It was one of those soft gray days of spring 2022 when the Covid memorial first opened. Bright but not sunny, overcast but not miserable, the wind blowing blossoms amidst the avenues of trees. People lined up in Glasgow’s Pollok Country Park to walk, remember and grieve together. They wandered holding flowers, talking softly, and inspecting the oak artworks designed by Alec Finlay that act as a form of remembrance for this unprecedented time.
Alec Finlay is a Scottish poet and artist whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. He’s lived with Long Covid since March 2020, and recently completed the memorial in Pollok County Park, called I remember: Scotland’s Covid Memorial. This collective memorial of the COVID-19 pandemic, permanently installed in the public park, is an artwork featuring oak ‘supports’ holding up trees.
In addition to the outdoor art, the memorial includes a book, audio, and web project, which adopts the American artist Joe Brainard’s well-loved form, ‘I remember …’, collages of fragmented recollections and thoughts that all begin with these two words. Single sentences scattered throughout the memorial recall lost loved ones and many aspects of the pandemic, from lockdown to Long Covid. A blend of loss, pathos, grief, fury, and wry humor, this memorial is one of the first collective texts that speaks to the complexity and burden of the ongoing pandemic.
Kat Hill: Why is memory and memorial so important after the trauma of an event like COVID-19? Or to put it another way, what does the work of memory effect?
Alec Finlay: Yesterday I received Roxani Kristali’s introduction for the book of photographs I’m publishing to document the completed Covid memorial in Pollok Park. She writes on this issue: ‘To publicly commemorate an event is to relegate it to the past—or, at a minimum, to acknowledge that enough experience has accumulated to merit public remembrance. The past, however, is a territory in dispute.’ Roxani is speaking from her experience as a feminist and peacebuilder with survivors of violence in Colombia, with a critical curiosity about how we define an event in time as over. She asks, ‘for whom is the ‘post-conflict’ period truly post? Which violence has really ended and which losses and harms continue …’
Memory is caught up within a process of ‘parley,’ where the reality of pain, loss, fatigue, and violence, are complex realities which are either believed, or not, supported, or not, and witnessed, or not. Organ donation has achieved a social consensus where the good of ‘the gift’ is widely accepted, but in the other projects the work of memory is still fankled up with trauma and contention. The memorial must witness the arrested grief of those who couldn’t be with their dying loved ones: for me witness is what allows healing to flow.
KH: The point about ending is interesting. Most people might think about memory as the act of witnessing what is past. Do you think it is important, for the Covid memorial project in particular, to move beyond that simple idea of past and present and attend to the interweaving of layers of time and temporality?
AF: Yes, absolutely: and to this temporal aspect we must add the political. Many acts of memory are, necessarily, political acts, as Roxani implies. The memorial is, in a quiet way, a campaigning artwork because it gives voice to the breadth of experiences of so many people, witnessed through their recorded memories. This goes against the dominant narratives, which soft-brush or coerce what the pandemic was and is, eliding the lasting impact on people’s health, refuting the solidarity of the early months of the pandemic, refusing the need for clean air, deleting evidence, referring to the virus as ‘flu’, etc.
At the time I tried to address the pressure from government and commerce to force an ending on the pandemic, the gradual and deliberate erosion of solidarity, and the refusal to support those for whom the event continues – including those for whom the virus is on constant repeat in their immune systems. There are many examples of coercive pressures which actively prevent us memorializing the complex reality of historical events. Perhaps the true memorial to Covid will be created in 2075?
In each of my memorial projects there is an attempt to represent acts of witness. With ME, I created a collective description by people with ME, because their disease has been falsely represented for decades.
Memory is a human event which can be described and recognised but, because we live in a time that actively questions whether people of different identities can ever know, or feel, one another’s experiences, much of my work is concerned with reaffirming that possibility. I sometimes write about this crisis around representation and commonality – and here I’ll to return to a word I used earlier – in terms of ‘parley.’ Here we come back to Roxani’s question: which acts of memorializing are imposed endings? And who gets to declare an event over – with the implication that those still suffering its repercussions are no longer to be supported?
This idea of endings pertains to chronic illnesses, which are neglected medically because they have no ending. They don’t fit the cliché of fighting a foreign entity until it is expelled from the body. Our culture finds climate breakdown difficult to engage with because it has no obvious ending. Wars and victories propose endings. Domestic violence imposes a false ending. And so do many traditional forms of poetry! But I live in a world of recuperation, remediation, and processes of ‘parley.’
