ARTEFACTS
The discovery was not the result of a dedicated search but an accident of development. Shortly after the ground was broken on the new motorway that would rip through the centre of the city, work stopped. Strange things had begun to surface in the teeth of the diggers and archaeologists were called in.
The artefacts were found in a layer of the earth that suggests industry rather than fossil but looking at the photographs in the city archives the researcher thinks of them as grown, not made. She wonders if they are hollow, imagines them filling with water, conducting moisture to a part above the surface, now lost. Once removed from the ground and cleaned, the branching, reaching forms glow against the deep gray of the conservation foam. Broken in the process of extraction, they are fragments of a larger whole, a network.
Beyond a rudimentary note about the dig at Cowcaddens and its inconclusive results she can find no other information. There is an old print of the sandstone mansion that once sat on the site but the building is crowded in by the warehouses and offices that sprang up when the canal was built. She can just make out an elegant facade obscured by a vast colonnade. The house itself no longer exists, the faceted cement columns of the M8 have taken its place.
Someone chose to give a column roots. To allow it to reach into the ground beyond its base, beyond its individuality. What was above the surface was demolished but the roots were forgotten, buried in the subsoil, infiltrating the rammed earth foundations. She wonders if they were the reason the mansion, surely a listed building, was demolished, their tendrils compromising stability like the roots of bamboo, Japanese knotweed, buddleia and other species that homeowners are told to be vigilant of. The grandeur of the column, this ubiquitous architectural form, often more symbolic than structural, is turned on its head as it burrows underground among the soil and the worms that had been so carefully paved over.
In the archive’s collection of building plans she discovers that the mansion was commissioned by someone who is referred to in the accompanying documents as ‘an illustrious gentleman’. James McKinnon, merchant, philanthropist, friend of the Lord Provost, patron of the arts, a donor to the university who insisted that all the young men who enrolled there would receive copies of what he called the foundational texts of humanity: The Iliad, The Odyssey and The Aeneid. His business interests lay primarily in Virginia, in tobacco, in a monocrop cultivated by the worn and tired hands of those brought to the Americas like cattle, those clothed and fed sparingly and paid nothing at all.
Work stopped and archaeologists were called in but the artefacts were unexplainable. Looking up the discovery in the newspapers of the time she reads that they kept uncovering more fragments. Every time they thought they had found the extent of it, new smaller roots would appear, filament-like, holding up work for another day. Delaying construction, the objects outdid the activists who had chained themselves to railings, to diggers, to protest the environmental and social damage
this new road would bring. They were forcibly removed by the police after only a few hours while the artefacts required weeks of careful excavation and scrutiny until the council and the construction company, embarrassed by the headlines, insisted that the objects were of no historic importance and the development should continue.
She imagines the fragments connected together to form a vast lattice, perhaps spreading as wide as the building’s foundations. She wonders who did it and how. Who could go unnoticed, who would have access to the building site, the time and materials to insert such a thing into the city’s substrate. They must have known about the relationship between trees and columns, must have wanted a message to be heard beyond the lifespan of the building and the merchant who commissioned it. She likes to think they knew of the environmental devastation brought about by plantations, of the pollution from the factories tasked with processing the raw materials extracted from the colonies, but perhaps it was just about the trees uprooted to make way for the grids and mansions of new towns, the blocks of warehouses and offices built to house the commodities that brought such wealth to the city, the vast craters carved from seams of sandstone in the Scottish countryside. Perhaps this is too romantic a speculation. Perhaps, like so many neoclassical monuments and buildings, it was just a folly. But there is something to this act of sabotage, whether conscious or not.
–
It is strange to think that all this stone is made of dust. That such infinitesimal particles can add up to a crushing weight. It heartens me to look around the city knowing that these self-aggrandising edifices will one day crumble, be wiped away by whatever new fashion comes along, suffer from the same indignities of decay as we do. The merchant thinks this house I am building him will last forever, will forever remind those walking by of his dignity and wealth even when he is but a skeleton in the ground that was once a pasture. Last time we met he spoke proudly of his philanthropy, of his generous improvement of students and schoolchildren alike, all the while forgetting the degradation of those I read about in the abolitionists’ leaflets, those whose blood stains each cask of Virginia tobacco, each scholarship, each leatherbound book.
I visited the mason’s apprentice after work yesterday, caught him cleaning his chisels, one foot out the door, his master gone. I told him I would like to make a column that will never be seen, that will reach deep into the foundations of a building.
At first he seemed confused by my request and quickly asked how I would be paying for the work. He misunderstood, or rather I had not explained myself properly. I was only after some advice, and perhaps some old chisels and blocks of stone. These I received and carried home on a sack barrow, trying not to get dust on my frock coat as I rattled over the cobblestones, attracting strange looks as I passed.
I spent my Sunday chiselling smooth channels of fluting, cursing every time I messed up a line. I found myself envying the potters who can add water to dust and start again, who can fill a hole by working in a bit of slip, smoothing away the join. When my chisel strays from the line of graphite that marks the edge of the proposed channel, there is nothing to be done. But now I’ve learned to let the wavering lines remain, allowing them to become like the fissures found on the scaly bark of oaks and pines that once supported ancient buildings, those early columns whose memory is buried deep in their stone counterparts.
This morning I worked on the roots before coming into the office. I forgot to brush off my clothes and the architect wrinkled his nose in distaste as I rushed in five minutes late. It was the same when we visited the quarry last week, he couldn’t help but show his distaste at the dust and the noise, all the mess and labour of this trade that he tries to efface with his elegant plans and elevations. But I don’t mind, sometimes I think I am more interested in the process than the result and besides, there is nothing clean about the money that funds the merchants’ mansions.
Maria Howard is a British-Italian artist and writer based in Glasgow. Read more about her installation for 16Collective here.