A Brief Introduction to the Lye Artefacts

The pathways and weathered clay domes that mark the site of the last major settlement to perish on the Lye Planet were at first mistaken by the team for nothing more than shallow valleys and contours. Although no doubt strangely uniform, as noted in the log entry recording their initial sighting, still they were thought to be no different in essence from the landscapes of thousands of other barren rocks documented since the expedition had begun. In addition to this, the planet’s attributes did not correspond to the mission’s primary objective: specifically, to monitor exoplanets with the potential to harbour life in the present. Preoccupied with signs of water and familiar gases, the dry and inhospitable coldness of the Lye Planet and its moribund star were initially not investigated further. We should be grateful, in fact, that the planet’s so-called ‘natural features’ were revisited at all, and that a subsequent, more detailed overview of its geography from a closer vantage point was able to reveal to us the astonishing breadth of its former civilisations. For those researchers who had long maintained that the initial expedition’s narrow goals were misguided, the irony was not lost: how in our myopic, vampiric pursuit of the living, a reflection from another world had nearly passed us by entirely, the still remains of an ecosystem more extraordinary than any one of us could have foreseen.

The first expedition to the planet’s surface confirmed our wildest expectations: the Lye Planet was a once-inhabited vast terrain, dotted with the vestiges of purpose-built, interconnected dwellings. It is now apparent, as was presumed at the time, that these communities persisted in some form until the planet’s sun started to cool. Exactly when and why this process began remains a matter of some contention, and nearly everything that we know for certain about the event comes not from scientific analysis, but from studies of the expedition team’s most remarkable discovery: vast quantities of artefacts, many created during the final epoch of civilisation, a period referred to by Lye academics as the Decline. The majority of these artefacts were found in near perfect condition, stored in vats filled with a liquid preservative. The decoding of a story they collectively tell of the end of their society, a gradual and anticipated event narrated from numerous perspectives over the course of many years, is the primary focus of our organisation, the Lye Planet Research Unit (LPRU).

The artefacts and essays collected in this book, first published through our website (lpru.co.uk) and newsletter in the spring of 2020, marked the first time we had brought our work as the LPRU to public attention. Rumours had periodically circulated in the scientific community, but thankfully gained little traction. One could say that the unprecedented nature of our research has worked to our advantage: some readers may well recall the vague, disbelieving references, passed from one faculty canteen to another, to a ‘planet of painters’ recently contacted in the outer reaches of the universe, and having laughed dismissively at such a prospect. The story is, of course, completely inaccurate, for while items which we might describe as pictorial or visually expressive feature among the Lye Artefacts, it is certainly suspect to suppress the authorial and technical diversity of this body of work under the single reductivist term ‘painter’. That being said, its prescriptiveness is no doubt provocative, challenging us to think on what such a planet would look like; on how ‘alien oeuvres’ might correspond to those with which we are familiar, and the ways in which expression might manifest at all defined outside of our traditions. It is for these reasons that the discovery of the artefacts has stimulated more interest and discussion within the LPRU than any other research area. The study of other facets of Lye life has seemed impossible to start out on without the lens of their texts and images.

Taken as a whole, these papers provide some insight into the beliefs and customs of the Lye Planet, showing in particular how these practices were upended by the events of the Decline. Radical changes to society, culture and environment necessitated new ways of recording and interpreting the world; the chapters in this book show how these upheavals challenged conceptions of nature, narrative perspective, language and time. In this book’s appendix (page number), we have included excerpts from our ongoing ‘Lye Encyclopaedia’ project for additional information on certain recurring themes; however, it should be stressed that the most directly relevant contextual information is included in the essays themselves, and that foreknowledge of the Lye Planet’s cultural history is not required. In his analysis of the Husband folio (page number), Kiran Leonard discusses how the content and structure of the piece was influenced by the widely held conception of the planet and its inhabitants as a unified, living organism, outlining how this belief informed artefact-making and notions of the self and demonstrating how the Decline provoked its subversion. This essay, along with Prof S. A. Leach’s work on the Moorland diary (page number) and a translation of folios from the Lye Lower Wetlands (page number), chart the struggle to articulate a new, individual mode of expression which does not feature in the works of earlier eras. This transition was not limited to Lye writing, as Dr. Frances Whorrall-Campbell’s work will attest (page number).

Not all of the artefacts have such lofty, world-making ambitions. Many of the recovered pieces, right up to those of the Late Decline, are often focused on the disruption of individual relationships or smaller details; further still, a significant quantity makes no direct reference at all to context. In both cases, we are still able to glimpse the effects of the Decline on wider society through these artefacts, as is apparent in Dr. Grace Linden’s work on the items recovered at Wolf’s Head (page number), in the work of Adeline Monan (page number), and most extensively in Leach’s aforementioned paper on the revelatory Moorland diary. As with the development of new and individual voices, the roles of community and family in the artefacts became more complicated and conflicted as the Decline worsened.

In the process of preparing these articles for release, it has been asked why the LPRU has decided to start publishing at this moment in time, when there remains such a huge amount of research to be done and questions unanswered. We still do not fully understand why these artefacts were created, why they continued to be produced throughout an environmental catastrophe that the planet’s inhabitants knew to be completely fatal, or why the artefacts were preserved for a future they knew would never come to pass. The mystery of their true motives is never far away from our minds, but we have also had to accept that full and perfect answers may never prove, in the end, attainable, or even desirable (for indeed, we must allow for the possibility that some motives for making and doing rest beyond our analyses’ potential for articulating them). With this in mind, we believe that the time has come for these works to escape the confines of our laboratories and enter into dialogue with the human world. As readers discover what these findings have to show us, we hope that the relevance of the Lye artefacts and the ‘timeliness’ of their disclosure will become self-evident.