essay

Obscure Rodent Manifestations:
On Dale Holmes

First published by Huddersfield Gallery, June 2022

Written on the occassion of Welcome To Ratcatcher’s School For Good Dogs Tennis Club by Dale Holmes
Huddersfield Gallery, 24 June to 3 September, 2022

I. Dry Stone Tripping

 ‘Who is the Rat Catcher, and what does he want?’

 ‘Who are the Good Dogs, and why the fuck are they playing tennis?’

With the frustrating illogic of a psychotropic encounter, a tumbledown tracery of carefully painted drystone walls erects the boundaries of a psychic-sylvan enclosure in our minds, forcing these unbidden questions to the forefront of our hapless bewilderment. Immediately suggestive of quaint country lanes and yet preternaturally stained with the mawkish pinks and yellows of a Yorkshire tea house’s gaudiest Battenberg, the globular stones apprehend us as they partition their own weird territory of abstracted leisure. Things might feel cheerful here, if it weren’t for a cloying sense of rural unease.

Peasant-slippered feet erupt from the ground around us. Others emerge too, these ones capped with contemporary sports shoes. Are they the grave markers of some backwater funereal custom or the goalposts of a sadistic game? Searching for some point of orientation, we realize that there are, indeed, recognizable intimations of the ‘natural world’ here, albeit heavily warped in both figure and form. Vaguely defined fungal protuberances, likely the heavy-headed cupolas of the common inkcap mushroom, destabilize the dirt, taking root on stone. Rats - or are they dogs? voles? rabbits? stoats? weasels? - assail us with animal song, plucking a dulcet tune from the broken strings of their knackered violins, tapping out the miasmic rhythm of a dancing plague on the worn skin of a seasoned bodhran.

And now we’re starting to loosen up a little, starting to sink into this weird experience a little more fully, because a welcome mat rests before us, its fibers knitted into some outlandish yet somehow comforting conflation of sportswear insignia and cartoon vermin. This mat is the woven standard of rodent pageantry, and it tells us, without question, that this is the place we’re meant to be. Its quasi-corporate glyph feels familiar. Perhaps we recognise it as the one embroidered onto a favourite sweatshirt or an old pair of trackie bottoms? It makes us feel an almost brainless and yet irrefutably real sense of pride. Like rats amongst rats. And that’s when we finally catch a glimpse of him. Way beyond the walls, ascending a bluff hazed by high summer. That’s where he is, almost indistinct amidst the meadow soft grass, a Piper, securing the gates to The Ratcatcher’s School For Good Dogs Tennis Club.    

II. The King In Trainers        

Rats. Drystone Walls. Trainers. Dale Holmes’ recent works triangulate these natural-cultural phenomena into a trickster-like exploration of deep pastoralism and anarchic leisure. Through wall paintings, free-standing sculptural artifacts, and woven garments, the artist invites us to enroll at The Ratcatcher’s School For Good Dogs Tennis Club, a semi-fictional and arrestingly carnivalesque institution animated by the shifting relations of the urban and the rural, of tradition and contemporaneity, order and subversion, agency and subjection. Inside this improbable clubhouse the uncanny customs of an illusory ‘Old England’ are teased into strange relation with the tribalism and brand affiliations of the country’s sport-oriented present. Here, Men of Morris clack sticks in boots of Umbro. The Burryman is covered in pingpong balls. And John Barleycorn is resurrected as the ‘King in Trainers’.

The ‘Ratcatcher’s’ moniker itself is folksy and forthrightly animistic. It encourages us to imagine unexpected confluences between the pandemonium of the folkloric imaginary and the brittle diplomacy of municipal sports clubs. This might be a place where amateurism confronts orthodoxy, where the excessive energy of the ludic imagination holds more creative power than any official patrolling the sidelines. More alarmingly perhaps, it’s also a place where me might have more fun stomping holes in the set turf of a bowling green than propelling boules along it. Where pavilion windows make for better marks than archery targets. Where rodents bung the holes of a municipal golf course in a mad game of ‘splat the rat’. It’s a place where we might find our own uses for things.     

