To Exist Here: From Collections to Connections. A Blog by Pauline Rutter

 

To Exist Here: From Collections to Connections by Pauline Rutter 

 

To exist here and now in this space, this embodied nature writing, environmental care and community nourishing space; to call in others to walk the paths across the South Downs; to turn out of yourself what is there on the inside of your heart, for those who look like you; to offer a fossil’s history or pressed herbarium chalk grassland story for them to plant in their rolling landscapes of imagination, is to live in the fullness of being.

 

Begin

‘From Collections to Connections’ is a project, bolstered by funding from the National Trust Changing Chalk partnership. Look around. Admire the ideas released into the landscape and listen for what echoes back across deep time, along with bookings for accessible transport, a launch event, printed posters and pamphlets of pertinent poetry. Amplify the quietest voices at talks and picnics, on walks and social media posts. Revel in doing justice to the plan and to every helping hand.  Know that some of the institution will never have time for your emails, while your local art shop and Youth Hostel Association, Shoreham Scrap Space and Brighton and Hove Food Partnership accept the invitation and come onboard, expanding what you can afford and who values saying yes.

 

It’s all pure artistry inspired by Kew Gardens herbarium and the Linnean Society collections. With time allowed to daydream yourself into comfort while watching from a sheep’s eye-view, clouds that disappear over the ridge in formations of puff and billow.  Settle with your mind full of histories, geologies, questioned monarchs and aliveness. Make a promise to the bodiless trophy heads of big game animals and the rare taxidermized skin of a condor that you pass beneath, each day of artefact recording in the Booth Museum. Propose that you will return in full voice, to sing them to peace and wholeness one day. Know that day is not too far away, because this is the work that takes us ‘From Collections to Connections’.

Propose

Let me propose a, natural history, environment and community connecting initiative to widen the eyes of young people and families of our Black, Asian, dual heritage, global majority folk, just as my eyes had been widened. I’ve seen Adonis Blue and Horseshoe Vetch pinned out and pressed. Then have found the two in symbiosis during May along The Monarchs Way. Butterfly and larval foodplant clinging to the chalk turf on south facing slopes, gives hope. I read the county survey of 1990-1994  with a few Adonis Blue colonies reported west of the river Arun, now all disappeared.

You know this sad decline is set to gather pace with anthropological time. How can it be, we ask, that chalk grassland now covers just 5,608ha, that represents just 4% of the National Park’s total area?  But still, you find the will to step out of your door in Shoreham and walk towards the hills. As you pass where sloes and rosehips are ripening with the October chill following you on. Turn up towards Thundersbarrow and listen to where the chalk ridge speaks to you in whispers with the grey-green bristles of  Sheep’s Fescue. Call out to the South Down sheep grazing the land, trimming back the grass so the sun can warm the anthills, for the spring ants to appear. Then they’ll feast on the sweet secretions of Adonis caterpillars and stand as constant guards over the honey liquor making pupae, protecting them from parasites and predators. Return again because there’s more to be done than gentle walking and writing.

 

If this is your practice then you know it must come with a peeling back of layered systemic colonial hierarchies. Who is here? Who’s allowed to stay or walk the South Downs Way? Who decides what a volunteer or senior manager looks like? Who writes the policies, signs off, pays up, sits at the table, guards the nectar.

 

Hands thrown up.

Hold on.

Too much disorienting language cold with the imbalances it reveals in waves of trembling discomfort.

 

Take a moment.

Or take two.

 

Look to the decolonial process full of pre-colonial ethnological and archaeological linguistics and environmental sciences. Lay them out right here in the present to update what liberation tastes like when you drink in the view from the top of Mill Hill.

 

Let it be knowledge.

Let it be warmth.

Let it be peace.

Let it be rest.

