The Marshes - installation (text, audio, video)
Under the Guidance of Truth by Ben Evans James
Managing the unfolding of fact and fiction across space, Donald Harding’s The Marshes is an assemblage of film, audio and text. Taking place throughout the former marshlands of Erith and Belverdere and around the Thamesmead area, Harding describes this edgeland as ‘neither urban nor rural, caught in the machinery of economic regeneration. A landscape rearranged by real estate values where developer’s plans are marked up and ways of life marked down’. (Harding, 2018)
While there is no set path for the visitor to navigate the work, the most immediate entry point comes from a series of directional speakers installed throughout the gallery. Here we encounter recordings of Harding’s phone conversations with local residents who describe their view from various points in and around the Thamesmead area. These recordings are the result of Harding’s improvisation with the public phone boxes in the area where he would call and wait for someone to answer. The description of this landscape by its inhabitant’s echoes Nairn’s subtopian polemic Outrage around which this show is based - ‘the doom of an England reduced to a universal subtopia, a mean and middle state, neither town nor country, an even spread of abandoned aerodromes and fake rusticity, wire fences, traffic roundabouts, gratuitous notice-boards, car-parks and Things in Fields’ (Nairn, 1955). Harding’s recordings from Thamesmead reveal additions to this list that include betting shops, Chinese takeaways and an infamous, now boarded up pub, where a shotgun was once fired into the roof.
Weaved alongside the essayistic form of these audio stories, Harding intersperses a separate narrative through a first wall text that questions the discovery of bones by construction workers employed on a building site within the Thamesmead area. At first thought to be human, the
bones are eventually identified as originating from the “Marsh Cob” – a breed of horse whose presence Harding ascribes to the landscape of the area. Mounting a camera on a horse and allowing it to wonder freely, Harding creates a filmic component to the work that takes the form of a kind of psychogeographic dérive where the camera drifts across the landscape. Occasionally, the horse appears to interact with individuals or elements in the landscape causing the animal (and the camera) to alter its course.
Placed in opposing spaces within the gallery, the audio story, wall text and film begin to build a narrative of place for the viewer through the communities who reside there. In the final part of the work a second wall text historicizes the Marsh Cob, tracing the relationship of the horse to the area through key historical junctures. From the Saxon Kings of Kent to the filming of Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange, there is shown to be one constant in the landscape – the Marsh Cob Horse. It is around this threshold – where the gallery visitor is caught between film, audio and wall texts - that questions around the veracity of the Marsh Cob might surface. Caught between hearing snippets of the sound work and seeing short flashes of the film – the visitor is left to piece together the fragments of their experience and to assess the plausibility of the facts being communicated.
In The Marshes, Harding constructs the Marsh Cob as a breed of horse animated by the real Gypsy Cob, a well-worked horse within the Gypsy and Traveller communities of Thamesmead. Providing a fictional character that mediates between reality and representation, the Marsh Cob is used as a conduit through which the artist explores the erasure of histories brought about by the landscape’s cycles of economic development. Making visible Harding’s subjectivity and his status within the communities around Thamesmead as both an insider (a Londoner) and an outsider (a North Londoner), the fiction highlights the difficulty Harding felt in creating an appropriate response to a temporary context as complex as Thamesmead. His use of the Marsh Cob, acknowledges this dislocation without undermining his attempts to uncover truths and facts through the work (Sharpe, 2016).
The Marshes creates a lie with a sharp focus; a fabrication designed to uncover truths. As such, it requires a labour from the viewer to think both fictionally and factually at the same time; the installed work managing the plausibility of truth across space, leaving the visitor to piece together the fragments of their experience and to assess the veracity of the facts communicated. In The Marshes, Harding has created a work that achieves a condition of honesty by employing a lie.