Nicholas Hedges
As a descendent of tailors and miners, it is perhaps appropriate that my work's concerned with lines and traces; the weave and texture of pathways taken by people throughout their lives over the course of history. Inspired by visits to sites of historic trauma (camps, prisons and battlefields) I’ve sought to find ways of identifying with people long since lost to the past, those who’ve been subsumed into vast, unimaginable numbers or not remembered at all.
Walking, both as a means of creating work and being a work in itself (as with artists like Richard Long) has become an increasingly important element in my practice. Phenomenological approaches to archaeology and landscape have enabled me to articulate ways in which we can remember those who’ve left nothing of their existence. Through being in the landscape and researching the ‘nowness’ of the present, I see paths as traces left by ‘place-making1’ people, where every path is a story, comprising tens of thousands of others.
Human beings, ‘leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route2’. When we consider in light of this, the etymology of the word writing (derived from the Old English term writan - meaning to incise runic letters in stone3) we can say that human beings write themselves on (or in the case of my forebears, deep beneath) the landscape – they leave a trace. Henri Bergson wrote that our 'whole psychical existence is something just like this single sentence... I believe,’ he said, ‘that our whole past still exists:4’ the whole past does indeed exist, upon and within these pathways, as sentences, written in the landscape by people over countless centuries.
Across this ‘meshwork5’ of pathways, we record our own stories and play back those of people in the past. History is a dialogue between us; between the past and present and never is this made more clear than when we move through the world, down a road, path or track, through a room or underground in a mine.
Family history has played a vital role in my work and my research, enabling me to find anonymous individuals to whom I am related and to explore the places in which they were born, where they lived and died, to walk the roads, tracks and paths which have led to my existence. Bill Viola wrote that ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived, that it is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts...6’ Considering my family history, I could say that I’ve ‘existed’ right throughout time, imminent and potential in the pathways down which my forebears have travelled. There is life that is the sum of our lives and it’s individuals and memory which gives the impression of the same discrete parts.
Memory is a feature in the works of artists and writers with whom I most identify. Christian Boltanski, Tacita Dean, Anselm Kiefer and Doris Salcedo to name but a few. Further to this, the writing of Rilke, Goethe and Sebald, Benjamin and Lukács have all have played a major part in the development of my practice; a practice which aims to be a broad church, encompassing disciplines from art to archaeology, architecture to history, music to anthropology.
