neroche - in transience

returning : a sense of completion

2008-11-03T03:28:00.000-08:00

Travelling through Neroche now, I clearly see the end of my project. I've lost the desire to follow up new threads - I like the thought of things being left suspended (and the paid artists days have expired - way over my budget now).

But there is definitely one thing to follow up - the woman that Meg and I talked with over the gate about her animals. I shot a bit of video on my camera that day that I've wanted to put either on this blog, or on the website, and I want to ask her permission. Our conversation that day was very striking to both me and Megan, and I couldn't ask her on the spot whether I could use the video I'd spontaneously captured - that would have felt too 'breaking into' the presentness of the moment, too artist-needy. (Here is the post where I wrote about our encounter - scroll down to the geese).

I have driven back past her house at least once, and paused - how to re-approach someone that you've engaged with spontaneously? - how would I react if I was her? - what is this desire to 'share' what she has said?

So Meg and I have arranged to meet in Culmstock, and go back to her house; I like this collaborative task. We wander gingerly round the boundary - the geese are out and protective. There's a garden gate, some windows open ajar, but no-one responding. Then a young woman arrives who's looking for 'Kathy' herself (we didn't even know her name), so we wait for her to make contact. She goes fearlessly through the goose gate.

Kathy appears, invites us in with no hesitation, remembering us from our conversation back in September. We sit in the conservatory with Pipsqueak the woof, the geese looking in through the window, beside cages for injured wild birds and talk about animal connection. It's good to come back to this conversation, to hear more about Kathy's life, her decision to devote her life to animals. Of course, use the video Kathy says. I promise to send her a copy along with the photographs that I've taken - these exchanges are important to me, and perhaps the most lasting aspect of any arts project like this.

"To come into conversation can be a disturbing thing, exposing, altering and aesthetic. How the conversation is made can conduct the speakers in a unknown direction, towards friendship, argument, silence, the emergence of something new."
Wallace Heim, from the chapter 'Slow Activism' in "Nature Performed: Environment, Culture and Performance

We leave with an open invitation to return, and right now I want to make a three part art documentary about women working with animals in Neroche, and Kathy would certainly be the focus of one of the parts.

public art making in the rural : some thoughts

2008-11-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

Back to the Neroche Scheme office in Hemyock, and the delivery of my website design on disc to Kate, and a check in meeting with Sally, Gavin and James.

We talk about the nature of the artistic engagement, public art, connectivity, quality, when something 'works'. These are the conversations I crave to have - people who are not artists, yet are commissioning art projects, and there is too little time given to these crucial conversations where we all talk transparently about art-making in public contexts, or as Meg put it later in an email - the notion of "art as enquiry rather than the repetition of established knowledge or technique". What happens when we make an 'obscure' piece of work - is it ok that it is alienating, that people humour it? does that exacerbate the uneasy relationship between conservative rural communities and contemporary art? how do we know if and when people connect? - when and how does it matter?

If the 'general public' looking for information on birdwatching events on the Blackdowns, come upon my website via the Neroche Scheme, and instead of finding a pleasant picture of a warbler, come across a strange link which opens a video of mens pants hanging in a wood, what happens? can we ever know what people think, how they respond? - and indeed over what time period that process might be. I recall performance events that I saw in my 20s, that only ten years later did I realise what they were doing.

And in relation to the work I've designed and made, I'm sure it will be seen as quite conservative, even quaint, from the point of view of radical contemporary art, and yet adventurous and obscure from a traditional rural perspective, and for people who don't have the latest version of Flash, very frustrating.

I don't know the answers, but I like asking the questions, tracing the landscape and editing the videos.

Just before the meeting, I picked up a copy of the Blackdown Hills newspaper and the front story was about a 'phantom' (!) artist working in a bus shelter up at Culmhead - intriguing, yes. A link to the story in the infamous Western Daily Press here, and a link here to the same story on John Thorne's blog.

It looked like an interesting and playful intervention to me - an anonymous artist making 'A Changing Room' out of the bus shelter, lining it with silver foil and putting in a clothes rack, and calling it “But I’m a million different people from one day to the next...”. John writes "The Deane council staff quickly cleared the bus shelter but could find no trace of who had put the clothing there"; playfulness has never been easy to encounter outside the play area.

Maybe the 'phantom' followed the 'changing room' piece by putting lots of rubbish bags inside the shelter, and placing the title 'rubbish : art : rubbish'. Perhaps an invitation for us to reflect on the whole range of opinions provoked about playful or controversial art being rubbish! - I don't know.

