Prose, Photography, and Landscape Art by Julie Brook
The tension between fire and water in my Firestack series acts as a visual catalyst, inviting us to watch the tides as they are governed by the moon’s gravitational pull. Wind is expressed by the quality and direction of the flames and the intensity of the fire. Anticipation slowly builds as the tides rise and when powerful waves crash against the stacks.
On a remote coastline in North Harris, Outer Hebrides, I and a team of helpers built the firestacks you see here using the dry-stone walling method (i.e., without mortar or other binding material) on the naked seabed between tides. We carefully fit the stones together to form pillars 6.5 feet in diameter and 5.75 feet high so they might withstand the incoming tides. Ultimately their stability depended on the nature of the weather.
Every 30 minutes stokers would wade into the sea to replenish a fire from a stack of well-seasoned logs. When the sea was very rough, and especially if there was a storm surge, the whole stack was vulnerable to the mass and weight of moving water. Sometimes the fire appeared to be extinguished by a single powerful wave. We’d hold our breaths until, miraculously, the fire sprung back to life and held its own for another hour as the tide rose.
When the cold water reached the bottom of the bowl formed within the top of a firestack, we’d hear a powerful quenching sound accompanied by the squeals and whistles of embers. It was a guttural sound you heard with your whole body.
When the sea was quiet and rising—an incremental rising you felt creeping up your body— the tension between fire and water became a form of choreography: of time, of sound, of light—an exquisite dance between the water rising and receding, the fire dousing and regaining itself.
In 1991, I went to live on the uninhabited west coast of Jura, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. I made my home in a natural cliff arch. I wanted to live close to the ground, in solitude, and to see how this way of living and the landscape around me would influence my work. I painted and drew in the hills and began working directly with the materials I found in my environment. This, and a desire to bring the four elements together in a single work, led to the making of my first series of firestacks.
Here are two excerpts from my diary during this early time, when I worked alone:
Saturday, 10 August 1991. The wind howls and hurls about the sky in angry zest, waking me. The sea roars. It is quite frightening when it is this windy after days of quiet. Drawings flap and tear, drips start falling everywhere, and in the dark I am hurrying about the arch half-naked with goose bumps trying to save the drawings and make them fast.
Monday, 12 August 1991. There is a pregnant suspense in the air. I work hard all evening in the relentless rain building up the walls of the stack. I am getting better at fitting their irregular shapes. The stack is a point in the bay. It marks the tide. I know better how the waters come according to the slight undulations in the seabed. Suddenly the middle part of the bay fills quickly. I am up to my boots in water, reloading the stack with a good amount of hard thick logs. I wait. Soon I can take the raft. It is past midnight and dark. The flames cast bright orange ribbons of light across the sea . . . .
In 2016 I revisited this early work in Jura when I was asked to make Firestack for a BBC4 documentary. This time I chose to create firestacks in Aird Bheag, in the Outer Hebrides. I saw this as an opportunity to explore this work in greater depth and through all four seasons.
It took nine years. As I progressed with the making, the filming, and the editing (I had developed my filming skills while working in Libya and Namibia on other projects), I realized that Firestack was about much more than my initial idea of bringing the four elements together. It was also about working as a team, listening to the weather, and being held in thrall by tide time. It meant consecutive days of firing during the high spring tides, walking long distances over rough moorland at night, enduring hail and snowstorms and physical mishaps. It meant the wonder of a firestack enduring rough seas. In autumn, when the winds were easterly, there was little swell to the sea, the wind whisking murmurations across its surface. The firings under these conditions were as dramatic as the winter firings but in a slower and more contemplative way.
The firestacks connect us to the natural order of things that is also our human condition. They are the direct expression of construction and destruction and all the elements of vitality this journey conveys.
Part 2 of The Land and Tidal Art of Julie Brook, Ascending, will be published in December.
About the Artist
Julie Brook is a British landscape artist based in Northwest Scotland who makes large-scale sculptural works that respond to the environments she has explored. These include the deserts of Libya and Northwest Namibia; the Orkney island of Hoy and the isle of Mingulay in the Outer Hebrides, Scotland; and the West coast of Jura, Scotland. In the last decade she has been making works in stone and marble quarries in Japan and in Carrara, Italy. In 2023/2024, she had major solo exhibitions at Abbot Hall, Kendal; Komatsu City Museum, Japan; and Pangolin, King’s Place, London.
Lund Humphries recently published What Is It That Will Last?, which features Brook’s land and tidal art along with essays by Robert Macfarlane and Alexandra Harris. She is currently making a new sculptural commission on the Fife coastline in Scotland and developing new sculptural and performative projects in Italy and Japan.
Find more of Julie Brook’s work at www.juliebrook.com. For more about Firestacks, tune into her talk with the writer Robert Macfarlane. And take a look behind the scenes in this short documentary, Julie Brook: The Wild Side.
All images by Julie Brook.
