How small, how fragile can a work of art be before it drifts away on the wind or floats out to sea? And how large, or long-drawn-out, before we are unable to apprehend it all at once? Katie Paterson is an artist who answers these questions in the same breath – she pictures the furthest reaches of the earth, even of the universe, and asks us to imagine the smallest speck, or span, of space and time. Her materials include the light of heavenly bodies, the sounds of creaking glaciers and dying stars, the tiniest grain of sand added to or taken from the vastness of the Sahara. In First There is a Mountain, Paterson has made a nested set of sand pails, modelled after five famous mountains: Kilimanjaro, Shasta, Fuji, Stromboli and Uluru. Imagine that these mountains, from far-flung corners of the world, have all appeared together on the beach at Cleethorpes, multiplied along the coast, sprung up all round the edges of the UK. An experiment (or is it a game?) with the earth’s scale is under way, but will very soon disappear.
The coast is a place where things come and go – especially a coast like this one, where a third of the estuary is exposed at low tide. One fifth of the land surface of England drains eventually into the Humber, and with all this water comes sand and sediment, detaching itself, as elsewhere in the world, from the highest mountains, but also from slopes, plains and riverbanks. This is just a fraction of what ends up in the estuary; along the Holderness coastline the cliffs erode and are washed down into the Humber. Still more material comes from the North Sea. In fact, around six million tonnes of sediment enters the estuary each year. The tides take most of it away again, but things are not so simple. Above and below the surface, sandbanks swell and shrink; currents twist and turn; ports and channels silt up and need to be dredged clean; sand is thrust onto the beach, scooped out or blown away, and must be replaced. Everything is on the move; whole mountains have been arriving and departing regularly since the last Ice Age.
Still, Paterson’s mountainous archipelago is an apparition of another sort. The seashore is also the scene of historical surprises, magical or monstrous sights. In March 1870 the schooner Clio, which had sailed from Lowestoft, was washed ashore without a soul on board. In September 1956 a large round object 80 feet in diameter hovered off the coast from Cleethorpes one afternoon; when RAF planes approached, it was reported, the UFO sped away. Other curious arrivals on the shore: a cargo of French onions, a monstrous squid with a beak like a parrot’s, several thousand starfish, a message in a bottle predicting the end of the First World War. Stand on the beach for long enough and the world will wash up, in the shape of a miracle or catastrophe. The beach is made of mountains, the mountains were once the floor of the sea, and the earth, as Katie Paterson reminds us, is still saturated with surprises.