Despite its apparent novelty, the name itself doesn’t denote a singular institution, but - following the ‘Corpse Road Pack Horse Tennis Club’ and the ‘Broken Hand Tennis Club’, both of which were previously exhibited at Huddersfield’s Temporary Contemporary and Grove Lawn Tennis Club - it simply announces the latest iteration of Holmes’ franchise of fabulated academies, all of which seem a little too eager to enlist us in their proceedings. The resources they offer - these rats, walls, and trainers - may seem like incongruous things to populate a sports club with, but they’re richly mercurial images that allude to both the myths and tendencies of how we’re predisposed to think the urban and the rural. Set loose to run amock here, they allow Holmes to mobilize ideas of heritage, custom, and regionality less in terms of their fixity and more so as conduits of constant exchange. Following Michel Serres, a philosopher whose work was populated with pesky rodents, we might even think of these images as emissaries of a kinetic and perpetual relationality whose pantomimic presence could help us to think about systems of cohabitation in terms of their multi-lateral co-creation, but let’s keep things in an appropriately anglophone register for the time being…

Writing in 1973 with a lyrical flare quite uncharacteristic of the often labored Marxist critique of his day, Raymond Williams traced the matrices of interconnection and exchange that might erode our entrenched stereotypes of ‘rural backwardness’ and ‘urban enlightenment’ in his study The Country And The City. He’d also direct a keen skepticism towards the ‘sentimental’ and ‘intellectualized’ accounts of an ‘unlocalized’ (read fictitious) ‘Old England’ whose golden age of untainted pastoral tranquility he believed couldn’t be located historically. With a comedic deftness, Williams supplied a litany of complainants - from Richard Jeffries and George Eliot in the 19th century, through William Cobbett and Thomas Bewick in the 18th, all the way back to Thomas More in the 16th and eventually the compilers of the Domesday Book in the 11th - who all betrayed how an absurd lament for ‘Albionic’ purity had plagued English culture from the development of the modern novel to the writing of Magna Carta.

Born into a working class family in the Black Mountains of rural Monmouthshire but eventually elected fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, Williams was acutely aware of the continual exchanges that take place between ‘centre' and ‘periphery’ in the production of contemporary experience, and his writing enacts an infectious conjuration of their interrelation through a kind of understated yet clearly enmeshed landscape vision:

‘In the south-west, at nights, we used to watch the flare, over the black ridge of Brynarw, of the iron furnaces of industrial South Wales. In the east now, at night, over the field with the elms and the white horse, I watch the glow of Cambridge: a white tinged with orange; and in the autumn, here, the stubble fields are burned, sometimes catching thorn hedges, and when I saw this first at night I took it as strange accidental fire. My own network, from where I sit writing at the window, is to Cambridge and London, and beyond them to the postmark places, the unfamiliar stamps and the distant cities: Rome, Moscow, New York.’            

Against fixity then, Williams writes of a reciprocity between urban and rural, past and future, that shape their meanings as a result of active and continuous processes. ‘The relations are not only of ideas and experiences,’ he suggests, ‘but of rent and interest, of situation and power; a wider system.’ In his strange deployment of painted objects and crafted garments, Holmes’ themes appear to mirror the sentiments of Williams’ networked perspective, less as stable entities, more so as the flow of mutable intensities, as both vectors of transmission and energies of obstruction. Rats. Drystone Walls. Trainers. This short essay sticks with those things for a while, testing them out as agents of flux, blockage, and convergence. 

III. Obscure Rodent Manifestations

We might immediately think of rats as corrupted proxies of blight, an animal whose pestilential role in the transmission of plagues has undoubtedly earned them their macabre reputation in British myth. Clothing gnawed by rats has traditionally been seen as an omen of impending death, while rats glimpsed aboard ships are the commonly considered portents of an ill-fated voyage. In some understandings of sorcery, rats and mice were considered ‘soul animals’ that might emerge from the mouths of sleeping witches. Certain tellings of the Pied Piper tale even evoke the philosophy of herbalism in a strange conflation of moral fable and remedial plant lore, suggesting the Piper lured the rats of Hamelin to their deaths with a pocketful of valerian. In his 1923 tale ‘The Rats In The Walls’, American fantasist and racist H.P. Lovecraft would notoriously marshal an arsenal of the ravenous creatures as a grim subterranean index of ancestral misdemeanor. The ‘obscure rodent manifestations’ heard beneath an ancestral estate in Exham, England, alluding to a covert history of human trafficking in which a subspecies of ‘human cattle’ were deemed fit fare for both rats and aristocratic cannibals, perhaps unwittingly partitioning Lovecraft’s own middle class timidity from the extreme behaviors he feared percolated at either pole of the social scale.       

