Landing

From Time Horizon, Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK, 2024

The construction of Houghton Hall park began in the Late Cretaceous Epoch, when chalk deposits from warm primeval seas settled to form a hard white bedrock. During the late Quaternary Period, large ice sheets, freezing and thawing, pushed this bedrock into new shapes. Anybody who stands in the park today looks out over the drifts of sand and gravel that lay down here back then, cutting into or draping over the underlying chalk. These drifts left a fine layer of silt at the far northern edge of the park, and it’s still there, under the grass around the railings.

The glaciers retreated and plants seeded themselves on the revealed earth. Hyenas hunted mammoths through what is now the park; the first humans arrived. On the coast not far away, footprints were left by a child eight hundred and fifty thousand years ago. The prints were revealed between tides and lifted by archaeologists before they could be washed away again. It looks like the child was running in a circle – perhaps she was digging for shellfish, or gathering reeds, or just killing time as children do. The marks she made somehow survived huge shifts beneath her feet – the landscape rearranged itself around the prints, heaving a river mouth downward, over millennia, to deposit it on the beach.

When humans settled here, the landscape changed again. Forests were managed and firewood gathered; livestock grazed back the heathland. Local families farmed, fought, and claimed land from one another. A village was founded on the site of Houghton’s North Park.

In the eleventh century, at the beginning of the Crusades, English soldiers travelled to the Holy Land to make war. Those who distinguished themselves in combat were rewarded with gifts and honours from the Crown. Crests bearing the sign of a Saracen’s head were bestowed on several noble English families, including one from a village in West Norfolk, the Walpoles.

The story goes that Sir Joceline de Walpole was awarded the Saracen’s head for his service at the siege of Acre from 1189 to 1191. Acre, now known as Akko in Hebrew or Akka in Arabic, is a small city on the Mediterranean coast, in what is now Israel. Paintings of the time are bewildering: the scale is confusing, everything looks too big or too small, upside down or inside out. In one image, medieval knights look taller than the fortifications they stand on. Another depicts the citizens of Acre surrendering the key to the city gates. The key itself is white with jagged teeth and longer than a man’s arm. A rare written experience of the siege, from a soldier in the English camp in 1191, describes it viscerally and materially: the foul air, rampant disease, and the constant rain of weapons from the sky. Blackening bodies were littered around the place.

The Saracen’s head on the Walpole family crest can still be seen on the Houghton estate: it is a reminder that the siege of Acre, 3,552 miles away and many hundreds of years from the present, has an enduring legacy that is not yet completely disconnected from this patch of English countryside. The family motto, inscribed on the crest above the Saracen’s head, has the ambivalence that mottoes of powerful families tend to have. Fari quae sentiat: say what one feels.

The English aristocracy is not celebrated for the ease or aptitude with which it talks about its feelings. Nonetheless, ordinary human feelings are manifest in the landscape that the English landowner has contrived to create. Sorrow, fear, curiosity, jealousy, love, all have their place in the English country park – a place in which emotional force, like any other natural expression, is given form. Rainfall is dammed and diverted to pour through an ornamental spout. The pear tree is persuaded by the espalier to send its branches in the most decorous of directions. Grief for a beloved grandmother is arrayed in a memorial garden. Greed or anxiety compel the annexation of the neighbours’ vegetable plots.

Over the years, during and after the award of the family crest, many members of the Walpole family made their changes to the house and park, somewhat haphazardly. Several centuries after the Crusades, in the grounds of the grand new house, a gardener stood a slim sweet chestnut sapling in the ground and heeled it in. Long, solemn avenues of lime trees were planted into the surrounding fields, leading up to and away from the hall’s central doors. Walpoles and their tutors walked on the new paths and alleys, reading, talking, thinking, and planning. Nearby, local villagers tended their plots on land that was outside the boundary, in those days, but has become a part of the park we walk in today.

In the eighteenth century a decorative ‘wilderness’ of cultivated tangled trees and shrubs was planted up (but it didn’t last long). During the same period, a ha-ha was constructed around the house and gardens, not long after the term ha-ha was first used in English – it derives from a French phrase that is notable for a guttural or instinctive quality that feels out of place here, in the formal garden. The expression is thought to come from the cry of shock or disturbance that a person makes when they realise the ground they are standing on has reached an abrupt end.