It seems that anything made outside a picture frame in a rural setting at the moment, far too easily and jovially, gets termed a 'Banksy', referring to his anonymity rather than his work I'm presuming. This immediate referencing overlooks his artwork which is painfully insightful in relation to rural politics - for example the graffitied landscape oil-paintings: Constable-style country views overlaid with CCTV cameras (here, and click through to the following 2 images via 'next'). They ask us to look again at rural scenery in relation to our culture.

We need those conversations about art as enquiry, and while the inquisitive or provocative end of art-making can be uncertain of itself, even clumsy, it's important not to turn it so immediately into the 'just weird', but instead to sit within the questions it's attempting to ask.

autumn : light

2008-11-03T02:00:00.000-08:00

transience site : design and decisions

2008-10-17T07:43:00.000-07:00

Since my last post about the website design where I'd come up to a wall between the idea in my head and the reality of what is possible on a small budget and a reasonable load up time, the 'what are you going to do then' has been going around my head.

And Stephen, my photoshop friend and very practical collaborator, has spent at least two evenings trying to explain pixel ratios to me.

There are two paradoxes in my mind:
- firstly, that I'm trying to locate on my 'map' things that are passing through the landscape - ughhh?
- secondly, that I decided to make a website because of the flexibility, its ability to be changed and re-made at any time, but of course, with a Flash file, once it's up, it's there and I can't alter it. So while this blog is endlessly being returned to for editing and tweaking, the Transience website will be pretty much untouchable.

It's always interesting how in any process, especially an artistic one, you have to let go of the grip of desired form somehow - is that the right word? - and let the conversation between materials and practicality take place, which often tends to lead to what the best thing is to do anyway.

Obvious decisions had to be recognised:
- use a smaller scale map as source for marking from
- simplify content and materials
- only use materials that attract me, and none that I think I 'should' use
- write neatly
- sort out, once and for all, the right pixel ratio (this seems to do Kate's head in as much as mine) and go with that.

So I made the map in a day, having thought about it for at least ten. I visited many possible additions to the map but in the end just added a date, and the prevailing wind direction. I was thinking of all sorts of extras, such as links out to migratory routes, but I fear it is already far too cluttered and in a few months time I will be wanting to alter it all.

The last thing to fall into place are the titles, or rollovers which are the links to the media files. Stephen helped me with these decisions, all the photoshop and the scanning, by uploading a kind of 'what do you want it to kind of look like?' at our biggerhouse site - there's a link here. I was worrying about what the aesthetic of dymo tape says, but through Stephen's 'just do it' kind of reasoning, I realised these labels were crossing a very productive border between the hand made and the printed.

I've learnt a lot about layers.

horse stories : orchard portman

2008-10-09T10:04:00.000-07:00

A meeting with Tom Mayberry, from the Somerset County Records Office, famous for his knowledge of the Portman family. Tom has written a book, "Orchard and the Portmans" about this very significant family, whose Manor house was at the edge of the Neroche land near Taunton.

I wasn't so interested in the general history of the family - my focus was on two things:
firstly - how had Orchard Portman Manor, such a distinguished and architecturally defining house, come to have been so completely erased from the landscape - nothing remains of it - a tremendous 'passing through'. And secondly - how horses had fundamentally participated in the history, culture and geography of the family.

I am continually struck in Neroche - in fact all across England - by how defining the horse has been as a companion, worker, traveller, helper, competitor, vehicle and accomplice. Perhaps because of my own pony -club-pony-obsessive background, I ally horse culture with land and farming, with countryside and rural communities far more than with hunting and class structures, but of course, I acknowledge my personal history is influential here, and horse breeding, hunting and racing are all defined by wealth and land ownership.

(In a recent conversation with my friend Dan discussing hunting as a right wing class-driven activity, I questioned why it was that hunting had been banned, when to my mind all sorts of much more complicated and painful human-animal relations (shipping of live animals, vivisection for example) seemed to be equally important. He said he understood it as Labour's pay back for Thatcher taking apart the miners and the unions. And suddenly it all made sense...)

So, Tom tells a fascinating history of the Portmans, and I tell him of an earlier walk I had done to look at the site of Orchard Portman. The absence was nothing but striking - was it typhoid in the water system that they couldn't banish that precipitated such erasure? a crumbling unkempt mansion destroyed by lack of investment? an over eager estate manager bent on stone recycling? No matter - it is extraordinary that simply nothing remains. He showed me a map, I take a photograph and compare it with google earth images.

