photographs below document the research and development of Still Life.
Taken during extended periods of working on site, they record observations, experiments, collected objects, early installations and studies of the landscape that informed the performance.
Together they reveal how the work evolved through sustained attention to the changing conditions of Morecambe Bay.
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