But rats are also a potent metaphor of disenfranchised struggle, of insurrectionary vitality, and of swarming, indignant hostility. In 1974 the puckish British hack James Herbert would pen a bestselling tale of urban decay set amidst the slums of East London. Cobbled together as nothing more than a clunky horror novel, The Rats adopted an unwitting tone of social umbrage and modern myth when it relayed how Herbert’s plague of radioactive sewer dwellers had been catalyzed by a very real governmental abandonment of working class Stepney, the author’s childhood home. ‘Old bomb sites had been neglected since the war; houses that were condemned for years still remained standing; garbage from markets and rubbish dumps was never cleared soon enough,’ he writes, hauntingly anticipating the rubbish-strewn streets borne of widespread industrial strike action during the winter of discontent occurring a few years later. That Herbert would ride his tide of rats to literary notoriety as a mainstay of the bestsellers chart is perhaps one of the only joyful aspects of this otherwise truly awful book.       

In a novel that’s as quickening as it is cringe, China Miéville would reimagine the tale of the Pied Piper in his 1998 book King Rat. A story of urban exploration and cross-species becoming, the book’s protagonist Saul becomes attuned to frequencies of scratching and skittering that tell of a mythic confrontation between rats and Piper in a timeless oscillation of control and dissent. By his rat-like movements through the city, Saul is able to perceive some of the the strictures of contemporary neoliberal society built into the conditioning fabric of the modern environment. Through ravenous rodent trajectories, he is able to defeat the ‘conspiracy of architecture’, evading the ‘tyranny by which the buildings that women and men had built had taken control of them, circumscribed their relations, confined their movements.’ What may have once read like a jungle-infused clarrion call for urban insurrection in the late 90s however now reads like a sad hippie’s ramblings on the power of ‘urban exploration’ and the subversive potential of parkour, themes that would arise again with greater impact in Miéville’s later short story, ‘Polynia’.

Tracing the progeny of Lovecraft’s mythic rodents and Herbert’s radioactive pests, we might currently point to the ecological resilience of the ‘super rats’ caught by Japanese collective Chim↑Pom that embody a distinct hardiness and adaptability in the face of ecological crisis. Immune to industrial poisons, and living among the fallout of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster of 2011, these strange creatures are caught, painted yellow like the iconic Pokémon Pikachu, and exhibited as auguries of our own species trajectory in an age of environmental collapse. Such a disquietingly modern fable would seem to revivify the now seemingly platitudinous Deleuzoguattarian trope of ‘becoming animal’. Perhaps the rodents of Holmes’ fictional sports club emerge as similarly portentous inspirations for different kinds of movement, resilience, and evasion? Of sustenance through play. As the philosopher Brian Massumi urges us to remember, refloating Deleuze and Guattari’s original provocation in our present moment of ecological despair, ‘the fact that the becoming-animal is entered into under pressure does not disqualify it as a fundamentally ludic operation. In the becoming-animal of the human, creativity and survival are one.’

Might Holmes paint like a rat whips its tail?

IV. The Minorlithic Antiquarian

You may have seen them clogging up your social media feeds. A great swell of enthusiasm for neolithic stone architecture appears to have sent contemporary artists out in droves over the past few years, smartphones in hand, to drape themselves over the megaliths of antiquity. Following the foppish Ley-hunter John Michell, channeler of earth mysteries, and author of such charity shop classics as The Flying Saucer Vision (1967) and The View Over Atlantis (1969), we might characterize these excursions in pursuit of chthonic encounter as a kind of latent ‘megalithomania’. As the sixties drew to a close, arch contrarian Jeff Nuttall would dismiss Michell’s wide-eyed antiquarianism suggesting that the violence of US imperilasm in Vietnam and the ideological gridlock of the Cold War had nihilistically infused international culture and its attendant art forms, eclipsing the ‘pseudo-mysticism’ of the ‘John Michell Glastonbury/Flying Saucer cult’ with a pop culture that trembled at the terrifying imminence of mutually assured nuclear annihilation. And it’s hard not to feel a similar sense of frustration in our present moment of new-age nostalgia.

But the appeal of these stones for artists is precisely a result of their relative historic emptiness, which remains blank as a canvas, open to both academic and lay speculation. Lucy Lippard would intimate as such in her 1983 study Overlay, suggesting that the land-based art practices emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s might utlilise the unknown histories of Neolithic earth works, burial mounds, and stone circles as useful points of departure for rethinking an artistic canon that had been colonized by white male practitioners. Such sentiments are still certainly present in the contemporary practices that orbit these ponderous works today.

