Edgeland Visible (V)

V. Sacralisation

Written by Leonard Yip
Dated 1 Jul 2024

Blessed be the light upon the tiny dark plains.

Scrawled hastily down as I stood atop the knoll, I’m not entirely sure why those words – suggesting consecration, tugging at the presence of God – came to mind. Something about that night’s ecstasy sparked the edgelands into a sense of…otherworldliness? But the world had not turned suddenly alien and unreal. In fact, the reverse felt true. Attuned and astonished by the here-and-now, the edgelands had felt reified instead – a sharpening of reality to me, unveiling the handprints of a Creator.

Much of the edgeland art I have focused on traces a similar route to what I experienced that night. Edgelanders traverse devastation to celebration, then stumble further into sacralisation, perceiving their locality as something transcendent, holy. The motivations animating Samuel Chia’s photography contain this movement. Experiencing a deep brokenness making him ‘desperate for a place of escape’, Chia discovered sanctuary in the edgelands of home. He took devotedly to edgelands by jungles and shorelines, returning often to the casuarina-covered dunes of reclaimed land by the eastern coast. Gazetted for Changi airport’s future expansion and otherwise-unnamed, Chia christened this edgeland ‘Zion’ – a name echoing the Judaeo-Christian promised land of rest, in his own discovery of such succour there. Chia’s work is profuse with themes of sacredness and sanctuary. The commentary which accompanies his photography returns often to the architecture and conventions of Christianity. Flame-of-the-Forest trees above Bahtera’s lakes become ‘saintly guardians’, and beneath the crepuscular rays of the Mandai forest canopy, Chia remembers finding himself within ‘a cathedral of light’, feeling ‘that [he] was in the presence of a higher being’. Cowen, too, experiences a transcendental depth to the edgelands. He approaches the ‘margin at the margin’, sensing how the area’s ‘edge’ has transcended a physical straddling of wild and urban, broaching the metaphysical. He is brought closer to memories and spirit-presences beyond his own at this ‘thin place at the fabric’. 

Cowen’s term recalls the Celtic-Christian tradition of ‘thin places’. These were distant promontories where the borders between worlds seemed to fray, enabling closer communion with God. The monks and pilgrims who sought out thin places were known as peregrini, derived from the Latin peregrinus, conveying the idea of a great distance wandered. Fascinatingly, Chia describes his sojourns into the edgelands as ‘peregrinations’, and the linguistic echo of the practice proves him and Cowen as modern-day successors of this tradition: this time seeking the world’s unravelling fabric in their own localities, rather than faraway, foreign places. 

The geographer Yi-Fu Tuan observes that most biblical encounters with God upon physical earth occur in desolate areas, theorising bleakness as central to the peregrini’s thin places. Though he tentatively names the edgeland as a thin place, noting how ‘bleakness may be found in the country railroad station as well as the desert’, Tuan concludes that ‘in the modern age God has withdrawn from the world’. Yet Chia’s photography unveils the thinness of the edgelands precisely through their profusions and proliferations, working as a counter-spectacle to Tuan’s ideas of desolation and divine absence:

In Figure 4, the ‘cathedral of light’ and the luminosity which brings Chia into closeness with God are composed on the edgeland’s lushness, rather than its bleakness. The jungle atmosphere is rendered reminiscent of a place of worship: innumerable canopy leaves turn the light frangible, diffusing them further through low-hanging mist like a stained-glass window. A sanctuary is sprung into vividness, showing where Tuan’s observation has been short-sighted to experiences of divine proximity that persist within contemporary terrain. 

Edgeland thinness unlocks curious experiences of voice, song and language made freshly audible. Chia hears a ‘delicate forest song’ within his green cathedral. In Aaron Maniam’s poem ‘Walk to work’ (2015), roadside flora grows similar tongues and vocalisations. He hears ‘leaves whisper in hushed shadows’ as God ‘[sends] tendrils of light / to the wayside trees’ at dawn, realising that ‘all things / have their language of praise’. Chia and Maniam’s whispering, singing leaves have roots in biblical expressions of more-than-human presences responding to God with speech – Isaiah prophesies how ‘the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands’. 