I recalled my walk there, and the bizarre conjunction between the church and the back of the racecourse that i couldn't forget - the hundred or so metres between the ancientness of the church and the presentness of the racing stables are palpable. If you're interested in gaps, in tears in the fabric of time, this is a good one.

And I also recalled something I'd heard - that at one time, you could travel the whole way between Neroche and London on Portman land.

Then some connections made between my own research and Tom's oral Portman history through the horse:

- Taunton Racecourse overlaying the site of the Orchard Portman Estate
- the Portman Hunt at Blandford Forum: Brynaston in Dorset was the other 'family seat'
- the local myth-story of the ghost of Rachel Portman galloping on a white horse on the 'old road' by Bickenhall
- and The Jockey Club was, until recently, based in Portman Square in London.

The horse is written in, inscribed into the family, into the land all the way from Neroche to London.

A link here for a general history of the Portmans (scroll down to Orchard Portman). Here for the Portman Estate in London, and here for an outline of their heritage.
Here for Taunton Racecourse. Here for the Portman Hunt.
And here for 'who owns London' - scroll down to the Portman section.

I am sure there are further connections to be eked out ... the Portman estate having to give land to the Crown for death duties - even now much of Neroche is owned by the Crown ... the galloping hooves of the Monmouth Rebellion passing through from Ilminster to the Portman estate, the pony-club-horse-culture of Neroche ... my residing memory of the Blackdown Hills Pony Club as the most courageous, the fastest in the west, their ponies were the fleetest ...

passing through : a cabbage leaf

2008-10-01T12:42:00.000-07:00

a day of conversation about animals ...

an hour with brian turley at staple park woods, talking about squirrels eating trees, deer marking territory, and forestry conservation projects.

then to the RSPCA Animal Centre at West Hatch to meet up with Anita - we talked about their work in taking in, and re-homing animals. i want to make a short video about the pets passing through the centre for the website.

it's a truly extraordinary place of course, very sobering. the predicament of domestication looks you right in the eyes, and i was continually faced with questions about what humans want from animals. after our conversation, i filmed the rabbits, brilliant in their eating.

i used to have a rabbit as a kid: the hours spent watching Pickles eat to the end of the greens. it reminded me of the woman who i talked with on the last walk, who spoke about the sound of her sheep grazing calming her nerves. this material world, being material, consuming the live and processing it, burning it into another kind of live-ing; this circulation at the heart of my body and my world, the rabbits bodies and their world.

Anita said a nice thing: usually she is too busy with her work to stop and watch the rabbit eat a leaf from start to finish. we liked the moment of concentration, of just watching.

I sought out a dynamic quote to accompany the rabbits in their material burning, and found Annie Dillard quoting the French palientologist Teilhard de Chardin in her book For The Time Being - always a good reference for the notion of the material on fire:
“Plunge into matter” Teilhard said .... “By means of all created things, without exception, the divine assails us, penetrates us and molds us. We imagined it as distant and inaccessible, whereas we live steeped in its burning layers.” so, there you go rabbits.

"Is it a kind of dream,
Floating out on the tide,
Following the river of death downstream?
Oh, is it a dream?

Bright eyes....

staple fitzpaine : cornfield : turning circle 6

2008-09-20T13:49:00.000-07:00

the playstreet dig - portman connections

2008-09-16T04:08:00.000-07:00

I passed by the Play street dig at Bickenhall organised by the Neroche Scheme. They had decided to do a two week dig to see if there was any evidence of a settlement that aerial photographs from the 70s had revealed. The site had been turning up medieval potsherds and tiles from ploughing.

I was particularly curious, as Diane and Brian Hood had talked me through the story of Rachel Portman and her white horse ghosting the road way. 'In 1602 Rachel Portman (daughter of Sir Henry Portman) obtained the property and made it her residence. The name Playstreet is probably Saxon in origin, meaning quite literally the street where people played.'

'Rachel Portman (1554-1631) was buried in Bickenhall churchyard, which has since been demolished. It is said that her ghost riding a white horse roams the area from the old churchyard at Bickenhall, through Park Farm to Playstreet.' (Neroche Scheme website).

