Wallace Heim — Unpublished tour

Wallace Heim works in many ways, all within the fields of performance-ecology-culture. She writes as an independent academic, makes sculpture, creates and produces audio fiction, develops ecological and social practice projects, all to enquire about human relations with the more-than-human, with a place. Every place brings its own questions; every question produces its own way to create a response.

Her academic slant is philosophical, reflecting on how new forms of ecological experience and understanding can take shape through the arts (PhD, Lancaster). She has published on whether a place can learn, on ecological conflict in theatre, and on what it means to care for contaminated land. She wrote and produced ‘the sea cannot be depleted’, an audio piece about the Solway Estuary/Firth. Her sculpture exhibition, x=2140, at the Florence Art Centre, Egremont, was themed on how to make decisions about the decommissioning of the Sellafield nuclear site. She is part of a long-term arts and sciences project on the watersheds of Cumbria and the future of climate instability.

Her earlier careers included designing for theatre/film/television, and with others, she started the Gate Theatre, London.

She is an affiliate of the Centre for the Study of Environmental Change at Lancaster University; and on the editorial board for the publication series Performing Landscapes (Springer).

She has lived in south Cumbria for 20 years, often walking the shores of the Duddon Estuary.

Further information:
www.wallaceheim.com
@wallaceheim
FB: wallace.heim

WORKS

Black Combe seen from the Duddon Estuary (Image: Wallace Heim)

What do people say to a place, to a landscape or seascape, while they are walking or watching? What words do they come up with when talking to themselves, words that connect them with a place and with the more-than-human? How do people declare their feelings for a place, while their thoughts might also be melded with the events of the world, overpowering ideas, sorrows and secrets and the chatter of everyday life?

I’m interested in how a monologue by a fictional character can be a kind of writing about a place, writing that is somewhere between a first-person essay, spoken word, a narrative and sensed observation. Writing fictional voices is a way to experiment with ideas and emotions, to try them out. This is a writing that needs to be performed, realised in the human voice sounding into another human ear.

Unpublished Tour has given me the chance to experiment with two monologues about an area of compelling and puzzling beauty in Cumbria. A man speaks to the estuary seas. A woman speaks about Black Combe. Both speak about the uncertainties of the future.

These monologues are works-in-progress. They were performed live as rehearsed readings at the ‘Unpublished Tour’ event in Millom, November 2021. The audio recordings are below.

We slip. We bind. We beg.

As man walks on the Duddon shoreline, he talks towards the seascape as if the estuary had an ever-changing face. He has begun to feel something strange in the storms and in the calm, bringing him to speak to it, face-to-face.

Written by Wallace Heim
Read by Kevin McNally
Recorded by Barry Vernon

The Golden Oar

A woman finds herself burying small things in shallow cuttings on Black Combe as a way of celebrating the fell with tokens of human love. She connects her actions with historical excavations and possible future ones.