Start the Week

21/03/2011

Andrew Marr talks to Pamela Yates about filming the mass killing of Guatemala's indigenous population during the 1980s, and how thirty years later her footage has become the evidence in a genocide case against a military dictator. And from the countryside of South America to the vast landscape of the Arctic: in Melanie McGrath's latest book, White Heat, nothing rots on the tundra, and all bones and memories are left exposed. The light and sea of Margate inspired Turner, and the Director of the Turner Contemporary gallery, Victoria Pomery, aims to put the Isle of Thanet on the artistic map. And a chest carved with wave forms is the centre piece of a show celebrating 50 years of design by the furniture maker, John Makepeace.

Producer: Katy Hickman.

Duration:: 41m
Broadcast on:: 21 Mar 2011
Audio Format:: other

Thank you for downloading the Start the Week podcast from BBC Radio 4. For more information, go to bbc.co.uk/radio4. Hello, a conversation with a strong sense of place today. Later, we're going to be talking about England, the skies over Thanet, the loveliest in all of Europe, said Turner, who knew a thing or two about skies. And a rare thing these days, the New Public Art Gallery, the Turner Contemporary, is opening in Margate and we're joined by its director, Victoria Pomerie. Plus, the woods of Dorset and England's wood in general, inspiring one of the greatest makers of furniture, a man called the father of British furniture design, John Makepeace. Before that, further, revealed the plight of the indigenous Inuit in Northern Canada, brought vividly to life in what I can only call a campaigning thriller by Melanie McGrath. And to start with, what happens when a leader attacks his own people, and instead of being bombed by America and her allies, survives and retires. Pamela Yates is an American filmmaker whose film about Guatemala's vicious war in the 1980s was shown around the world. But at the heart of that war was a genocide of the native Maya people, and the search for justice turned to her original footage. Pamela, can I just start by reminding people about the Guatemalan conflict, because it's not so familiar. It certainly isn't. It's the sole genocide in the Americas in the 20th century. And so few people know about it, including Guatemalans under 30. So it's incumbent on us to remember it, to act on it. And none of the perpetrators of that genocide have been brought to account. And yet the Guatemalans have never given up on their quest for justice to make this happen. That's at the heart of soul of Granito. Of Granito, which is the field that the new film has been made. And it's the Maya people who were the indigenous people living in forests and farmland. And their land was taken away by big landowners. And that was probably the origins of the of the fight. That's the origins of the fight back in the 1980s. And it's the origin of the struggle today, although today is taking the form of big multinational projects in hydroelectric and mining. When you started out, you were very young, you're you're seen in your original film where the mountains tremble with your sound boom. And with with remarkable courage, you and your cameraman made your way to the heart of the rebel insurgency against the Guatemalan government. They look very much like everyone's idea of sort of Marxist rebels hiding in the woods with their sort of berets and the shagavara t-shirts or so. But at the time, were you aware of what a dangerous thing you were doing? I was aware of what a dangerous thing I was doing, but I felt that I was in a unique position to be able to bring the story about what was happening in Guatemala and hopefully stop the violence. In my youthful innocence, I thought that if the rest of the world just knew what was going on in Guatemala, it would help stop the violence. And that drove me. And you also managed remarkably to film with the army, committing the terrible acts. And you interviewed this extraordinary character, General Rios Mont. So tell us about him, because again, he's an unfamiliar character. General Rios Mont was the president of Guatemala and head of the armed forces from 1982 to 1983, which was the peak of the genocide. And he is the one that strategized and implemented a plan to exterminate the Maya population in the highlands. He is now a congressman in Guatemala and heads of a political party. There have been multiple efforts to bring him to justice, including an arrest warrant for him against him for genocide. And yet he still is powerful and wealthy. How can this be? And you interviewed him at the time all this was going on. You asked him whether he was involved in repression. He kind of laughed, batted away the question, but did say that he was properly in control of the army, which will become important later on. You then, the second part of the new film, Grenito, takes us to Spain, which will surprise a lot of people. Why is the Spanish court so important in trying to bring people to justice? The Spanish National Court is in the forefront of the principle of universal jurisdiction that says that some crimes are so horrible, that in their country of origin, they're not being prosecuted, that any court anywhere in the world should try them. And Rigo Berta Menchu, the Nobel Peace Laureate, was the plaintiff who brought the genocide case to the Spanish National Court, having been influenced by the Pinochet case. So the idea is- So the Spanish court simply asserts its global right to pursue these cases. Absolutely. And they investigate it and they see whether there's enough evidence to issue arrest warrants and to bring the alleged perpetrators to trial. In the case of Guatemala, they found that there was sufficient evidence and they ordered