Waterfall

For two weeks in 2016 a small part of the rural Upper Teesdale landscape was transformed at night by three illuminated barns. The traditional whitewashed field barns were wrapped in slow-motion film of the main waterfalls of the River Tees - Cauldron Snout, High Force and Low Force (Salmon Leap).

'Waterfall', like most of the artist’s works, is a many layered piece, but at the core is a piece about time - the millions of years in creating the unique geology of the Upper Tees valley and the fractions of a second captured of the movement of water, slowed down to a visible speed in the films.

The work takes two of the distinctive elements of the Upper Tees Dale - the waterfalls of the River Tees and the white barns of the Raby Castle Estate - into a single large-scale nocturnal installation over a mile of the fells.

The River Tees is one of the principle rivers of the North of England. The upper stretches of the river pass through the North Pennines - a UNESCO geo park for its unique geological features. Here the River Tees cascades over a series of picturesque waterfalls - ‘Cauldron Snout’, ‘High Force’ (the largest waterfall in England) and ‘Low Force’. While the water that flows over each waterfall is the same, the water assumes a very different character at each falls:

At Cauldron Snout, the water is lively and skips acrobatically over the rocks.

At High Force it’s all about power - here the water seems in a rush to reach the top ledge before forming a more solid volume of immense power that twists and turns on its way down.

By Low Force the river becomes more elegant and mature, waiting patiently before leaping over a succession of ever greater steps.

The landscape of the Upper Tees valley is a gradual transition from wild and bleak to rolling green. It’s an ancient landscape settled for thousands of years. The upper valley is distinct in its traditional whitewashed houses and barns of the Raby Estate. The hillsides are littered with little stone barns - mostly redundant now by changes in agriculture through the centuries.

At Bowlees, three whitewashed barns dot the rolling landscape in a cascade down the fell side. Each barn having its own architectural style and purpose.

‘Waterfall’ takes this vista and transforms the alignment of barns into an illuminated cascade at night.

Each of the waterfalls was filmed at high speed to create slow-motion footage of the movement of the water. Each of the barns was then ‘wrapped’ on all four sides with a short section of the slow-motion footage. So the top barn became ‘Cauldron Snout’, the middle barn ‘High Force’ while the smallest barn at the bottom became ‘Low Force’. The projections were on 6-minute loops staggered so that at the end of each loop the cascade in the landscape appeared to stop from the top to the bottom, before starting again in the same order.

The installation ran over two consecutive weekends. Visitors were encouraged to explore the landscape in the dark armed with only a flashlight. Stewards along the way ensured people didn’t get lost in the dark. The walk from the entrance to the furthest barn took approximately 1/2 hour, encouraging the audience to spend time with the whole installation and importantly experience the landscape at night. The streams of flashlights flowing across the landscape by up to 300 visitors per hour was all part of the unique experience of the piece.

The weekends were chosen to coincide with a full moonrise in the first weekend and a dark sky for the second where the barns sat beneath the milky way above. The dark skies and lack of light pollution from cities accentuated that sense of place both within the landscape and within the wider universe. These are the kind of things that can only be realised in remote rural environments and on a scale that just isn’t possible in a city.