Fleeting — Alexandra O'Toole

As we go into another lockdown, the inevitable craving for the outdoors and wide open spaces I know are denied to me for a least a month has begun to stir. I’ve been scouring social media for works that will help provide the mental calm and clarity that a vista can give.

My search brought me to a series of haunting filmpoems taken from Dr Roseanne Watt’s latest poetry book, Moder Dy / Mother Wave, that investigate the cultural memory of the Shetland Islands.

Though darker and more ancient in mood than I was seeking, I loved the atmosphere created by her layering of landscape, visuals, sound and voice - the errieness and language of RAAGA and Kishie Wife will stay with me for a long time. Though darker and more ancient in mood than I was seeking, I loved the atmosphere created by her layering of landscape, visuals, sound and voice - the errieness and language of RAAGA and Kishie Wife will stay with me for a long time. However, the broader subject of the filmpoems reminded me of a piece of own work that I haven’t visited for a while, but actually fits for my mood and mindset perfectly. Reflective, emotive and full of the sounds of calming natural elements, Fleeting was a soundscape installation that I created as a commission for Morecambe Bay Partnership to bring to life the oral histories of Morecambe Bay’s fishing heritage.

I knew that I wanted the format of the piece to mimic the way memories come to us in fragments, at odd moments, and to represent the fleeting nature of our lives as brief interludes in the passage of time.

I thought about the beautiful landscape of the Bay, the forgotten heritage and the busy onward motion of our daily lives taking us away further away from our legacy and ancestors with every passing minute and decided that installing the piece along commuter routes on public transport would enable people to listen and absorb it exactly as memories form and dissolve - in vague, half remembered thoughts and in vivid sensory moments that punctuate their every day.

I called the piece ‘Fleeting’ and established a partnership with Northern Rail that would allow me to set up an installation in train carriages on the Barrow to Lancaster coastal line on every Sunday in September, so that as passengers looked out of the window as the train crossed the Bay, the voices of fishermen and women, living and long gone, would transport them back in time to the work and wonder that took place, and continues to take place, in the landscape they were travelling through.

In the process of creating the piece I listened to over 50 hours of audio footage and spent countless others travelling up and down train lines to determine how the ambient sounds of the carriage might interrupt the soundscape and how best to safely install and use the technology that would play it.

On broadcast days I travelled on the train alongside the installation, catching snippets of the Sunderland Point Sea Shanty Crew, who’d agreed to play on the platforms at Lancaster and at Morecambe stations and talking to passengers about the voices and stories they were hearing.

It was a wonderful, affirming project to work on and since its original broadcast in 2017, Fleeting ran again in 2018, appeared as a special feature on BBC Radio Cumbria and featured as an audio walk in Morecambe in 2019 as part of the Lancashire Arts Exchange.

Fleeting is now part of the Recording Morecambe Bay online archive. Go for a walk outside, put your headphones on and have a listen to it here

You can also look back at my artist journal website, created to document the making of Fleeting here