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There is a feeling known as solastalgia, the grief or longing for a place that no longer exists. It’s a relatively new word – invented in 2005 by the philosopher Glenn Albrecht to describe this experience as one that is particular to being alive now, on a planet whose seasons and species are collapsing. In the Arctic there is an expanse of ocean where an ice shelf should be. In Brazil there are fields of soy in the place of an old-growth forest. On a small island in the South Pacific, a tarmacked road runs right into the sea. Solastalgia is the pang you feel when you realise that the ground you’re standing on is no longer really there.

In Norfolk, not far from Houghton Hall, vineyards have been planted since the turn of the millennium. Mediterranean species – fig trees and sweet chestnuts – fruit prodigiously here these days. Over the past few years, a growing body of scientific data has evidenced the fact that the English seasons are no longer what they were. Spring comes earlier, winter is colder, summer hotter and too dry. Rainfall, ice, and heat are erratic. This changes what grows, and what feeds, and how things move. Migrations and cycles of bud, blossom, leafing, and leaf fall are all disrupted.

These shifts are rarely tangible to the human senses. Viruses mutate and wander; species populations wane; spring lines waver on the map: none of this reveals itself to the naked eye. Things happen over time frames that are longer than any human life; the spatial scale can be planetary or microscopic. Put plainly, we don’t necessarily know how the environment is changing – what it’s losing or gaining – because the changes can’t always be witnessed. This scale effect leads to a fold or gap in perception that has been called ‘generational amnesia’ and ‘shifting baseline syndrome’.

Cultivating historic gardens is conventionally understood to be a quaint pursuit, but in this estranged climate, it becomes unsettling. The park at Houghton Hall is a landscape that was created centuries ago and has, since then (and with alterations), been conserved. Many parts of the present grounds – the walled garden, the wilderness, and the ha-ha – are modern recreations of gardens that existed long ago. All this presents a weird expression of a different kind of solastalgia: a constant, willed suspension of disappearance.

The renovated gardens are exhibitions of the past, of course. But they also draw attention into the breach between now and then. Today’s gardens can’t exist on the same terms as their originals. There are new words and objects, things that are being done or happening – these are gardens that are growing in a world that has ‘organic’ and ‘rewilding’; greenhouse dehumidifiers and cordless strimmers; plant passports and Italian marble priced per shipping container unit. Drawing out from the garden to its setting (the landscape, the ground, the planet), the atmosphere is different now. The summer heat is reaching new peaks, the seasons turn differently. The historic garden becomes its own doppelganger: a reproduction that is uncertainly the same.

Interesting things can happen when a contemporary sculpture is placed inside this cultivated memory. Richard Long’s overlapping slates make a rough sea inside one room of the walled garden. Rachel Whiteread’s cast concrete garden shed takes cover in the replanted wilderness. James Turrell has framed a piece of sky.

Antony Gormley’s Time Horizon takes this process of placing sculpture in the park unusually literally: the majority of Gormley’s life-sized human forms are buried inside the landscape, several are up to their neck in it. The lone figure who is inside the house – at the heart of the hall – sets the level for all the others, who are lowered or, more rarely, elevated so that they stand at precisely its height. It fixes terms for the ninety-nine other figures that surround it, who face over the grounds of the ancient village or have their feet rooted in the strips of land that were cleared to make Houghton’s park. This is a straightforward and material relationship: the sculpture in the hall determines the lie of the land, and that can look exacting for the other body-forms who are perched or buried to come in line with it. Their awkwardness compels you to see difference – the differences between the figure in the hall and those outside become inescapable. So this perfectly even line draws attention to the heights and depths within, above, and below the smoothed ground, a third dimension emerging from the plane. One figure on a low plinth is lifted into the patch of atmosphere above the earth. Another, half-buried, has its legs down in the first stratum of soil.

Gormley has spoken about objects that charge or change their medium: copper wires run through cheese to marble it with veins of blue mould; acupuncture needles inserted in a body; fuel rods submerged to heat a nuclear tank. These sculptures can do something like that – activating or altering their medium by standing in its negative space. Here at Houghton, the sculptures draw attention to the baseline as it gets shifted from the figure in the house. They mark out or foreground the gaps and spaces between the formal gardens, below the lawns, or above the vegetation. And at the same time, they are just like a bunch of people, standing around. Each one is the image of a body, trace or proof of presence. A handprint on a cave wall or a footprint in sand. Something simple can be heightened or made plainly apparent when it is made still, it’s like the way the pressure builds when you hold your breath.

Through the course of Gormley’s career, the cultural landscape has changed around these forms which he has made across time. A person who stood in 1981 in front of the first mould that Gormley exhibited of his body would have been differently aware of what this figure – human, male, upright, individual – might show and mean to the person who walks among these figures today. Stubborn, naturalised distinctions between genders, species, races, and bodily differences of all kinds, have been challenged, relativised, or overturned. In an environmental context, interdependence rather than individuality has become increasingly urgent.