Ratcatcher’s School For Good Dogs Tennis Club shares a similar obsession with the charged persistence of stone, but it gestures somewhere else, through what I’d call a kind of ‘minorlithic antiquarianism’, toward a gathering of cobbles and capstones less immediately arresting in stature - and certainly less celestial in orientation - but nonetheless imbued with meanings and histories potent enough to rival any grand neolithic structure. The drystone walls that have come to preoccupy Holmes as a borderline obsessive motif appear as both colorful painted canvases and jerry-built freestanding sculptures. Bedecking gallery walls as an almost continuous barricade, tethered to tennis court fences as incongruous hoardings, or interrupting our route through an exhibition, they seem to play with the dynamics of movement and spectation, encouraging novel choreographies from their viewers.

Despite their function as tools of enclosure in the development of modern capitalism - a process which saw common lands that had been previously used by the peasantry subjected to violent expropriation by an emergent class of landowners between the 14th and 17th centuries - drystone walls are remarkably protean structures that sustain vibrant ecologies. Their immediate appearance might suggest an unshifting demarcation of boundary, yet their inner composition of precisely oriented ‘pin’ stones and clusters of ‘hearting’ material allow for a necessary, if glacial, flexibility. And where human perception might observe in them a barrier, animal vision is more likely to interpret them as thoroughfares and escape routes, drystone walls providing necessary conduits for survival.

Without overdetermining their meaning, Holmes’ ‘walls’ seem to casually channel a number of possible readings; of histories of labour, of social class and its shifting relationship to property, of rural vernaculars and their debatable function in the cultivation of regional identities. It’s no wonder then that the artist cites Cheshire author Alan Garner as an influence, a writer whose own cosmology has been distilled through the rocks, soils and mulch of Alderly Edge, ‘a part of England strong with magic,’ where ‘Merlin watches with King Arthur under the hill,’ and where a specific instance of ‘walling’ would provide the focus for what is perhaps the author’s most concentrated exploration of intergenerational exchange, The Stone Book Quartet (1999).

Garner is remarkably attuned to the alienating vectors of the British class system, and his education at both Manchester Grammar School and the University of Oxford between the 1940s and 50s would apparently enforce an intellectual and emotional disconnection from a rural working class family whose livelihood had always been plied by the application of craft, from stone masonry, to smithing. ‘This was the dilemma,’ he announces in the short 1973 film All Systems Go!, ‘I had found an education that freed me from my roots while equipping me to understand what it was I had lost.’ The Stonebook Quartet then becomes an invocational rite in which Garner expresses felt proximities to his family through the tentatively crafted evocation of trade, as he writes the story of his grandfather and great grandfather constructing a wall together. ‘He took the new stone, the square dimension, and he built. He smoothed and combed the blocks, and they fitted together with hardly a knife-space between them. Their weight was nothing for him, and Joseph watched the old man happy.’

These are material-linguistic excavations, a kind of sympathetic ‘word mattering’ of stuff and process through which Garner appears to write, or indeed build, himself back into his family’s story. And when he writes ‘Ay, he was a bazzil-arsed old devil, but him and me, we built that,’ ventriloquizing the dialogue between his relatives, we get the sense that Garner himself is present in the exchange, belatedly making his own contributions to the wall’s legacy.        

V. More Than Half A Bicycle

In the summer of 1995 I got screamed at by a conservationist for recklessly scrambling over, and partly destroying, a drystone wall at a camp site on the banks of the River Dane in Derbyshire. The fact that I was wearing a pair of Converse ‘Destroyer’ Tar-Max trainers - a rugged outdoor basketball shoe built for tarmac courts and containing reservoirs of neon yellow REACT® Juice designed ‘for a new breed of player’ - seemed to add a uniquely destructive charge to my delinquency. The anecdote has stayed with me for years as a weird parable of what might be construed as dissidence in a rural context. Of how apparel and misconduct and play don’t carry stable meanings as they migrate between rural and urban locales.        

Ratcatcher’s School is full of trainers; Adidas, Fila, Nike. Low-top leisure shoes that promise athleticism but get all too easily scuffed up, muddied, and water-logged in the countryside. Capping a bunch of upturned and immobile legs, they allude on the one foot to a kind of underprepared and ill-fated pastoral leisure, on the other they suggest the dislocation of British street culture into a world more attuned to the less affordable Barbour, Osprey and Berghaus. In the East Midlands, where I’m from, and especially the North of England, the recession of industry since the late 1980s has coincided with the emergence of urban music and its associated apparel brands as the popular culture of working class kids. Often talking about economic disaffection and the endless hustle of Post-Fordist capital, it’s easy to see how young people who would have once worked in the coal, steel or manufacturing industries get more from an artist like Drake mournfully singing ‘workin’ on the weekend like usual’ about dead-end service sector jobs than they would the charged political folk music of Ewan MacColl. This isn’t to suggest a total cultual seachange as such, but, as MixMag journalist Joe Muggs has quite rightly suggested, implying a continuum of similar sentiments expressed via electronic means, that ‘bass culture is folk culture’. Weirdly, street culture has recently started to embrace hardier, ‘tech-wear’ hiking brands like Nike ACG, Arc’tyrex, Columbia, and The North Face, perhaps betraying something of the environmental harshness of our present moment and a perceived need for immediate protection through the sartorial expression of preparedness, through GORE-TEX and RIPSTOP.            