eight arrest warrants on charges of genocide. Two of the defendants in my original film, When the Mountains Tremble, have actually been issued arrest warrants. And so that's why the lawyers in the Spanish National Court case asked me to go into all my filmic outs to find forensic evidence in the genocide case. And that's where I found the very damning evidence against General Rios Monde, which asserts his chain of command. And that's the liability theory in the Spanish National Court case. And you found that by going back through footage that wasn't included in the original film, searching through your archive, as it were, you were aware that something pretty horrible was going on back in the 1980s, but I get the impression you weren't aware of quite the appalling depth of the carnage. No one was. It was really only until the Guatemalan Truth Commission convened and issued their final report in 1998 that it was found that genocidal acts had been committed. So it was uncovering of this history that really led us to the understanding that we have today and hopefully to a course of action. At the time, Ronald Reagan appears briefly in the film as a bit player, as it were, explaining his support for the Guatemalan military. But it was a time when anybody who was fighting, you know, guerrilla activities in Latin America would have been regarded as Marxists. And they were probably most of the Marxist revolutionaries. There will be some people who say, well, actually, it was terrible, but a bit like Pinochet, these countries have come on a lot. Is that the case with Guatemala? What do you mean by come on a lot? They've become richer. You know, if you go, if you go to Santiago de Chile, people are now having a normal political conversations. It's a wealthier country. And somehow it's escaped from the Pinochet years. That's not really the case in Guatemala. In fact, the political violence from back in the 1980s has now morphed into drug trafficking violence. And the reason for that is that the impunity from back then has never been addressed. And I think that Guatemalans feel that unless they address what happened in the past, they can never be a democratic, modern, or prosperous society. So in their case, the two go hand in hand. And I would also say that back then, you know, the people in the resistance against the military dictatorship were to a greater or lesser degree Marxist. They had a greater or lesser degree of consciousness. What they did have was the hope that Guatemala could be transformed. And one of the, it was a key guerrilla leader who got you in there and turns up astonishingly later in the film, looking like a kind of rather well-dressed sort of businessman who's been living underground for sort of nearly 20 years. Absolutely. Gustavo Meonio. He was one of the founding leaders of the guerrilla army of the poor. He now directs the National Historic Police Archives, where they're uncovering the role of the police and state terror during the years of the genocide. And just before we open this up, Rios Mont himself, the guy who was responsible for the genocide at the top, he can't leave Guatemala, is that right? You can't get him. You haven't yet found a way of actually getting hold of him in Guatemala, but he can't leave the country. He can't leave the country and the Spanish National Court case has really emboldened judges and prosecutors in Guatemala to open their own cases. So that's what we call the Justice Cascade, when an international court really has a profound effect on domestic prosecutions. And sorry, there's one other thing I should just ask you about and raise, because in terms of the violence still going on, or the threats of violence, the forensic archaeologists who were digging up the bones of the people who were murdered in large rooms are now themselves the subject of threats. The idea, the concept of granito, which means tiny grain of sand, is a Maya concept that each of us have our small bit to contribute to positive social change. And the forensic anthropologists and archaeologists are really iconic in that sense. Every single day, they're putting their tiny grain of sand. Of course, they're in danger, but that hasn't stopped them. They're putting their masks on, they're going down tunnels and they're picking up bones and trying to work out whose bones they were and how they were killed. Yes, and they're using them as evidence in the genocide case as well. Pamela, you mentioned in granito that you felt frustrated that when your first film came out, when the mountains tremble, the film was really widely distributed. It became very famous, and yet ultimately it didn't stop the violence, it didn't change anything. And I was just wondering with granito, was that a kind of act of redemption for you or act of atonement to go back and try and make action from your film this time? Absolutely. How many times in life do we get a second chance? And in so many ways, this was the story of a lifetime that came back and gave me a second chance. And not only that, but all of the people from back then, Belegourgo Bertemenshu, who's the storyteller and when the mountains tremble, became the original plaintiff in the genocide case and is in the new film as well. So it's a story of destinies woven together. And perhaps it was my destiny to be able to make this new film. Victoria Pomerie. I just wanted to ask you about the sense of aging. I mean, there was, Andra's already mentioned, you were much younger when you made the first film. But we get a sense of aging coming all the way through to the granito and this lovely concept at the end of each of our own responsibilities. But you think age has given you a sort of sense of being able to look back in a slightly different way. I do. That's