‘To say that trees praise, sing, clap, and rejoice’, write theologians Brian Walsh, Marianne Karsh and Nik Ansell on these expressions, is to say that trees ‘in their whole […] functioning can fully respond to their Creator when that functioning is uninhibited’. Conversely, ‘to say that trees groan is to say that trees experience and respond to conditions of human abuse or neglect that inhibits […] their responsiveness. In this way metaphors of praising and groaning enable us to “hear” what the trees have to “say”’. This illuminates how the vocalisations of contemporary thin places might be processed. If the singing of trees functions as a response to acts that nurture, their groaning is a reflex of acts which neuter. Leong’s admonitory tone in ‘Trees Are Only Temporary’ strains to make such groaning audible – ‘if trees could yell in decibels / drown the drone of saws / in final screeching falls / we might be less careless / to cut and carry so efficiently’. Being able to register a living world’s speech demands awareness in how we answer back, recognising  the wounds we have gouged and the hurts we might still heal. Rather than straying towards the anthropomorphic (and thus Anthropos-centric), envisioned speech teaches us to be sympathetic instead, navigating our shared spaces with the generosity of conversation. The interests at stake expand from the ‘I’ of the self to include the ‘we’ of collective, created things. Alongside our vision, the edgelands as thin places sharpen our hearing, becoming spaces not just of challenge and confluence, but also of communion.

The edgelands’ sacrality, however, is largely dependent on the viewer. Thinness is an aspect ascribed as much to person and perspective, as it is to place. Writing of how sensitivity to sacramentality depends on one’s sacra-mentality, Suniti Namjoshi argues that ‘the sacred is in everything, and that is what poets and artists do, they release it to us by our perception’. Edgeland artwork is important because it can influence our perception through its artist’s own: training our eyes to see as they perceive, our ears to hear what they listen to; to commune with the life they discover intertwined with their own here. They teach us another language by which to interpret and respond to this mixed space. This language often stumbles in its excitement, as Chia attempts to communicate the ‘inexpressible wonder’ of each peregrination. Of Zion’s lagoons, Bahtera’s waterlogged undergrowth, and even the bike parks around his neighbourhood at Tampines, he writes that ‘I loved them in ways I can hardly describe. These places became precious to me if for nothing more than for my spirit to be free’. Chia is conscious of the insufficiency of language here, fully aware of its slowness in capturing love for places intimately known. Where Jerome Lim and Ho Poh Fun’s grieving language becomes bogged down by loss, Chia’s language is late because it cannot keep pace with the quicksilver rush of joy and wonder he feels. The prose provoked by his thin, in-between places cuts through the grief of thick speech, arriving at the language of hope mentioned by Macfarlane as similarly vital for the Anthropocene – learnt within the localities right at our door.

In identifying joy, wonder and love for the edgelands as essential survival skills for the human spirit, this language also suggests why these skills are needed. As geographies unique to an age of land-loss and alteration, the edgelands are always under threat – wonder is countermanded with dread, and edgelands artwork embodies this premonitory quality. From Jefferies, tracing a societal forgetting of plant names and the birds’ gradual disappearance, to Leong’s smouldering grief and Lim’s elegiac wistfulness, the movement from devastation to celebration and sacralisation never blithely obscures the note of mourning which shades the edgelands. Cognisant of this, Chia recognises how his edgelands are also ‘in-between places’, in their precarious position betwixt sanctuary and devastation. The former often arises from the latter, returning just as easily to it. Many locations were irrevocably changed or lost over the course of their capturing – Zion, once uprooted from the soil of another country, is now gone, razed again for the expansion of aerospace industries. ‘May these photographs be the enduring memory of them’, closes the album’s preface, presaging how its form evolved from documentary into epitaph through its completion. If sacralising the edgelands demands our response to them, then this must drive us to protect them with an urgency commensurate to the fervency of our love. The languages of hope and grief must work together as twin literacies for the edgelands: our guide to navigating, cherishing, and working to protect these terrains of the Anthropocene.

VI. ANSWERING THE EDGELANDS >