Fieldwork (once more, with feeling)

Calver David Hoad | lie lie lie | 2016

I’ve just completed a show of work in progress with fellow artists Megan Calver and Susie David. Throw only to an alert catcher was held across three beach huts on the site where we've been working together for the past six months - Dawlish Warren. We showed a series of videos, made a small dark-space installation and shared various objects and traces gathered during our time on site. We also produced a small artists’ publication. It's the culmination of our a-n supported project The Buffer Zone.

Having spent all this time in an intense collaboration with other artists and a site, and thinking/talking as ‘us’ and ‘we’, I’d rather let go of where this work fits into my existing practice. It took a student visitor to the show, who was aware of my previous collaborations with scientists, to ask the question about how it all fits together.

What I brought to this latest collaboration was a desire to work with the idea of the hide. Used by naturalists, film-makers, hunters and soldiers, the hide is a camouflaged structure which seeks to efface the presence of the human observer and encourage 'natural' behaviour in those observed. Hiding was an extension of my previous interest in surveillance, but an approach I hoped would put me back out in the landscape rather than keeping me behind a computer.

Now, through working collaboratively with artists rather than scientists, I've switched from traditional scientific fieldwork to what I and my colleagues have termed ‘poetic fieldwork'. It's quite a change. At one point during Foreign Soil, I was regularly collecting temperature data from field instruments that was used as material for my own work but also as input to verify climate models. These days I still go out into the field armed with various instruments (or prosthetics) and attempt to make observations and discoveries, but it's far more open-ended and intuitive. It’s an attempt to build understanding of the site's nonhuman inhabitants on their own terms.

This playful, spontaneous and slightly ‘magical’ approach is a real contrast to my previous focus on testing the limits of objectivity and rationality – and one I actively sought. We've fostered dialogue, both between ourselves, and with the site and its inhabitants – and been acutely aware of how each affects the other.

Many themes have emerged from our work – of entanglement, liminality, slippage of language, the ‘life’ of ‘inert’ objects but, for me, one of the most resonant has been the idea of lying to get closer to the nonhuman. This is lying in multiple senses: of deceiving (pretending to be what one is not, perhaps through mimicry), of getting physically closer to the earth, and of hiding (by becoming prone) to make observations. And we are not the only ones who do it: lying is a strategy we've observed throughout our time at Dawlish Warren, from man-made objects pretending to be 'natural' objects to a log-like seal basking largely unobserved on a beach.