one of the beauties in power of aging. And also, granito is very much about documentary filmmaking. I try to bring all of the things I've learned through my experience to bear on this story. And the hope is that this story will also have great resonance for citizens around the world trying to throw off murderous dictatorships, putting their tiny grain of sand. Sean, make please. Pomerie, I find it extraordinary that you were there in Guatemala at such a critical time. And I wanted whether you knew before going just what it was you were going to find. I didn't know what I was going to find. I knew that it was a hidden war. I knew that it was a hidden story. And I knew that so many courageous Guatemalan journalists had been killed or silenced trying to tell the story. And so I thought I would give it a chance, give it a shot, see if I could penetrate what that story was. Well, it's an astonishing film, both astonishing films. Let's move now to another indigenous people who weren't massacred, but they had a very, very hard time and a very strange contemporary story, 20th century story, I should say, Melanie McGraw, you wrote about the story of the Canadian Inuit people in the long exile. But you've come back to this place for a thriller, which I described at the beginning as a kind of campaigning thriller because it is a proper thriller. But I think people will come away with it fascinated by the back story of the Inuit. So to start with, a lot of these people and particularly the children were forcibly removed from their families and taken south into mainland Canada to be educated. Yes, that happened generally throughout Canada with its indigenous peoples, not just the Inuit, but the native American people too. And rather in a similar way to the way it happened with the Aborigines in Australia. And a lot of children were then transported right back up to their arctic communities without being able to speak any inuktitut, the local language, so they couldn't actually communicate with their parents. They also came back a lot of them infected with Southern diseases, most notably TB, which when you say there wasn't a massacre, there kind of was a massacre, but it was a massacre of neglect in a sense that a lot of the Inuit fell prey to Western illnesses and were not treated right up until actually the 1970s and the 1980s. And there was a second phase in this story where large numbers of Inuit people were sort of resettled into the far north for geopolitical reasons, I suppose. Yeah, well, it was after the Second World War, the Canadians realised that the United States actually had more personnel in the Canadian Arctic than the Canadians themselves did. And the US was making moves on the Canadian north as were Denmark, Norway and other arctic nations. And the Canadians got very worried about this and felt that the only way to claim sovereignty over the territory was to have some Canadians living on it, and the only Canadians likely to survive were Inuit. So in 1953 they forcibly removed 19 Inuit families from their homes in the Hudson Bay, about the same latitude as in Vanessa, and they moved them 1500 miles north to Ellesmere Island, which is the most northerly landmass in the world, and more or less just left them on a gravel beach. Good grief, and yet they survived, and that is the setting, that is the area for the thriller that you've written. Yeah, I wanted to write something that made those people's lives and the place itself more accessible, and hence to write an entertainment. You know, I hope I've written a page turner, but the point, there's a slightly more serious point too, which is that these people are like you and me. I mean, they watch TV, they play computer games, they just may never have seen a tree, or may never have ridden in a car, but in terms of their humanity, they're as recognizable as your next door neighbour, and I felt particularly now at a time of tremendous change in the Arctic, the more people understood the Inuit, the more respect they'd have for them, and the more understanding they'd have for them, and the more they would see that the Inuit really are the stewards of the Arctic, and whatever happens in the Arctic, it needs to be led by the Inuit. Because there is an underlying melancholy about this landscape caused by global warming, climate change, the changed behaviour of the bears, the changed behaviour of the ice and the snow, which is a kind of theme underneath the human story. Yes, absolutely. The kind of change that's happening in the Arctic now is that the reasons for it are very complex, I think, and much under dispute, but there's no disputing that the changes happened. Even to the degree that in the western Arctic, for the first time ever, grizzly bears are breeding with polar bears to produce this cross that they call the "pizzly" up there. What do they look like? Well, they just look like sort of blonde grizzlies, but they're much meaner. Oh, right, yeah. Don't want to come across one. But the ice is obviously melting much more quickly, and that doesn't just have an impact for water levels and so on. It also means that it becomes very difficult to travel, because the Inuit up there travel on the ice. It's a desert. One thing people don't often think about, about the high Arctic in particular, is that there isn't any snow. It's just ice in rock. And in the case of Pamela Yates's story about Guatemala, the evidence, the bodies, and so on, are rot away quite quickly and have to be dug up and burns. One of the points that you make in your thriller about the high Arctic is that it's, in a sense, nothing is lost. Everything is lying permanently either frozen or to be dug up again or to be uncovered underneath stones. Yeah, that really struck me when I first