Browse by author
Lookup NU author(s): Dr Rob Mackay
Full text is not currently available for this publication.
Inside the Red River is a poetry and soundscape installation developed for the AHRC funded project Red River: Listening to a Polluted River. Led by Dr John Wedgwood Clarke of the University of Exeter, it explores how creative writing can transform our relationship to a polluted, post-industrial river through listening to the human and non-human voices that have shaped, and continue to shape, its course. If you don’t know the Red River—and it’s not on the usual map of West Cornwall tourist destinations—it rises among neolithic standing stones on the moors above Camborne and flows through a valley that has been worked for tin since at least Roman times, finally emerging into the clear waters of St Ives Bay at Gwithian. Although only 7.5miles in length, and little more than a stream, it passes through a remarkably diverse physical and cultural landscape. Given its centrality to the Industrial Revolution in Cornwall, and the development of hard-rock mining around the world—it flows through part of a UNESCO World Heritage mining site—the Red River’s sediments are rich in stories and ecology that reveal the human and non-human legacies of heavy industry. It even contains a unique sub-species of trout that has evolved to live in its polluted water, a life form that may be considered as much an artefact of tin-mining as the Cornish engine-houses on the slopes around its banks: mining is in its genes. The combination of ancient landscape use, post-industrial economic deprivation, EU-funded environmental remediation, and the continuing growth in high-end tourism based on the image of Cornwall as a Romantic, rugged elsewhere, make the Red River an exciting site through which to question what is wild and what is natural, beautiful and ugly, rubbish and valuable. We have many great poems about beautiful rivers, but fewer about the polluted, post-industrial and ugly. This research project will set that right. It will borrow from the ecological concept of the 'ecotone', or meeting place of biomes, both to read the marginal environments of the Red River, and as a metaphor for the way creative processes may be altered when they touch, enter and meet the river on its own strange terms. This sound installation draws on a continued collaboration between Wedgewood Clarke and Mackay as they have developed numerous place-related works over the past decade which situate the disembodied voice within soundscapes. Their practice requires both artists to experience the same site at the same time during field trips, and then exploring the sites through their own artistic lenses.
Author(s): Mackay R, Wedgwood Clarke J
Publication type: Digital or Visual Media
Publication status: Published
Year: 2021
Extent of Work: 15:27
Publisher: Tate St Ives
Place Published: St Ives, Cornwall
Type: Poetry and Soundscape Composition
URL: https://redriverpoetry.com/creative-responses/inside-the-red-river-rob-mackay-and-john-wedgwood-clarke
Notes: Presentations to date: - Vicarious Vocalities Conference. Newcastle University. 6th September 2022. - Last Weekend. Tate St Ives, Cornwall. 29th April – 1st May 2022. - COP26. As if Radio, Soundcamp radio broadcast from Civic House, Glasgow. 11th November 2021. - COP26. Green Zone, Glasgow. 10th November 2021. - Red River Stannary. CAST, Helston, Cornwall. 9th October 2021.
