Catherine Yass was out on her bike one day when she made a most unusual discovery. She had already journeyed far from the beaten track – down a little-known nature trail through the bowels of Barking. After passing an establishment recently called “the most isolated pub in London”, she pedalled along a “very industrial road”, reached a patch of abandoned grass, and then began to feel nauseous.
“It often really stinks around there,” says the artist, “because it’s right next to Beckton sewage works.” But the journey was worth it, because in front of her was Barking Creek Barrier, a towering concrete structure built over the River Roding in 1983 to prevent flooding in the east London borough. This structure, which became the focus of her new project, is a huge square arch with a barrier on top which is lowered once a month for maintenance purposes. “When you watch this blue blade coming down,” says Yass, “it’s like a guillotine. It seemed like a symbol for our collective guilt about the climate crisis and potential flooding.”
Flood Barrier is a film work commissioned by Create London to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the North Sea flood of 1953, which left Creekmouth – the village that once stood here – destroyed. Yass wanted to study the barrier from different perspectives, but chiefly that of the local bird population, once the barrier is lowered. “I was interested in the idea that they alone can flow through the arch, unlike the river,” she says, speaking by phone from the French countryside. “Then I began wondering what it must look like if you don’t know its function and if it wasn’t made for you. Birds would be seeing it from all sorts of angles we could never view it from.”
How others experience the world has long been a concern for the Londoner – and it’s a fascination that has ramifications for the environment, too. “If we don’t start recognising that all views are equally valid, then we are going to be stuck with the systems we have now, which have all been generated by a particular viewpoint: man as the centre of the Earth.”
Yass recalls a life-drawing class she took when she was young. “The teacher told me to always look at my drawings upside down or in the mirror. Then you really see what you’ve done, because you don’t view them through your habitual perspective.” Since then she has become accustomed to viewing the world in topsy-turvy. In 1986, when she was studying at Slade School of Fine Art in London, a friend gave her a 1950s camera that she still uses today. Its viewfinder shows the world upside down. “I became very acquainted with seeing the world that way,” she says.
At first Yass wasn’t sure about photography as a medium, keen to avoid mainstream perspectives. So she took to “solarising” her pictures, by overlaying an image’s negatives with its positives. In Flood Barrier, light leaks have added unusual colours to the film, a nod to the fact that birds can detect more colours than humans.
In the early 00s, Yass was offered the chance to travel down the side of a skyscraper on a crane in London’s developing Canary Wharf area. This was for Descent, a work that tracked (upside down of course) an adjacent building as she dropped. The unsettling, vulnerable perspectives in her work were so unique, she was nominated for the 2002 Turner prize. Her films can make your stomach churn, not least 2008’s High Wire, in which Yass documents Didier Pasquette’s attempts to traverse a wire between two tower blocks among Glasgow’s since-demolished Red Road flats.
That must have been a scary experience. “I don’t think I would do it again,” she admits. Pasquette had said he did not need a safety harness as he knew how to save himself – and besides, it might crush his ribs. “Right until the last minute,” says Yass, “we were desperately looking for solutions to this. And then he just went across without any safety gear. It was very frightening.”
Pasquette only made it a third of the way across before stopping and shouting: “C’est pas possible!” (“It’s not possible!”) But he did return safely and High Wire became, says Yass, an analogy “for a dream that can’t be realised. I think that dream of building cities in the air, that whole idealism of high-rise building, was such a utopian one.”
Yass’s anxiety over what would have happened if Pasquette had fallen led to another project involving high rises: this time she wanted to drop a piano from the top of London’s Balfron Tower, to record the sounds it made as it descended and to make a comment on the housing crisis. But the project proved controversial. There was already a fight going on between the housing association and local residents. “And I just stepped right into it,” says Yass. “The residents completely misunderstood the project. Before I knew it, it hit the headlines and I hadn’t had a chance to meet them properly.” The whole thing ended up being canned.
Yass did, however, get to record the sound of the wind working a piano’s wires for her 2017 film Aeolian Piano (developed with Hughes Meyer Studio), in which she attached the instrument to a crane and let it swing around inside the former HQ of the BBC at White City. “It became a kind of swan song for the BBC because they were leaving the building,” she says.
Yass is now working on a different kind of music, finessing the soundtrack to Flood Barrier with the help of some local people: sound artist Martin Osman and students with special educational needs – again part of her drive to include people who experience the world in ways that aren’t often heard about. Gusts of wind, noises recorded underwater and the gurgling of a waste pipe will all feature on the soundtrack.
The project has also prompted Yass to look afresh at her own career. Ahead of this interview, she looked over past projects and realised concrete was often a theme. She filmed the Israeli separation wall in 2004 and later the Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River for her 2006 film Lock. “We have this desperation to control nature through concrete, which is a pollutant,” she says. “The more you need to defend yourself, the bigger the structure. But is it ever going to be enough?”
• Flood Barrier is at Valence House Museum, London, 26 September to 21 October; free outdoor premiere 7.30pm on 22 September; then touring.