went up there, that particularly in a city with, as historically rich as London, you dig down to get the history. In the Arctic, it's all on the surface. Scattered. Scattered. And there forever, nothing rots there. So it's a kind of channel house. The tundra is littered with bones, human and animal from centuries past. Interesting. The idea of making people understand another part of the world through a thriller. I don't know whether you would consider yourself now first a thriller writer or somebody as it were championing the Inuit people, whether there's no distinction between the two things. Well, I think of myself as a storyteller, but I hope that I tell stories that have some meaning beyond themselves. So white heat is intended to be a page turning thriller. It has a background of this extraordinary Arctic landscape, which is very contested and going to become more so as oil and gas exploration increases in the area. But it's also a comment, I think, on, I hope, on the contemporary condition of the Arctic. And a manifesto for us being very careful what we do with the Arctic, because it's a very delicate terrain. And once it's gone, it's gone. Well, we had the writing explorer Sarah Huila on the show not so long ago, talking about the politics of the high north and the fact that the Russians, in particular, but other countries are really driving because of global warming. They feel that there's fantastic oil fields and gas fields there to be exploited. And there is a kind of, it's not yet a rush for the Arctic, but it's speeding up, isn't it? It is indeed. And the Russians have put frigates out, naval frigates out in the summer around Ellsmere Island. The Canadian Navy has a presence now around Ellsmere Island. And one of the issues of the eastern Arctic archipelago is that no one has yet established who owns the waters in between the islands. And that's actually historically a fault of us Brits. When we seeded that part of the Arctic to Canada in 1870, it was very unclear about who owned both the territory and the waters between the territories. It's now been established who owns the territory, that's Canadian land, partly as a result of dumping the Inuit off there. But who owns the waters as a whole other matter? So that I think in future is a matter of great contention. Victoria Pomerie. I just was interested how you first got interested in that part of the world, and when you first went there. And then how did you cope with those temperatures? It was a reference in the book of it's minus 25 degrees. And it sounded like the people going off to have a barbecue or something. It sounded like it was balmy. Yeah, I did actually have a, I was staying with some Inuit people up there. And we did actually have a barbecue at minus 28, which they thought was a lovely, lovely breezy spring day. I guess I'm always interested in marginal places where people have a struggle to survive because I think dramatically, from the point of view of storytelling, that the greatest stories are there. And I felt that it was a story, there was a tragic story that these people were moved up there. It was also a story of great human resilience and resourcefulness. And as for the cold, I'm not actually a cold weather person. You chose badly. Pamela Yates. You painted an astonishing and beautiful portrait of the Arctic. I'm wondering how that kind of lunar landscape is really reflected in the culture of the Inuits. I think that the landscape, unlike most landscapes, the landscape of the Arctic is something that you cannot negotiate with, or at least you can only negotiate with it in a very subtle way and from the position of absolute knowledge. And I think the Inuit do have absolute knowledge. The landscape is inside their bodies. And it's one thing that's been known about the Inuit for hundreds and hundreds of years, that they can draw you a map of virtually anywhere. They were drawing maps of the Arctic before the Elizabethans for Martin Frobenche got to the Arctic in the 1570s. And they have a very subtle understanding in the blood, understanding of Arctic ways, which we can never have. And I think that's, again, that's why it's important that the Inuit at the forefront of any great decisions that are made about the Arctic, because we can never understand it in the same way. John Makepeace, not a lot of wood for you up there. No, very sparse. Melody, I'm wondering how the Inuit culture survived that transport south and then they're returning north again. Have they reestablished a culture that is in any way like that, which would have existed before? I think, sadly not, not entirely, there have been attempts to, there are attempts to reintroduce in the schools and make sure that the children can speak the native language. There are attempts to teach the children traditional skills, because there's often a tension between the kind of, I mean, these are children who, for the most part, won't be leaving the Arctic, and certainly up on Elsmer Island, will be leaving lives that are subsistence hunting lives, by and large. And so there's a tension between the Canadian government wanting to teach them about one textbook up. There was the highways and bioways of Texas. I saw in a school up there, which was somewhat bizarre. And the need for them to learn traditional skills about the land, which they can only do by being on the land. Well, let's move now to a slightly less windswept and forbidding landscape, the beach at Margate. It can be very windy there. It can, it can Victoria. I'm sure it can. Turner, the great, the great painter Turner, said that the skies over Thanet are the loveliest in all Europe. And overlooking those, kind of looking up at those skies, rather, is this new gallery, the Turner Contemporary