KH: Do you have a sense of how people might use the space of the Covid memorial, or is there a slow unfolding through a series of private acts? It brought to mind debates over responses to the Holocaust memorial in Berlin where the design did not prescribe any form of ‘appropriate’ engagement. And related to this I wondered too if there something about trying to dismantle what might be deemed an appropriate grief response?
AF: The Covid memorial envisages the artworks — ‘oak supports’ for trees scattered through the landscape – as a ‘memorial walk,’ so that the act of memorialising isn’t anchored to a singular object, or objects which exude scale and status. Rather, there’s an attempt to create an intimacy appropriate to grief, using the healing effect of nature. Some of the 40 supports create ‘groves,’ others are deliberately placed singly in private secluded areas. Some people may favor the public ‘groves,’ while other choose a support and tree that is private, even fugitive.
It’s accepted that people can leave flowers, and, in some cases, they add photos or even plaques. There’s a negotiation between their urge to create a personal shrine and the requirement to ensure any element of the work still belongs to the collective. In all this the approach is to guide the interactions rather than prescribe.
There’s an aspect of each memorial which is ‘living,’ for instance, the pebbles people can place in the ‘taigh’–at the botanics, Edinburgh – or the wildflowers people plant as a memorial for a loved one, in Pollok Park. Every memorial is a story that carries beyond the final physical object, by the use of books, blogs, audio, and photography, to record ritual or dedicatory acts within the process of making.
It’s important that I can say to anyone affected, the name of your loved one is there, within the earth, or woven into the project. I’m seeking a respectful alternative to our cultural reflex of displaying names on benches and trees.
Grief is a heightened state which must be respected. In any project of remembrance or healing I always begin from the person, or community, who are holding the most pain, with an awareness that they don’t necessarily wish to perform their grief in public. Creating the ‘taigh,’ the original site that had been selected was a lawn, but I found, and then enhanced, a neglected corner of the botanic garden, and collaborated with the gardeners to create a ‘wilding garden’ which remains intimate and secluded.
Personally, making these artworks feels different to my other projects. The concept must set in flow a process of which I’m not the sole author: it would be impossible that within my narrow self I alone could author an adequate memorial for the pandemic. The work must involve a communal aspect. The skill is, therefore, devising a series of guidelines, or adopting simple forms, within which everyone can belong. Again, this approach reflects my commitment to ‘parley’ and refusal of contemporary tribalism. All of the memories in the book and the audio are in a kind of dialogue, tracing the complex reality of the pandemic, in a way the media rarely achieves.
KH: Why is it important for you that memory and grief and pain are living things too, or at least memorialized in living ways?
AF: I grew up in a garden which was filled with objects, marble, stone, carvings, quotations from Neo-Classicism, and there was something sepulchral about that. I was also aware of the transitory aspects of light, shadow, clouds, flowing water, which forgave the stone and spoke to life. One makes art memorials in a space between the graveyard and the monumental memorials of the nation-state. There is a reality of collective emotion which has neither the finality of a grave, nor the public formality of royalty, war, procession, arches of triumph, tombs of the unknown soldier.
So, my memorials recognize that ‘memory and grief and pain are living things too’, simply because they are. My approach to landscape and memory began with a poetic tour project, the road north, wandering through the Highlands, visiting neolithic sites, notable native woodlands, and rural art venues. My walking was constrained by ME and I began to conceive work around viewing, creating poetic forms that engaged with the view. My collaborator Ken Cockburn and I also, without intending, found ourselves adopting practices and rituals, for instance, I adopted the Japanese tradition of the paper ‘wish,’ a slip of paper tied in a knot as an act of remembrance. I would tie these on trees at numinous places, the orchard at Falkland Palace, stone circles, a Druidic oakwood near Ord.
Photographing those simple wordless knotted forms made from soft Japanese paper, I found something which didn’t impose words, or names, but did exist within the view, for a time, in a modest way. I began to tie them whenever someone I cared for died. They age beautifully — the rain slowly melts the paper and flecks of mold appear. Recently I tied them with a group of bereaved walkers in Fife — again, such a beautiful contemporary concept, a diverse group of people who come together to be with their grief — von a sycamore tree, facing the Forth. These brief shared acts helped me to create the more ambitious memorials, showing me how to integrate the ‘living’ aging transitory aspect, accepting the changing seasons and passage of time as aspects of the work.
KH: Why is the body at the center of so much of your thinking on remembrance and healing?
