By Nige
It’s 1990 and I’m sitting in front of the TV at my ground floor rented flat in the then notorious Rowner Estate in Hampshire. I’m between jobs having just spent the best eight years imaginable working in zoology (a story for another time!). I’m thinking about going freelance but I’ve not plucked up the courage to get out there and do my thing….partly because I’m not entirely sure what my thing is. I’ve got ideas, loads of them in fact but something is missing. I feel as though I know what it is that’s missing but I don’t know where or how to find it. It’s a weekday, around 1pm, I remember the time only because I was watching Pebble Mill at One on the BBC and as the name suggests it was on TV at 1pm.
For those not as old as me - Pebble Mill at One was a TV magazine show, a sort or forerunner to the BBC’s One Show today.
So I’m watching Pebble Mill at One and the show’s gardener Peter Seabrooke introduces a VT (video tape) segment about a retired man and his many garden ponds, I’m interested straightaway because I like ponds, I’ve always had my head in one searching for wildlife since as far back as I can remember. As the TV segment runs on I notice that all the chap’s ponds are raised out of the ground like tiny stone built reservoirs, only they don’t look like they’re made with bricks or stone blocks, in fact there’s an odd aesthetic to these retaining walls, a curious rhythmic pattern that nowadays one might think was the work of a 3D printer. I’m glued! Then I can’t believe my luck as the old boy says he’ll show me (I say ‘me’ because at this point he was only talking to me as far as I was concerned) how he makes his ponds. I’m riveted…but at the same time fully expecting not to understand his mystifying crafting method that probably took him a lifetime to perfect. However something completely unexpected and utterly amazing happens, the old chap shows ‘me’ how he makes his many garden ponds by borrowing/stealing his wife’s tights and then stuffing them full of sloppy grey material made out of scrunched up newspaper, water and cement. When he’d fully stuffed a few tights legs with the gloopy mess he then laid them on top of each other like sandbags. When the cement set he had a solid watertight structure. POW!!…on went the lightbulb in my 25 year old head, that was it, just like that I found the missing thing that would take me from the living room sofa to freelance. Ladies tights!…no not ladies tights really.. but in fact the newspaper, water and cement mixture that was inside the ladies tights. With a bit of refining I thought, this would be it, this was what I’d been waiting for!!!
And so it was, that then was the definitive moment over 30 years ago that led directly to Artecology via a most extraordinary journey of learning and discovery with cementitious materials and brilliant people. In the early days I honed my materials knowledge and making skills alone and worked as a freelance artificial habitat maker in zoos across the UK. Inspired by the bloke on the TV, through reinvention and refinement I created a variety of cementitious sculpting and crafting media; With them, I made wildlife documentary sets and loads more habitats for zoo animals. I learned to collaborate with other creative practitioners and later formed an arts collective called Eccleston George. With that incredible team I worked with students and staff in hundreds of schools across the UK; with students from ages 4 to 20 we made dinosaurs and racetracks and outdoor classrooms and all manner of extraordinary things. We worked with communities too on large scale community art and landscape projects…and all of these projects where made possible because of one man and his wife’s tights!
Eventually after all these incredible experiences, still with a ball of pulped newspaper mixed with water and cement still in my hand, Artecology was born, an arts/science collaboration formed, specifically to create solutions to the real life problem of biodiversity loss and also to reconnect people to the natural world by design.
I don’t remember the name of the old chap on Pebble Mill at One, sadly he’ll be long gone by now, but without him it’s fair to say that I might still be sat on my sofa at home, watching TV waiting for inspiration…..so thanks mate, whoever you were!
Photo: I’ve still got this original 30 year old piece of ultra lightweight concrete with a 5 pence piece stuck in it (then newly issued). I stuck the coin in the wet mix to demonstrate the material’s excellent ‘grab’ capability!
We still use a material very similar to this today as a ‘bioreceptive’ surface treatment on our various ecological enhancement units.