We arrived a little after the 'tour' of the dig had begun, so we joined in - as we arrived I sensed a tense atmosphere and realised we were in a group of very obsessive people; posturing, competition, distraction, a man with a child on his back talking so loudly into his mobile phone I couldn't hear the guide, men undermining the woman archaelogist - a really weird atmosphere, lots of agendas. There might have been some very interesting observations going on, but the tension negated anything useful happening. This bit of film demonstrates it accurately enough....

it was weird - i couldn't work out what was going on - the project seemed to have dragged the strongest agendas to the surface. I wanted to watch and listen closely to everyone, to watch the difficulty - but it was so tense that the 'tour' dispersed through the field, and I turned away to film a poignant piece of hazard tape in the corn stubble, and thought about the horse ghost.

walk 4 : hemyock, up and down the valley

2008-09-10T05:10:00.000-07:00

for a while, i've wanted to walk the 'bowl' around Hemyock. Sally (artist co-ordinator) and Megan (placement artist) set out from Hemyock with me on a circular route. i'd provisionally mapped a walk traveling through or passing by four commons: Clements, Black Down, Hillmoor and Owleycombe, partly to continue the thread from mine and Megan's last trip to Staple Common, and also to witness the variations in the sense of the land as the Commons appear out of the field systems.
as we set out from Hemyock, this old milkstand, travelling further and further towards invisibility.

m & s free range eggs.

up in the forest, yellow staghorn fungus matching megan's pen,

out onto Blackdown Common which you can see from the M5, a high flat moor with bracken, roaming ponies and these beautiful wide green lanes - does something mow them? i wanted to lie down and sleep within the sound of the galloping horses hooves - that peat moor resonance would be something to hear travel past.

so much of the time, nature seemed to appear as something framed, composed - the orange staghorn in the spikey moss as a miniaturised surreal forest, the vivid grass in the black peat water as a zen garden. all kind of overwhelming in their sense of completeness - 'gardens in a tea-tray' Megan said.
and, all down to our perception too - how our minds and senses frame this landscape, how my viewfinder makes a square.

here, some kind of penis, or tentacle or delicate new fungus in the 'tea tray'. apologies for out-of-focus, it's magnified hugely, as i only noticed it while looking at the photo zoomed up. but there it was, right at the centre of the frame, discreet yet all powerful.

"I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.... Every glistening egg is a memento mori." Annie Dillard - "Pilgrim at Tinkers Creek"

descending over Culmstock Beacon, we tracked along the plimsoll line, springs emerging all along the side of the hill - so much water - and settle on a hillside with a strong atmosphere. we can't quite make out why it's so perfect a place to stop; the perspective, the quality of grass, the degree of slope, the sudden change from where we had come from - who can tell.

i photographed the back of our heads.

on down past Pitt farm, i was running 'common' around my head, thinking about what we have 'in common', common (shared?) language and land, and the notion of commonality.

a passing conversation with a farmer running his own archaeological dig on some of his land: it had potential to be an interesting conversation, but especially as three women, we tended to suffer his 'common' male banter: he referred to our overheard conversation at a distance as "the sound of mad cows" and his parting shot was "like moses said, keep taking the tablets". it's the kind of exchange that makes me want to headbutt a gatepost, and never do anything with rural england ever again.
still, the historical knowledge he had built up of his farm was extraordinary, and it's all in his head right now. he should write it all over the wall of one room in his house. that way it would be out in the world. people could come and read his house.

down to Culmstock, through amazing farmyards. some more exchange as we crossed a new bridge over the River Culm - two men just finishing the build, and unable to accept our genuine remarks on their work, bantered us off with directions to the nearest pub.

Sally leaves us and we cut along the road, and then up the drove.
on the corner, i hear 'Sweet Caroline' coming from behind a hedge. it sounds beautiful in the now soft afternoon warmth of the day. as i come to the garden gate, i realise that radio 2 is being played to a garage full of Indian Runner ducks.

three white geese appear from the front door.

and a beautiful and highly affecting conversation begins with a woman who tells us some of her life story in just a few minutes: about how keeping animals has healed her bad times, how they've helped her in her life. we talk about 'how good a goose is at being a goose'. she tells us about her sheep further up the road, how she sits in the field and listens to them eating; just the sound of them grazing calms her nerves, makes life ok.

as Megan and I move away, we are both unbelievably filled up with her story, a kind of swoon. it is the most dynamic yet stillest moment of the walk, our whole trajectory has gone towards - and away from - this point, here at this corner, with 'sweet caroline', a woman, three geese and the warmth of the afternoon sun.

