Artangel: Afterness, Orford Ness review: the debris on the beach was more impressive

There are two reasons you should stay on the path at Orford Ness. One is to preserve its fragile ecosystem. Rare birds and lichens thrive in this flat, tussocky spit of pebbles on the Suffolk coast. The other reason is to avoid a gory death. Stray too far, and you might be blown up.

Unexploded munitions are buried in its vast expanse of shingle, beneath a surface scarred by hunks of rusting, mangled machinery. Labs where radar and atomic bomb parts were once tested are now Brutalist ruins straight from a Tarkovsky film. Accessible only by boat, the former military site has been described by the National Trust (which owns it) as “hostile and potentially dangerous”. It is perhaps more enticing as an idea than in reality.

It’s easy to see why this post-apocalyptic landscape attracted Artangel – the outfit behind decades of site-specific art shows, including Rachel Whiteread’s Turner Prize-winning House (1993). But, awed by a too-promising setting, they’ve left it mostly as it is. Their new project, Afterness, requires a couple of hours’ walking (not on the easiest terrain, though there are provisions for visitors with mobility issues), for which trekkers will be rewarded with just three works of visual art, and every one of them upstaged by the surroundings.

Londoner Emma McNally’s, in an old armoury, is a sheet covered in tiny faint grey drawings of circles, lines and dots. It could be an Ordnance Survey map of a moon colony – one stiffly crumpled into peaks and troughs. Raised by partly concealed blocks and lifted into the air at one end, it looks like a half-inflated blow-up mattress trying and failing to take flight. I was more impressed by a broken door outside. That’s not a cheap dig at McNally: Orford’s objets trouvés set a high bar. The door was beautiful.

Alice Channer, another Londoner, makes more of a splash with her bramble of thorny metal pipes. They fill a derelict one-room hut, growing through the floor, sending plantlike shoots out of the hut’s missing windows. The sculpture’s smooth, shiny aluminium makes it a brash interloper in this muted world of salt-air and rust.

Paris-based artist Tatiana Trouvé is more in tune with the desolate soul of the place. Her installation’s wonky, primitive fence keeps us out of a roofless and partly flooded building; peering inside, we see suitcases, an old mattress, books carved from marble, and barely identifiable sculptures in the middle distance, mouldering and mysterious.

There may not be much to see at Afterness, but there is plenty to hear: one can press buttons in the Black Beacon radio tower (a lovely wooden building dating to 1927) to play various field recordings, or pick up a headset for the audio walking tour, which contains Afterness’s one real coup: a book-length sequence of new Orford Ness-inspired poems by Ilya Kaminsky, author of the widely praised Deaf Republic (2019).

The poems (read by Kaminsky and two actors) are interspersed with a soundscape by Axel Kacoutié of local noises soundscape of local noises: footsteps on shingle, seagull cries, the howling wind. At home, those sounds would transport you to Orford Ness. When you’re already there, they feel redundant.

The poems come as a printed book, too, which Kaminksy’s many international readers may be disappointed to learn can only be bought from the visitors’ information hut. Despite this, Artangel have optimistically printed a whopping 2,500 copies.

Kaminsky captures the landscape’s bracing weather – “wind/ slips/ its hand inside/ me,/ as if I/ am a shirt that needs/ mending” – but has never actually been to Orford. He stayed at home and imagined going instead. Sensible chap.

From July 1 - Oct 21; artangel.org.uk