Chris Meigh-Andrews

Interwoven Motion (2004)

Extract from Catherine Elwes’ book “Landscape and the Moving Image (2022), discussing Interwoven Motion (2004) , a temporary outdoor video installation harnessing renewable energy (wind & sun), in Grizdale Forest, Cumbria, England.

“A temporary video installation by Chris Meigh-Andrews, separated sound and image, but here the sonic life of the forest was provided by the surroundings in which the work was seen, by the forest itself. Deep in the Lake District, in Grizedale Forest, the artist was drawn to a stand of fir trees overlooking Consiton Water, a long ribbon lake that was a source of inspiration for the Romantic poets and the elegiac writings of the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Meigh-Andrews selected a mature fir tree that rose above the canopy of the forest. At its crown he installed four surveillance cameras that commanded a panoramic view of the surrounding landscape, all the way to the horizon. Where (Bill) Fontana and (John) Rose had to siphon power from the national grid to operate their recording instruments and replay to an audience what they had gathered, Meigh-Andrews dispensed with mains electricity and captured the power of the sun and wind in situ to generate a moving image installation that could be experience only in the remote location where it was created. He affixed a series of solar panels and a wind turbine to the upper branches of the tree, providing power to both the cameras and, at ground level, an LCD monitor that displayed the video feed from above. The work offered passers by an elevated vantage point that, until then, only the tree itself had enjoyed. This configuration was reminiscent of Yoko Ono’s early Sky TV (1966), a single live video image of the sky relayed to a monitor in a gallery, a work I discussed in Chapter 10. It also anticipates Kika Thorne’s The Sun (2019) in which a bank of solar panels powered a continuous image of the sun projected in a darkened gallery space. Where both Thorne and Ono offered a fixed. View of a small section of sky and the cosmos, Interwoven Motion transmitted a selection of images to the. Base of the tree, covering 360 degrees of the surrounding terrain, a cluster of cameras being directed to all four points of the compass. The prospect that was displayed on the monitor at any given moment was determined by a regular rotation between the four camera positions and the speed of the cycle was linked via the wind turbine to the velocity and direction of the wind. On the ground it was possible to visualise the interconnectedness of Meigh-Andrews’ individual “mother tree” to the commonwealth of plant life radiating from her. This temporary installation also suggested other correspondences. The work clung to the tree like an epiphytic plant, the electricity running down the bark of the fir’s trunk along cables while the sap rose up inside it. Sean Cubitt was inspired to declare Meigh-Andrews’ practice analogous to the flow of thought, and beyond it, “the flux of electrons and magnetism, the fall of light and the drag of gravity” which the critic says, “are the subject and medium in an art where the two are indistinguishable” (Cubitt 1996:37). Although Interwoven Motion employed technologies that deplete the earths resources in their manufacture, the objective was to create a work that left on footprint and drew only on the renewable power of the wind and sun captured in situ. Like the tree, the installation was structurally of the landscape and of the elements and was given life by those same irreducible forces. Both fir and video image were vulnerable to extreme weather conditions and dependent on the finely balanced supply of sunlight, sufficient to create an image, enough for leaves to photosynthesise but not so much as to destroy either”.

Catherine Elwes,”Landscape and the Moving Image”, Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press, Bristol and Chicago, 2022, pp 130-131