The sculptures require you to consider their form precisely because they are all reprisals of it. If the figure in the house is the datum, one hundred figures look like a dataset. Produced and reproduced here, they present as a sample, a kind of equipment. The dimensions of a male form have, historically, been reproduced as a baseline for medical tests and safety equipment, for sizing telephones or seating, for crash test dummies – victim and guardian of those who share his morphology. In recent decades, many people have drawn attention to this baseline, and it has started to move. When something is brought into view like that, what happens isn’t only perceptual but political and practical: something materialises, something comes to matter.

This is a physical parallel to theoretical concepts such as ‘solastalgia’ or ‘shifting baseline syndrome’ – concepts that induce awareness of an absence, loss, or apparent emptiness. The absences become loaded, as with the driver’s blind spot or the painter’s negative space. You might perceive a bulk of atmosphere between two bodies, carbon dioxide atoms on the move. Or a future stratum of earth hovering some inches above the current ground level. Or a vulnerable sapling inside a thick and ancient trunk. This isn’t an idea, it’s an experience. Something is triggered between the body and the material world. The footprint, fossilised on a Norfolk beach that was once a river mouth, animates the vast and incredibly slow shifts of the landscape that rearranges itself around each little toe.

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The construction of Houghton Hall’s park began again in the eighteenth century and this time it happened faster. If the retreat of the warm primeval seas was the creation of the bedrock; and the Walpole family’s success in the Crusades was the creation of the power; and the labour of the medieval smallholder was the creation of the tilth… all this may be seen as prologue. Histories of Houghton set it all aside in their story of the park as a place that was dreamed up by Robert Walpole.

Walpole, generally known as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, inherited Houghton in 1700. During the following decades of his tenure, the house, park, and environs were surveyed, remodelled, or swept aside. Walpole terraformed the immediate surroundings of his house. He had the earth scooped out to make a long half-pipe-shaped approach to the east door, running out to open country, and the lifted topsoil heaped in mounds around the new approach. He decided to annex the local church; then to relocate an entire village, whose remains can still be made out around the old stone cross in the park, where low earthworks and other irregularities in the terrain fleetingly imply the image of absent human figures or the formal remains of their homes.

The small piece of world that was rearranged by Walpole here was part of something much wider that he worked on too. When you stand in the park at Houghton, you could be forgiven for assuming that Walpole’s government was a side project that he attended in the spare time he had left over from his garden schemes. His approach to foreign policy has come to be known as ‘salutary neglect’, a programmatic laxity: under Walpole, the British government gave up on expanding their territories; taxes and inspections were abandoned in existing colonies, and the colonial grip loosened. This was all purposeful. Walpole’s intention was to let trade run free, and it ran. Deregulated globalised commerce from mines and plantations brought money back to Britain and the profits naturally flowed toward power. Walpole became richer. Having taken in the church and the village, he acquired the local commons and strip farms, plot by plot from smallholders and other landowners. He had plans for sculpting some twelve miles of parkland around his house and had succeeded in creating a six-mile perimeter around this landscape of his own creation when he died.

After his death, the hall passed through the hands of several owners in succession, from the Walpoles to the Cholmondeleys, up to the time the present owner inherited and began to bring things back. The restoration of the park lacks Walpole’s acquisitive urgency but has something of his energy. Young alleys of pleached limes have been planted to frame the house, the wilderness has been restored, and the ha-ha reconstructed. There is a new garden within old walls and a renewed glasshouse with a lively fountain whose water spills over stacked shells of giant clams through bright green maidenhair ferns down onto calla lilies. It’s strange to think that these clams were ever actually alive, submerged in a nineteenth-century sea, experiencing their alien marine sensations. But all the things inside the greenhouse are alien – that is its appeal. Epiphytic orchids and potted Datura plants sit through the winter in the balanced humidity and warmth. Large, quiet machines calibrate and maintain a tropical atmosphere. Everything here is involved in a process of perpetual manufacture – antique shells, respiring plants, live machinery, and anybody who opens the door and steps in. It has a hybrid, futuristic feel, this warm leafy gardened room. It sits over the park’s deep past (chalk deposits; ancient hyenas), and the hall’s indoor human history (Prime Minister; foreign policy) cannot adequately fill it. The experience of being here is spacey rather than historical, with its novel flora, crude robots, and giant clams. You stand just slightly above ground level, at the height of future geological strata, or the sea level that is already, unimaginably slowly, but surely, creeping toward your feet.