Gallery, sorry, which opens next month, and Victoria Pomeray, you're the director of it. This must be the last moment for quite a while, where a publicly funded contemporary art gallery is going to open. Yes, although this year it has to be said, there are three of us, I think. There's another chip field designed gallery opening in Wakefield at Hepworth and another building called First Site in Colchester. We are the last of the generation. It's a very exciting moment, obviously, for Turner Contemporary. And I think in the longer term, we here in Britain need to think carefully about cultural provision. The idea for Turner Contemporary developed out of needing greater cultural infrastructure within Kent, which suffers from its close proximity to London, but also as a regeneration project. So it's an initiative to regenerate Margate and the entire East Kent region. Let's talk a little bit about Margate itself, because people think of it as the sort of, you know, the jolly, cheeky, chappy resort of the post-war period. But it was also, it was a magnet for aristocrats and for artists going way back. Yes, it was definitely one of the first seaside resorts. I think it had the first donkeys on the beach of anywhere in the UK. It was also a place where writers, architects, Pugin Cames lived in Ramsgate, around the corner. T.S. Eliot wrote part of the Wasteland at Margate. So it's had a long cultural history. Turner made repeated visits to Margate. He went there as a child. He went to school in Margate in the old town. He then returned in the 1820s and 1830s and many of his key works feature Margate or the North Kent coast. And he returned for the skies, but also for his landlady. He called himself Mr Booth. Yes, he returned for two things. I think Mrs Booth was a key figure. And the new gallery designed by David Chipfield is actually built on the site where Turner used to lodge with Mrs Booth. She had a delightful double-fronted house looking out onto the sea front at Margate. Sadly, that building was demolished many years ago. But I think we have a very, very direct link with Turner through the site and the location. And the views from the gallery are some of the same views that Turner would have seen from this lodging house. Thanks to Tracy Emman, the artist, Margate has a place on Britain's art map. But I wonder whether there was much sort of collective memory or town memory in Margate about Turner when you started on this project? Yes and no. I think some people know a lot about Turner and Turner's links to Margate. And certainly one of the key drivers for Turner Contemporary back in the late 80s and early 90s was an elderly gentleman called John Cross who knew a lot about Turner's relationship with Margate. I think sometimes I'm amazed that people haven't heard about Turner, but that's quite understandable given that the Turner Prize is all about contemporary art and lots of young people think Turner Prize must be about younger artists. And this gallery, which looks very modern, is going to do a, you're going to be doing a mix of older paintings, will be the old Turner there as well, but largely contemporary art or modern art. Large contemporary, I think it's saying that in his time Turner was a contemporary artist. He was one of the leading contemporary artists. He was controversial. He was not conventional. Contemporary artists today continue to be radical and inspiring and we want to show the legacy between Turner and the historical with today's artistic practice. It cost around 17 and a half million pounds, I think the gallery, a third of that coming from Kent County Council. There was a bit of local unhappiness, wasn't there? People were saying, why can't we, we would prefer a swimming pool or we would prefer a new sports centre. Why do we have to have an art gallery? Yes, I think initially people were, why is an art gallery going to be relevant in our lives? We've done a huge amount of learning and education, working with members of the community and those people I think have come round. I went to a public meeting at the beginning of 2006 where people were saying, so when are we going to get our art gallery? It's a real change. Will they be able to get in for free? It will be free admission. And so what sort of shows are you planning to engage people, win over the doubters, bring them in? The opening show really sets the scene. It's called Reveal, Turner Contemporary Opens and it will be one Turner painting, an amazing scene of a volcano erupting that Turner never actually saw. He painted from documentary evidence alongside six international artists. Four of those will be new commissions. So the French artist Daniel Beren has made a site-specific piece of work in one of the main spaces. We will follow that with a show called Nothing in the World But Youth, which is all about youth culture and obviously Margaret has got a very important role to play in youth culture, the modern rockers, Dreamland when it was there, this amazing fun fair. And that will be followed by a large scale exhibition of Turner's works called Turner and the Elements alongside an artist called Hamish Fulton, who's an artist who's based in Kent, but actually his practice is all about walking. Yes, he's a very, very great and well-known artist. And presumably the idea is you're going to bring people into Margate from other parts of the UK, not simply for the donkeys, but for all. No, definitely to see art. Yes. You know, speaking about the controversy, you're not only a museum director, you're a diplomat. What do you hope that the people who oppose the museum will think when they walk into it for the first time? Well, one, I think it's about getting them into the museum to make sure that they actually come and visit so that