Julie Brook: Out of the ground, a thread of air

Charu Vallabhbhai

Writer and curator Charu Vallabhbhai surveys new and recent work by British land artist Julie Brook, who studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art, Oxford, and makes large scale sculptural work in the landscape. The feature focuses on a new commission for Holker Hall and a presentation of films recording Brook’s powerful, moving series of interventions, the Firestacks, at Abbot Hall art gallery in Cumbria. While the Firestacks that feature in the exhibition ‘What is it that will last?’ has an entry charge and is on show until 30 December 2023, the sculptural installation Out of the ground, a thread of air (2023) is free of charge and remains permanently situated and accessible at Holker Hall deer park.

Out of the ground, a thread of air (2023) is a new large-scale sculptural work by artist Julie Brook, created for the ancient deer park at Holker Hall in Cumbria. The commissioning of the artwork by Lakeland Arts in collaboration with the Holker Group and their subsidiary Burlington Stone, who excavate and supply British natural stone, coincides with Brook’s major exhibition What is it that will last? at Abbot Hall art gallery in Kendal.

As seen in the Abbot Hall exhibition, much of Brook’s tidal and land art is made in remote and wild places that have inspired and deeply engaged her since the early 1990s. From her solitary experiments on the coast of the Inner Hebridean island of Jura to the barren topography of Libya, travelling with Tuareg guides with knowledge of the terrain, Brook has selected the materials she found in these natural environments to create geometric forms and lines, built upright in dry stone or as meticulous flat shapes and margins, drawn in earth, rock and desert sand.

Over a four-year period from 2011 Brook made visits to north-west Namibia, this time travelling with Himba guides who, like the Tuareg people of Libya, taught her to survive in searing heat and to conserve her energy and resources, thus enabling her to produce substantial interventions into the natural landscape, such as reshaping a section of bank that forms the edge of a dried-out river bed. By extracting earth, with labourer’s tools – a spade, mattock or pick-axe, Brook inserted a precise curve, more than ten meters in length and over half a meter deep, making a subtle alteration to the shape of the river’s edge. Much of her work, though substantial in scale, is intentionally impermanent and sensitive to the natural habitat in which it is made.

In 2014, on a subsequent visit to the same region of Namibia, Brook recontextualised the dry stone forms she had developed for the uncultivated landscape through an opportunity to make work at the Onjuva Quarry in Orupembe, a site where marble has traditionally been extracted. This was to be Brook’s first experience of assembling large-scale, site-specific sculpture for an industrial site. There she created magnificent white marble structures out of the discarded material left in the quarry spoil heaps. Brook has since undertaken two more international residencies at quarries in Ishikawa Prefecture, Japan and Carrara, Italy. At all three locations she has built hexahedrons, exact in execution, bringing order to the otherwise jumbled mass of rejected stone, displaced from where it had laid since formation. The commissioning of Out of the ground, a thread of air brought an option for Brook to relocate quarried slate from the mine and present it in a very different, formal setting.

The deer park at Holker Hall forms part of an estate of 80 hectares. In the medieval period the land was originally owned by Cartmel Priory, founded in 1190. It has been inhabited and landscaped for centuries and now welcomes visitors, allowing an audience to experience Brook’s new piece. The invitation from Lakeland Arts to create a work as part of the exhibition at Abbot Hall led Brook to initiate a two-year period of explorations, visiting the sites of Cumbrian slate mines. This reconnected the artist with her past interest in these Lake District locations where she had previously made drawings in abandoned quarries, settings in which the process of digging out stone reveals a geological history that stretches into the past beyond human existence.

Inevitably, Brook’s research led her to connect with Burlington Stone. The firm currently owns eight working quarries in Cumbria that extract stone and slate. Brook was taken first to their Elterwater quarry in September 2021, which she found to be a magnificent, cavernous, underground space. This more formal introduction to an operational mine inspired the ideas for Out of the ground, a thread of air. With its stepped vertical passages, what she saw at Elterwater Quarry may also have resonated with her work Ascending made in 2019 at the Takigahara quarry in Japan. The huge blocks of slate, known as ‘clogs’, that she has seen piled up at the Cumbrian quarries were chaotic mounds that intrigued her. They were stacks of stored clogs, forming incidental shapes resulting from the process of being moved mechanically to shift them from one part of the quarry to another.

In March 2023, the installation of Out of the ground, a thread of air commenced in wintry conditions, the land enveloped in a blanket of snow. Brook worked with a team that included the skill of Burlington Stone’s master stonemason and the expertise of a local haulage firm whose experience in moving large pieces of stone was critical in facilitating the sculptural work.

A short film made during installation on site at Holker Hall’s deer park records Brook directing the operator of a grab excavator. The device at the end of a mechanical arm made it possible to pick up the huge clogs and transfer them into the locations Brook had designated. A combination of careful positioning and gentle dropping resulted in achieving the appearance of the heaps of clogs that Brook had seen in the quarries. In one scene a large stone is released from a short height, nestling into position while another time a huge piece of rock let loose from the grip of the machine slides down the mound of stones until it reaches its resting place.

Brook is not an artist to shy away from hard graft, having physically produced her large works, often solo and unsupported, by hand. Realising a large-scale sculptural work that required industrial equipment for its making has been a new experience for the artist, as has the creation of a form that is unsystematic and that incorporates moments of chance in its production.

Approaching the sculpture from the drive leading towards Holker Hall the mound of slate becomes visible. Pale yellow marks on the stones appear as code, their meaning lost since they left the quarry from which they were excavated. Walking round the rocks, slate steps leading to the top are an unexpected feature of what at first appeared to be an outcrop of rock, itself out of place in the cultivated deer park. The steps offer an inviting path to the summit and opportunity to engage physically with the sculpture. The work combines unrefined stone, yet to be assessed and cut for use, together with finished slabs of slate. Shaped at the quarry, they provide stable footing on the surface of each tread. The steps add a formality to the sculpture that is characteristic of Brook’s visual language, meticulously composed and highly crafted.