AF: Certainly, experiences of constraint, pain, and disability, with ME and Long Covid, heighten my awareness of gestures of support, care, or refusal. Losing the ability to walk any distance is a grief, but I still write in a celebratory way about walking, and what I playfully call ‘the walkative revolution.’ How can I do this when I miss walks so much? My disability access project, ‘day of access,’ is about returning vulnerable bodies to wild places, renewing the metaphors of wildness — pain as thorn, moss as comfort — weaving together ecological remediation and human recuperation. I’ve learnt so much from other people with chronic illness in terms of resilience, what they call ‘radical rest,’ and what I would term ‘creative adaptation.’
Memorialising, or remembrance, is a gesture which brings the past into the present. My task is to create healing places within which this can happen. I avoid creating memorials of status, which summon power and privilege to declare an event post-, past-, over.
KH: Would you say that the memorial is less a public space and more a communal act, a communal feeling, a communal seeing?
AF: Yes, that’s exactly what I mean. Parallel to the work of memorialising are a series of works of description: describing the pandemic, describing ME, describing ‘not-walking,’ describing the impact of domestic violence. These all affirm the collective. For that reason, these are typically found poems, and communal texts, because their task is to describe an experience which is not being seen – an illness subject to miscomprehension, or prejudice, the experience of chronic fatigue and constrained walking, acts of violence behind closed doors — and make it be seen, and, even more importantly, be seen to be seen, in all its complex reality.
There’s a subtle difference here, between the public memorial, where people perform military or sentimental acts of remembrance, and private acts, which can still affirm the communal. The artwork, including a book or audio description of the collective, becomes the story the artwork disseminates. I attempt to create a space in which you, or I, or anyone, could be in remembrance, privately, but with the faith their experience was being held in the continuum of the communal. Put simply, that their feelings had a place in which to belong. And this is what I’m searching for myself, given the isolation that pain, limit, and violence impose, can I recover a sense of belonging. These artworks, made for others, help renew my sense of trust, commonality, and reality. Honestly, I’m not sure that I could have endured without them.
When a man who lost his wife to Covid recognized his own pose in one of the ‘supports’, there was a moment of healing. And when a woman placed a stone in the shape of a kidney in its final resting place on the ‘taigh,’ in remembrance of her dead daughter, a donor, there was a moment of healing. Those private moments are like proofs.
KH: Do you have a sense of how the memorial might evolve in years to come and how these ideas might unfold in future generations? What would that ‘continuum of the communal’ look like then?
AF: The representation of complex reality, in a spirit of parley and forgiveness, rather than the current culture of snark, gossip, accusation, and rage. We’ve descended into a catastrophic loss of confidence in the empathic connection between ‘self’ and ‘other.’ We see, time and again, how one community is encouraged to view its own needs and vulnerabilities as threatened by another community, rather than parleying their commonality.
I wouldn’t try to imagine this in terms of the memorial artwork per se, but political models of truth and reconciliation exist, and I will keep speaking out in terms of parley. My work is my vision of that.
KH: Why is it important to be seen and not just heard? It struck me there is something so vital about the way in which your work, even when it includes words and description, is rooted in the visual?
AF: Truthfully, the way a work of art arises — whether in text, handpainted on paper, letter carving, audio, book, beehive, orchard, oak tree-support— is the essence of how I express complex reality. But how that happens is practical, intuitive, and, to an extent, beyond my ken.
I did grow up with a fluid understanding of what a ‘poem’ was — it might be found in RL Stevenson’s children’s verses in a book or be a grey boulder on the hillside with a poem describing the flight of the curlews we’d hear in the evening. So, I can’t imagine not availing myself of all these means: they are the ways to access complex reality.
I’m aware, of course, that seeing, hearing, touching, tying a paper wish, laying a memorial pebble, are at the heart of the work, but here you approach the essence of making, and I simply allow that, without analysis or strategizing. I seek for the truest form, to touch people, working within practical limits, thankful that I’m somehow able to create a “thing” which seems so present and resilient, when I compare it to the difficulties and vulnerabilities of daily life.
Kat Hill is an author & researcher based in the Highlands of Scotland. Her work focuses on questions of landscape, people, and heritage in a variety of contexts, from the bothies of the Scottish Highlands and non-conformist religious communities such as Mennonites in Europe, America and the Global South. Her latest book, Bothy: In Search of Simple Shelter, is published in May 2024 with William Collins.
Alec Finlay is a poet and artist whose work crosses over a range of media and forms. In 2020 he was awarded a Cholmondeley award for services to poetry. He is currently artist in residence with Paths for All and recently completed I remember: Scotland’s Covid Memorial. His publications include I remember (2022), descriptions (2022), a far-off land (2018), and gathering (2018). A selected short poems, play my game, was published by Stewed Rhubarb in February 2023.
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