Owleycombe Common: that same atmospheric as the other commons, that quality of grass again, unturned earth - is that it? - spaced trees, full of rowan and their red berries that the blackbirds love.
a view back to where we had come from - Culmstock Beacon.

i'm up here still dreaming of that temporary community back in the valley, about what we held in common there.
then a long descent through horse fields, black cattle and white sheep grazing and a hazy beginning of rain, and back to Hemyock, and a different kind of horizon.

field & gate

2008-09-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

a wasted morning going to the launch of an arts/museum fund called new expressions in Taunton. i found the event depressing on two accounts: the suggestion that the artists and museums 'speed dated' each other, and dried coffee in those thin packets with plastic cartons of milk (supremely bad signs). i wished i hadn't gone, and spent the time driving into Neroche trying to shake off the bad atmosphere that corporate wedding reception furniture generates. this soft horizon and september light helped.

on my way to the RSPCA Animal Centre in West Hatch, to see if i could meet up with any of the staff, introduce myself and the project, and arrange a couple of interviews. sometimes i phone ahead, but usually i prefer to call by - it's somehow easier to engage and to know if the person's up for the meeting. also, they get a sense of who i am and whether they want to be part of a conversation, or not.

i have really enjoyed these encounters on this project - often i'm daunted by approaching people but this time, it's been fine - perhaps a sense of 'nothing to lose' alongside a quiet confidence that my approach to this particular landscape in relation to things on the move, appeals to people (so many people love the swifts for example). i usually have mixed feelings about introducing myself as an artist, but again, i've done this every time. perhaps that comes from a clear kind of conviction that i feel right now, that it's the clearest way to frame what i do, and i like it as a way of living.

It's hard as an artist i find, to justify asking for an exchange with people who are clearly doing such practical, demanding and immediately necessary jobs, when compared to the more obscure and illusive role that the arts play in the world. but even so, i was interested to see how i could gather some material around the Animal Centre's role in taking in pets and domesticated animals, and re-homing them, and the Wildlife Centre's role in helping rehabilating wild animals that have been injured, for example they deal with cleaning oiled sea birds.

Anita showed me around the cats and the rabbits. there was a volunteer there, just doing cuddling i think, trying to befriend a frightened cat. well that's a thing, that's a good thing to do i thought.

conversation : hajni and the swallows

2008-09-05T13:27:00.000-07:00

meeting : real horses, ghost horses

2008-09-05T12:54:00.000-07:00

moth watch

2008-08-23T15:37:00.000-07:00

into the car park at quarts moor at 8.30pm. mike and robin from the butterfly conservation are here for a moth watch - their first at this site - and the national trust warden for this area is here too.
and me - to see if there are any migrant moths pulled in by the lights,
(and to continue my fascination with how us humans choose to observe, record and understand 'nature').

extension cables, small generators, nets, 125w mercury vapour lights over containers full of egg boxes and perspex (the moths fall in, protected by the egg cartons), plastic collection pots. two moth lights set up - one in the woods and one on the edge of the car park.

we're alone yet entirely visible due to the power of the lights, overlooking the escarpment facing taunton, wellington and the m5, the light fades. the edges of the landscape dissolve, travelling and static lights mark routes and lines, pale clear sky, light leaking to the west, cold wind; moths prefer warm cloudy nights.

moths don't tend to eat once emerged, only the caterpillars feed. once airborne, they reproduce, hibernate, die or migrate. we tend to associate them with darkness, even horror, looping them in with bats rather than butterflies, and watch them flapping awkwardly against the lightbulbs or windows, and wrongly assume they all eat clothes.
there is a nightly genocide going on below us now on the m5 - thousands of moths drawn by headlights broken up on metal and glass. would we let this degree of destruction happen visibly to butterflies? or birds? right now, our culture doesn't see moths in the same light.

at the time the moths are supposed to emerge into the night, so do the cars.
they pull in and park up right beside each other one at a time. dogging, i guess. it's quiet, discreet, very present, 5 or 6 cars, more arrive, some leave.
the national trust warden says "there are more cars here at night than there are during the day" and jokes about shifting the car park charging hours from 9pm to 9am. the daytime face of the national trust looks incongruous here.

four very loud men in a spoilered car pull in next to us, lager cans, drum and bass, two come over to ask what we are doing - the incongruity of it all, i can't look at them in the eye, so loud. we can hear their car go all the way to taunton after they leave. these worlds are hard to reconcile: mike scoops a yellow underwing off the grass as the clumsy lads touch the bulb he asked them not to. there are heaps of empty lager cans an arms throw from any car park.