 

Let it be the limitless art and illustration that we use to communicate with each other into the future.  Let it be a language understood in Yoruba as archival and memory as ecological.  Let it thrive as lichen, microbial matter or the coursing of water through chalk veins and carried across the South Downs, by ants and Bloody Nosed Beetles, Linnets and bees, to find its speakers again when needed by nature, and by us if we can find our way back.

Look on. Here comes the welcome of Saddlescombe Rangers, making possible those new ways of seeing.  Encouraging a poetic and relational investigation into the stories of this our chalk grassland, unique globally precious and ravaged habitat.  Together we are Changing Chalk with re-storied purpose inspired by natural history collections that we find alive again as we wander from Truleigh Hill to Devils Dyke. On this side of the Adur, the South Downs tucks in close. Yet still the lowland chalk grassland has earnt the prefix endangered-.

Let us show that interdisciplinary connections can flourish with the love of walking in good company and a sketch or two and a blackberry on your tongue and a child’s mind recreating the gossamer wings of butterflies. All connects in equity when you are free to roam and born here, moved here or just visiting for the day, can feel at home. For my part, I question where to begin when you hold closet to you, the practice of historiography, social justice, restitution, and decolonisation. When you are here to do more than fill a research gap, or raise awareness, or tease  out the hardest to reach, or make something beautiful, or keep score of the numbers through the door, or write enticing copy for funding bids, or be sculpted by hard edged parameters.

Though you will navigate these collaboratively as you scatter intergenerational story seeds and see what takes root to grow up through the soil, to surprise and to reassure. What will we learn about our love of nature, that makes no demands on us beyond protection from decimation and exploitation? What of dew pond restoration, of rewilding ourselves and so much more?

‘From Collections to Connections’ would disrupt that narrow story arc and propose we value context, evidence and lived expression equally. It hooked me in, beckoned me up to our South Downs for a panoramic gaze, as if an idea could release them from paternalistic romance and idealised docility.  Then to let words loose with all these folk, so that meaning could be remade through community, indigenous and ancestral curiosity. Perhaps its hearts and histories and heritage that draw us in? The hint and tint of 400 million years or more of life on Earth in a fossil case or a solitary women’s daybook reminding us of just how un-prepared we always seem for the joy and sadness that is life,

And loss.

And life and loss,

Again.

 

Still a dried and shrunken herbarium stem holds a memory of Horseshoe Vetch, the glow of its yellow flowering scattered where the thinned chalk grassland sites remain. And there the glorious Round Headed Rampion whispers a promise of the Pride of Sussex. And on the slope, the Bee Orchid pines for habitats destroyed and begs: -Do not pick me or mow me down before I can set seed-. For all this rich diversity will not survive without us here, without our care in relationship to one another. In return we find paths to heal from loss and sadness, from exhaustion and from fear.

I have laid down my sorrow next to Musk Mallow and Birdsfoot Trefoil. So, I can relearn from our ancestral ecology to Rachel Carson, from our elders  to Alexis Pauline Gumbs. From our sistas to  Bàyò Akómoláfé.  Teaching us to fill this Silent Spring with all the songs they taught us and to turn our wounds and theory into portals to humility and to healing. Does this articulate and infiltrate everything that must be exposed to ecologies across this textured landscape? Will it help to re-establish our sense of safety, belonging and dignity, no longer pulling away from feeling and from each other?

I asked these questions as a speaker, to the NatSCA conference  audience in Manchester Museum, The University of Manchester, this May. Did they think of our relationship to nature as a binary in terms of human exclusivity versus the world? Had our pomp and expertise made us distant, disassociated, separate from the community of life in all its mattering. And as we thought a while, I silenced my words, syntax and grammar and left space for the glorious sound of a dawn chorus, so we could all be lost and found again by nature until my time was up.

What next for this Changing Chalk journey, moving me even further away from consumption to conservation.  Asking us all to step up with our wise intersectional consideration even when we have such small privilege of time or funds or networks to draw upon. Even so, where there’s will there’s more than hope that we’ll continue on in community to exist here. 

 

END