they have a direct experience and that's going to be really important that they come and they visit. And two, that they may have their minds changed. And not everyone is going to like every show we put on. That's not the point, but it's about being open to something new and something different. Melanie, I'm really interested in the idea of Victoria of the art spearheading regeneration. And one of the things I'm interested to know from you is how you measure that. Well, this is always very, very difficult to measure. There's the economic side, which is the easiest thing to measure. And then there's the much more softer measurement around learning around changing attitudes. And we're working closely with some researchers to try and find a methodology which will enable that to happen. But I think it's really important to be able to capture that measurement. And I think over the years, we've worked with people who've been absolutely bowled over with an installation we've put on an exhibition or a project that they've worked on. People talk about their lives having been changed, having been totally transformed. Well, let's turn from one exhibition to another and an exhibition of furniture and from one part of England Margate to another Dorset and from a beach to a wood or woodlands. John Makepeace, you've been called the father of British furniture designer. You've been working with wood all the way through your career at different scales and sometimes almost semi-industrial output and other times very small scale. Can I ask first of all about when it comes to making furniture, we're going to try and describe some of your pieces of furniture, hard to do on radio. But start with the importance of indigenous wood for what you do. Do you start with the shape, the texture and the colour of particular pieces of wood? No, I'm not so much concerned with that. What really excites me about woodlands and trees in our landscape is that I think we all feel that our landscape is actually made by those features in the landscape. I'm the largest plant that we have and they're just such gorgeous structures. So and we of course trees don't need intervention. We wouldn't have trees in our landscape if they hadn't been planted. If we're going to plant trees and look after them then they need to have some kind of value at the end of the day and so part of what I'm involved in is making furniture which gives those trees a permanence beyond their natural life and you know people become passionate about trees in their landscape and I can be equally passionate about turning that tree into something which will go on for generations in an object which a family will use or will move through ownership over time. Can we talk a little bit about the the tradition of English furniture making because most people will think right straight back to the 18th century and then there'll be quite a long gap until some point after the right at the end of and after the Second World War when Scandinavian style design starts to get talked about and there seems to be something of a rebirth. When did you come into the story? When did you start to take an interest in the look of furniture or have you always? I became very interested in this year quality of furniture as an 11 year old really when I first saw some some wonderful things and then my primary interest became in making but then over the following years I really began to get an interest in the modern movement on the barhouse and only over time have I realized that actually the barhouse is about finding a machine aesthetic which has permeated the whole of the 20th century and I'm now seeing that actually we have lost a lot of the diversity in expression within furniture which to me is such a so vital and actually quite at odds with that industrial tradition so if there are going to be individual furniture makers and indeed there are then we are independent of that barhouse movement which was seeking to express machines and which it has been most successful in meeting a general public need but actually I'm interested in making the special items which are likely to be commissioned for particular situations and where we can put much more diversity into those things than is necessarily achievable by mechanical means you can't most of us can't nip out and buy one of your chairs or desks I mean they're terribly expensive aren't they and they're particularly beautifully made for as you say almost always for a wealthy individual or company I take issue with were terribly but inevitably there we put a lot of time into those things because we're trying to understand the customers needs and to express those in a way which are particular and where we combine that with material in objects which we believe will have a certainly a long life there's a there's a playfulness about a lot of your designs if I can if I can put that and again it's hard to describe pieces of furniture but you use a lot of sort of wave designs forms that echo or mimic the shapes of trees swirls swirls yes some of this comes out of my interest in the human form where the sheer shape of our bodies is itself a starting point of course for a chair and yet how often are we actually sitting in something which supports us and the way that we need to be supported so that's a really helpful framework in which one can work but beyond that of course nature produces wonderful patterns and and I like to penetrate the surface of the wood so that instead of this endless flat surfaces of timber if we're using a lot of material then let us actually look into it and penetrate it and achieve light and shade it's your furniture your furniture is not meant primarily to be looked at but it's to be used I get the impression and therefore the shape of a