Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis
The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
At the mouth of the cave at Borrowdale, May 2020. Photograph: Lewis Eaton.
On a swelteringly hot day in the North Western Fells of The Lake District, the gaping mouth of a cave offered itself as a refuge and swallowed us mercifully into its cool damp interior. Caves are otherworldly places. This particular cave, set into the hillside of Castle Crag, allows you to peer out at the gently swaying trees and glimmering daylight of the outside world from a viewing point void of light and sound. The daytrip itself had been to seek refuge in The Lakes; an attempt at replacing the stagnancy of a locked-down city summer with a more welcome, less claustrophobic, kind of tranquillity. We spent a few minutes scrambling around on the siltstone, marvelling at the height of the cave walls and exchanging the obligatory comments about feeling small in big spaces. On leaving, I noticed a large, flat stone covered in scrawlings. At the centre in neat, deeply-etched letters read ‘Don’t Waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’ with dozens of smaller sections of writing surrounding this. Each gave names and dates, with many faded with age and dissolving back into the stone’s surface. It was from a frantic Googling during the car ride home that I came to find out we had happened across a sort-of pilgrimage place for hikers: the cave in which a man had lived out his summers for over forty consecutive years.
In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Millican Dalton gave up his life as an insurance clerk in London in order to dedicate himself to The Great Outdoors. Having spent part of his childhood in Nenthead, the North Pennines, he found life and work in the capital stifling in comparison. From then on Dalton split his year, spending the summer months in the cave under Castle Crag and winters in a canvas hut in Buckinghamshire. Far from your conventional hermit, Dalton was an active and sociable member of the community. He organised camping excursions for the outdoors novice which included teaching hiking, rock climbing, rafting and how to forage for food. What I found extraordinary for the time was that these excursions didn’t exclude women, with one of Dalton’s advertisements for a mountaineering course stating his views bluntly: “Ladies are welcome to the camp. There is nothing new in ladies camping, the custom being at least 10,000 years old.” This rare indiscriminate approach led to Dalton forging a long-lasting friendship with geologist Mabel Barker, who over the years consistently recommended Dalton’s courses to women students and friends.
Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.
OPINION
Storytelling
by Madeline DeFilippis | 10 January 2021
I believe that the history of art is a form of storytelling.
This is what initially intrigued me about the discipline – by trade, I am a historian. I deduce stories from the past based on anecdotes, archival papers, and other surviving objects. When I began to study art history, visual culture and its history intrigued me. Above all, I am always interested in the stories behind the paintings, the sculptures, the photographs, the media. What was the artist attempting to tell the audience by using their materials, their figures, or their colours?
In the age of digital media, I believe it is more important than ever to remember the stories behind artworks. On Instagram, we only have a small square and a short caption to explain what it is we are looking at, and why we should care. In the gallery, it is a similar story, with caption panels on the walls (and the catalogue if you can afford to buy it). The story is not privileged.
There is a connection between literature and art that must be acknowledged. Although we call them authors versus artists, it is clear that both create stories which appeal to their audiences using various techniques. In the last twenty or so years, Black female artists and authors such as Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985), Bernardine Evaristo (b. 1959), and Zadie Smith (b. 1975) (to name but a few) have been recognised for their enormous talents in just this area. These creatives’ commitment to their unique creative processes has brought them fame in each of their industries.
Toyin Ojih Odutola is incredibly multi-faceted. Her work is intimate, introspective, and has the perfect quality of leaving the viewer wanting more. All of her works coalesce into a powerful narrative, whether it is about the changes in her appearance, a ‘thought-experiment’ about text and image, or her most recent series at the Barbican Centre about a mythical pre-historic civilisation in an alternate reality to ours. She is a friend to Zadie Smith and a portraitist of Smith and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye (a personal relationship which reinforces their creative connections). Both Ojih Odutola and Smith have contributed to the catalogue (which was a very affordable £12) which provides an insight into the storytelling behind the exhibition. In 2009, the artist was involved in researching a ‘black shale rock deposit’ in Nigeria which revealed that the Nok, a ‘civilisation predating the oldest civilisation indigenous to the region’, had a pictorial culture. This inspired the artist to create A Countervailing Theory, a series of 40 monochromatic drawings of various sizes which depict the ‘Tale of Akanke and Aldo’, a story which the artist wrote to inform the series. Smith has called Ojih Odutola’s multidisciplinary, multimedia approach a ‘radical vision’. The artist reverses roles of power, putting Black women in the positions of authority and identifying queer relationships as the norm. She also posits that love can be communicated in ways we, burdened by centuries of socio-historical noise, cannot fathom. There are many lessons to take away from this exhibition, about love, race, power, gender, the environment, the past, and the future.
Toyin Ojih Odutola, Sadie (Zadie Smith), 2018-19
In her most recently published work Intimations: Six Essays, Smith provides an insight into her beliefs and the changes to those beliefs following the events of 2020. Like artists who, she says, might believe in the political efficacy of art but struggle to connect with ‘regular’ folk, writers face a similar quandary when attempting to answer the question ‘why do you do what you do?’ Eventually, she realises that there really is no difference in filling time by baking or by writing a novel: both are made with love, but both are also a way to fill the time we all now realise exists. Before the pandemic, we had a different conception of time; now, it is infinite in its monotony. But I would venture to say that this is exactly what connects art and literature, and both with life in general: as cliché as it might sound, love is what connects these things. Of course, we cannot say for sure that all creativity stems from a place of love. Passion, anger, sadness, melancholy, curiosity are all emotions which creatives rely upon for inspiration. However, those who are interested in storytelling are connected by a love which I believe is unique. As Smith says, there are questions about ‘what life is for’ that cannot be answered solely by passing time through various activities, but telling stories is certainly one way to do so which feels purposeful and meaningful.
Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker-prize-winning novel Girl, Woman, Other is a story about a creative artist – a playwright – telling stories. We experience various narrators in the narrator’s past and present as she works to manage the weighty expectations of a predominately white, heteronormative British society and wider world. The conceptual vision for this novel exemplifies the threads binding together visual and written art. Ultimately, these are stories about some of the most marginalised people in our society: Black women. They are imaginative and unapologetic, and demand to be the main characters in their own story.
So much of our culture (as the pandemic has powerfully demonstrated) relies on connection and communication. Art and literature are uniquely placed to respond to these issues. They are both topical and timeless. They can speak to the individual and the masses, the abstract and the tangible, the mind and the heart. Ojih Odutola’s exhibition at the Barbican Centre is topical, telling a story about a prehistoric civilisation using issues which we debate to this day, including sexism, queer love, and the image of desire. She has created her own narrative to accompany this series and to inform the interested audience member, but the future of the story is up to the viewer, and their creative insight into ideas of race, gender, and love.
What does the man smiling at us have to say? What is the woman looking at as we stare at her profile? All of these are questions we must ask, because a work of art is, at its essence, a story waiting to be told. We have to coax these stories out and finish them ourselves.
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, No Need of Speech, 2018. Carnegie Museum of Art.