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The long history of Houghton’s park is a story of people making changes to the landscape and the landscape shaping the lives of its people – the peasant and the landowner, the full-time gardener or the weekend hiker. Some version of this relationship can be recognised in any environment on earth (from the emptied oxygen canisters on the Himalayan peaks to the plastic flip-flops in the Mariana Trench) and it can be found in every human on earth (from the tender soles in need of flip-flops on hot Copacabana sand to the Englishwoman, averse to talking about her true feelings, who finds refuge in conversations about the weather). Its history is unfinished.

It should be safe to say that Gormley’s one hundred rusting iron body forms, industrially produced in a West Midlands foundry, are out of place at Houghton Hall. Their rusted shells might make you think of burnt-out cars or piles of assorted metals in a scrapyard. Each sculpture was cast individually, from one of twenty-three different moulds of the artist’s body that were created over a year. Their approximately reprised, but not replicated forms, suggest some murky site of origin – neither the industrial foundry nor the sculptor’s studio. Iron goods, strapped onto pallets for shipping, are installed among hand-carved marble busts, between hedges of skilfully clipped yew. The works should not be at home in this country park, but they are. This patch of English countryside, like all the rest of it, is global and a product of intensive industry. The forms, plants, and symmetries, the ideas and the materials, the marble busts and sharp topiary, at Houghton, all the way to the horizon, has involved working, moving, or engineering the earth; importing, exporting, arranging the plants; breeding and culling the animals.

This park is a place where these forms of circulation and industry have been concentrated throughout history, and the past is tended with care here. The siege of Acre is carried on the family crest; the names of individual eighteenth-century smallholders are inked, plot by plot, on the large old maps of parkland annexations. These are local and particular histories, family stories of wars and relocations, acquisition or loss. But they’re also already familiar because they are continuous with the wider stories and landscapes that can be recognised in them – the Crusades; the enclosures; the House of Commons and the colonies, and so on (and on). So – what wider stories (national, global, universal) do Gormley’s sculptures get involved with when they are placed in this park? His dark human forms take on a spectral appearance here. They do not look at one another, each one is positioned to gaze into what appears to be empty space. I can only say with confidence what they are not. They are not smallholders standing on their plots, or plantation workers in their fields, or people gathering on the Mediterranean coast, or blackening bodies littering the ground, or all the people that are involved in the process of bringing the surroundings into being, all around us, all the time: mining, firing, smelting, manufacturing, assembling, shipping, recycling, recreating, undoing.

These figures are distinguished by their absence; perhaps it would be better to say that the sculptural figures distinguish their absence here. Standing in arrangement, aligned, they seem to be collecting or collected around the hall – or perhaps your body, as you move through them, is the point of convergence.

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Over the past few years there has been renewed interest in nineteenth century biologist Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of Umwelt, the idea that the environment that exists differs from being to being – not because a white hart or a sweet chestnut tree might feel something different to you, but because the world that is available to them is different. A flowering grass might be a source of food to a deer, a planet to a microbe, a road to an ant, or a hair decoration to a girl. It’s not possible for a microbe to experience this plant as a hair decoration, or for a girl to approach it as a road. In this park, the great majority of those who are audience to or interact with the sculptures will not be day visitors to Houghton Hall. They won’t be humans at all. The placing of the sculptures in the park exposes the variable materialities of these iron human forms, and of flesh and blood which are equally material. The body is made into an object, which it already was: the installation makes you think about what a human is – not how or who but what. The sculptures are fossilised footprints, they are fuel rods or acupuncture needles, crash test dummies, they are mortal realities and products of industrial and colonial histories, or globalised capital systems, and they’re so many tonnes of pig iron.

If the landscape is a product of human industry, the human is also the landscape’s implement and ultimately (there is a graveyard on the estate) an ingredient. Microplastic particles from the pallet straps have fallen into the grass beside a sculpture. A ragwort seed is blown into an iron join where it lodges and attempts to germinate. Fragments of rust from the scratching post are trapped between white hairs on a deer’s hide. A pheasant lands on the metal perch to listen for the gun. Colonies of soil microbes reorganise themselves in the earth which has been turned to accommodate the new work. A raindrop encounters an obstacle as it falls. Water runs down a sculpture’s blanked face. Between iron toes, the microbes manufacture enzymes. Something different is mixed up with the scent that the earth releases after rain. Steam rises off the sculptures as a person passes by. The smell of warm wet iron is familiar, already there in the blood.