bottom or the bottom of a spine or the length of legs those sorts of things are very important to you yes that's very much part of chairs and of course the same is true with all forms of furniture that we have sort of behavioral patterns which one wants to reflect within furniture which are not layers which are most readily produced by machines unless anybody sort of listening think of you in a working in a little hut down at the bottom of a garden with a chisel you actually work on quite a large scale I mean you use big industrial machines to make some of your pieces you've used aluminium as well as wood and you've brought in other people to teach them the skills and not a factory but certainly an atelier or I don't know how you'd describe it yes my activities have been quite diverse so I have certainly been involved in production I've been involved in how do we make better use of forest produce through research programs that tell us about for instance the small timber coming out of forest which was not at all understood beforehand and of course it resulted in buildings which are hugely exciting and very very economical in terms of use of resources with minimum impact so that's another area I'm now more involved in in the small scale operation of reducing commissions a lot of people will think wooden furniture harvesting forests well this is an environmental project but what's interesting about your career is that any environmentalism is pretty closely connected to the hard business of selling and creating businesses and creating wealth in other words that it's not a very fairy it's not no that's right and when running the college at Parnum that was an absolutely integral part that when it was designed it was making and it was business management and so equally in my own career that has been a vital component and I've had to look further afield so my clients are scattered on the world now because there is that sort of interest in furniture that is global can you have good furniture that's industrially produced and cheap absolutely yes I don't in any way dispute that but actually it's the diversity of the language that takes time and labor Pamela when you go I think of you as being intricately connected to Dorset when you go for a walk in the woods and Dorset what is your unique way of seeing the woods that we may may not be part of I think one of the I don't often walk in woods I'm all often working them because I'm actually looking after young woodland trying to bring on trees so that they become good and useful timber in due course because I'm basically I love being active and doing something that's constructive so what I'm looking at is how do we bring on a woodland to become a future of timber and is that old-fashioned woodland farming is it we're cutting away the brush and the smaller trees and making sure there's enough light and so on very much so yes it's developing a canopy so that the trees are growing up clean and straight which trees don't do of their own accord Melanie John there's a wonderfully gentle wit and pragmatism in your work which struck me as very very English do you think of yourself as specifically an English maker I do and I love the idea that we're using woods that have been growing on this island forever and even some of the woods like the bog oak which is five thousand years old and the you together in those trying chairs I love that idea that this is of this place and you know it couldn't be made anywhere else in the world is there a problem with the way that many of us consume furniture it's a strange state of consumer furniture but we have become very much a throwaway society and you know you people clear out the houses and buy some new stuff and wait a bit scuffed to get rid of that in term if you spent so much time looking after the woodland and looking after the wood and making the furniture presumably you hope that the furniture then has a very very long life with its owner and it's it's used well for a long period of time yes and I think one of the most disconcerting aspects of that is the extent of the expenditure now which people now make into fitting out interiors which when those perfectly well will be a very short life they'll be torn out whereas the freestanding objects even if that person falls out of love with them they they become something they can move it on and you know the world seems to be putting so much more into things which cannot last and will not last even though they've got huge amounts of labor and effort go into them and under in a good creativity but actually they will finish up being torn out and replaced well yeah I just wanted to say based on our project of building a new building a huge amount of time has gone into the detail and it's all in the detail isn't it and because you're actually building something for the long term not for the short term yes just a very small amount of time has gone into our detail but in terms of things that cannot last I'm afraid that includes us thank you to all my guests Victoria Pomeray the director of the new Turner Contemporary Gallery and Margate which opens next month John Makepeace an exhibition of John Makepeace's work Enriching the Language of Furniture is on now at Somerset House in London before it heads to Farnham and then deletes later in the year Melanie McGrath's novel White Heat is out as well and both of Pamela Yates's films Granito and When the Mountains tremble are playing at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in London on Friday and on Saturday next week the history of civilization no less the British and Saudi royal families and the new money markets with Neil Ferguson George Magnus and Madawa al-Rashid but for now thank you and goodbye

Producer: Katy Hickman.