The exhibition’s title, questioning permanence, is relevant two-fold. It references the temporality of much of Brook’s work made in the natural environment, places that are in themselves constantly shifting backdrops. Meanwhile beneath the surface, stone and rock, like the slate of this new commission, formed over 400 million years ago in the Silurian period and now unearthed, represent that which has endured. In Out of the ground, a thread of air this profound history converges with the tradition of slate mining in Cumbria, a long-standing industry that expanded in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and continues today.

Since her period of working in Jura in the early 1990s, the elements of earth, air, fire and water have become essential components of Brook’s work, together with natural light. The forces of gravity and time are also inherent in what she makes. In Out of the ground, a thread of air the heap of stones feels bound to the earth, secured by its own weight, while gaps between the rocks allow the air to mingle and move through. The steps, rising from the earth, propose a pathway up into the air and an elevated position to view the distant sea on a clear day, as well as the quarry that birthed the stones. The use of flame finished slate for the steps, a process which roughened their surface texture, brings the element of fire into the artwork’s making.

In the months since the sculpture took form, changes in light throughout the day into night and across the seasons result in subtle alterations in its appearance. In rain the soft blue-grey of the Cumbrian Black slate transforms into a deeper, more intense hue in the same way that pebbles on a beach become more vibrant when wet. This new commission, though very different in form, connects firmly to Brook’s Firestack works made in Jura when she first embarked on engaging sculpturally and physically with the natural environment. At Abbot Hall art gallery her series of four Firestack films made between 2017 and 2022 allow audiences to intimately experience this spectacular work, conceived and developed by Brook three decades earlier.

The Firestack works originally emerged from Brook’s experiences dating back to 1991 and 1992 when she lived for six months in each year within a natural cliff arch on Jura, first in a tent and then a cloth and driftwood ‘house’ she constructed. Her intention at the outset was to study the landscape in painting and drawing. She returned to the location for a year from 1993 to 1994. During these solitary and intense periods she tuned in to the environment, absorbing its rhythms that would shape her existence on the island. It was there that her sculptural practice developed in the creation of the Firestack works, consolidating the landscape and shoreline she inhabited with her daily practices for cooking and staying warm. These stocky cairn like cylinders, constructed of dry stone and topped with blazing drift wood, were made to be extinguished and often demolished by the waves of an incoming tide. A unique ephemeral event was to evolve, each time, with Brook as sole witness to the beauty and drama she created. Every firestack would become a glorious tribute to the forces of nature, timed, positioned and executed with exacting perfection to harmonise with rising sea and fading light.

Brook documented these extraordinary occurrences in photography and Super-8 film but they tell nothing of the toil she dedicated for their realisation nor the knowledge that was vital in their accomplishment. The entries in her notebooks of that time provide an illuminating record of her incredible exertion, resilience and her increasing depth of comprehension through observation.

Monday 12 August 1991

There is a pregnant suspense in the air. I work hard all evening in the relentless rain building up the walls of the stack. I am getting better at building their irregular shapes together.

The stack is a point in the bay. It marks the tide. I know better how the waters come according to the slight undulations in the seabed. [i]

The Firestack films presented at Abbot Hall are cinematic in scale and sound. The location for filming this new body of work is Aird Bheag in the Outer Hebrides where Brook has access to a bothy in which she and her team of assistants and film crew stayed. Reachable by sea or a long journey on foot, it is another remote location without road access. The films were made during each of the four seasons and this exhibition offers the first opportunity to watch them all in one sitting. They are mesmerising and hold the viewer captive, each telling a different story of the same beach, bay and distant hills at different times of the year.

Firestack Spring (2019) shows the sea at its most aggressive, its foam fringed waves deceptively delicate until they crash against the stones of the stack, leaving only a partial tower and hissing steam where flames had fought against the sea air. In Firestack Summer (2017) the sea gently rises in ripples, without waves. The fire burns on until water closes in, only surrendering once the stack is fully submerged, leaving a ring of stone visible on the surface of the sea, still lit by a barely darkened sky.

In Firestack Autumn (2019) the stack, surrounded by sea, forms a column twice its actual height owing to its own reflection that comprises half of the visible shape. Wind pushes the air around the flame, bringing it to life as if a being or creature has possessed the fire. As night falls its blackness is interrupted by glowing orange, and a shape caught on the surface of the sea that widens and contracts. As the sea rises further, sparks are dispersed and then burning wood breaks off and drifts away. The flame is no longer one unit as shards of fire voyage slowly across the water. The sea is molten in Firestack Winter (2022). Waves and flames are forced in the direction of the shore while steam and spray merge. As the water reaches the fire a gassy glow of vapour is emitted.

These moving images exhibited at Abbot Hall, accompanied by extraordinarily evocative audio, open up a sensory portal to the Hebridean beach. Each soundtrack captures the essence of the firing and the season in which it was composed. The performers in these ensembles are crackling fire, bird call, steam fizzing or hissing, flames roaring, wind blustering, sea glugging against stone, mysterious underwater sound and waves in motion, furiously attacking or serenely lapping.

What is it that will last? demonstrates that Brook’s practice extends beyond land and tide into photography, film together with sound and that her practice in paint and drawing has continued to evolve since she set out on Jura to make works on canvas and paper. She continues to create alone while also producing ambitious works where collaboration brings knowledge and expertise, as well as more hands into the process of making. The impression made by Brook’s remarkable and distinctive artworks is one that will last.

[i] What is it that will last? Land and Tidal Art of Julie Brook, Lund Humphries (2023) p 92