In a conversation with the artist in the lead up to his exhibition, he explained to me that a good deal of the show’s content arose from the sheer ‘sensory overload’ of simply being out in the countryside, as though the work might be a technique of latently processing the sense data encountered while blasting along the roads surrounding Huddersfield on his bicycle, The New Aspidistra 1, which, as it happens, is also a hand-built and painted artwork. Following media theorists like Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Paul Virilio and Thomas Lamarre, we might call this form of machine-mediated vision ‘ballistic’, accounting for the strange frontal focusing of perspective that occurs when a human body moves through space at high speed, the inevitable blurring of any perceived foreground, and the hypnotic character attained by the mid-distance as it swirls past us with a novel fluidity. Add the rural flux of weather, scent, and sound to this intensity of colour, pattern, and motion and we might, for want of a better word, characterize this intensifying of consciousness as a form of unmedicated psychedelia. Lovecraft, again, a trenchant materialist, was prone to moments of sylvan inebriation that demonstrate something of the weirdness innate to the rural. In his 1917 tale, ‘The Tomb’, an otherwise claustrophobic parable of sepulchral obsession, he writes of his protagonist’s spirited bucolic perambulations: ‘when the alchemy of nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odors of the soil and vegetation.’

Holmes’ large wallpainting at Huddersfield Gallery is certainly reminiscent of Neo-Romantic tendencies in British modernist painting that sought to capture such reveries. Its vast scale is particularly evocative of John Piper’s The Englishman’s Home, a mural commissioned for the Homes and Gardens Pavilion of the 1951 Festival of Britain, London, which forged its own peculiar and disorientating immensities from bucolic quaintness. But beyond any formal comparison, Holmes’ work shares a deeper painterly energy with the movement, specifically in its proximity to, well, ‘movement’ itself, and the exploratory junkets of outdoor pursuits.

Throughout the 1930s, Neo-Romantic moderns such as Paul Nash, Ben Nicholson, and Graham Sutherland contributed their paintings and drawings to a series of now iconic Shell Guides, edited by the poet John Betjeman and aimed at motorists exploring the British countryside in their newfound leisure time. Alongside Shell’s continued collaboration with The National Trust, a troubling relationship mapped powerfully by Patrick Wright in his important 1985 book On Living In An Old Country, such gestures would furnish an uneasy alliance between the landscape vision of painterly modernism and the emergence of a petrochemical capitalism that continues to threaten our way of life today. As Wright rigorously demonstrates, such alliances subjected the English countryside to both a preservationist capture (the selling of ‘heritage’ back to the people) and an industrial interference (the implementation of oil infrastructure) that repositioned the landscape as a ‘sacred geography to which the public has no legitimate relation except through an appreciative and increasingly educated visual imagination.’ Shell-endorsed modernism provided motorists with an image repertoire bold enough to be viewed in transit, whether on posters, placards or walking guides, and it ultimately aimed to catalyse warped sentiments of tub-thumping belonging and national pride while quietly deflecting attention from a corporate ambition that was reshaping the land.   

Holmes’ preferred means of transportation underscores his art making with a markedly different kind of perception to the motorist frontierism of the modernism that precedes him, yet his forays into the countryside perform the inheritance of a politically and historically shaped idea of rural pursuit. It’s that sense of breezy, leisurely recreation that lends Ratcatcher’s School its buoyant character, that lets it themes play out with an affecting levity. It’s a good-willed, open and ultimately generous painterly enclave where we could reflect on, amongst other things, contemporary British regional vernaculars and their role in the affirmation or subversion of the production of a heritage that will likely shape our future. It might be nothing more than a whacky municipal sports venue made of painted stones and rats and trainers, woven tennis ball rugs and embroidered tracksuits, but it’s somewhere we can bat our ideas about these things around for a little while and maybe find some novel uses for them. It’s a place where we might learn to become good dogs.