here we all are : hunched figures staring at bright light bulbs, white sheets spread, arms folded against the cold august night, casting giant shadows over the mysterious cars lined up on the other side. a vanity light, interior light, hazards flash, moths crash land on the sheet, drawn to the light in the dark, signals, calls, messages, acts of attraction, sex, things of the night, human watching, moth watching. there's a strange symmetry to all this that i can hardly hold in language - the ecology of the rural car park.

mike and robin tenaciously stick to the task of recording and naming the moths that flutter in - they collect them in the plastic specimen pots, and they all go into a plastic bag to travel to houses where they are specifically identified and released alive later on. sometimes they get 90 different species up in the blackdowns, tonight it's more like 9. it seems harsh to my mind to take them away from here, yet i understand what they're doing. like all conservation, recording of species and proving of territory and activity seems to be a vital act in our culture - i wonder when and if it will not be so. one moment they are glints of a magic kind of light emerging out of the night, like the brimstone, all yellow and veined delicacy - we could see them and watch them go, why not ? - but then they are put inside an incomprehensible environment, and transported away from all things of their world. what are we, us humans?

yet there is a strange beguiling beauty to this collecting: standing in the woods by the moth trap with robin, we intensively study a migrant moth sat still on the bottom of the trap in our torchlight - a rush veneer. the name lodges in me like the title of a favorite song, a dreamy surface, a foreign place. i want to release a single with this title, or use it as a pseudonym. this moth, nomophila noctuella (nocturnal name-lover?), has certainly arrived from france, or spain even, definitely from across the channel robin assures me. i kind of can't believe it, something so small carried on the wind all that way to 'fall' here whole, complete. what kind of language can i use? what kind of language does the moth use? what can we call knowledge? the rush veneer, here in our torchlight, is a kind of miracle. and in the clumsy beautiful attention of us human beings, there is a bewildering compassion and elegant connection.

on the way home, moths flap around in the car - they must have come in on our clothes - i can feel one moving around in my hair. the next day, it's flying around at the car windows, bidding escape. i pull over, and wind down the passenger window. it's a small pale moth - i have no idea what particular name it has been given by humans, but it's miles from home, no matter i hope - it flits off over a house.

later, i sit at home with a very old 'moths of the months' book that megan gave me. the list of names are entrancing, and i speak them quietly to myself over and over

northern swift
black arches
scalloped oak
july high-flier
frosted orange
buff ermine
pale tussock
beautiful carpet
the quaker
spring usher
the feathered thorn
lime hawk
waved umber
silver y
hummingbird hawk
scorched carpet
dagger
cabbage
scarlet tiger
the dot

a list, like walt whitman's list of trees used to speak to dying soldiers in hospital (and spoken by bryan saner in goat island's performance 'it's an earthquake in my heart') or the angel who speaks to the dying man in wim wender's 'wings of desire' of life-ful things to bring him back to the world: along with the many other lists, collections and taxonomies made by humans, this list draws the moths into my imaginative life.

List. n. A border; a boundary (obs.); a destination (Shake.). A catalogue, roll or enumeration. Desire; inclination; choice; heeling over. (thank you, dw)

staple fitzpaine : cornfield: turning circle 5

2008-08-22T07:36:00.000-07:00

'the broken world'

2008-08-18T05:56:00.000-07:00

just finished reading tim etchell's book 'the broken world'. it is really good - completely enjoyed it - and very absorbing in relation to the stuff that i often end up thinking about (the world - what is it), but from a different direction. 'the broken world' is a walkthru or guide to an imaginary computer game, and the novel navigates a fine journey, intersecting the 'game' world with the 'real' world, particularly in relation to the city/suburbia, and allowing those worlds to reflect and comment on each other. i was really struck by the stuff around the glitches in the programming, the lists of characters and 'items', and the imaginative and human landscape of the story. this passage from the book particularly stood out to me (pg 94/95), which i've been thinking about, and cross-referencing to, ever since.

“Listen up. There are TWO glitches I spotted in the Colony section including the one in Ray’s room where he should at this point be resting … Ray’s quarters are cramped. There is a cot, a chair, and a table with a vase containing as Moon Orchid (BugMap says it is plastic, not even real). On the far wall you see a pretty non-spectacular porthole/window. You cannot see much out there, only moon buggies stacked high with ore and a few Rogue Drones (?) headed off in random directions. But if you take a close look you will see a pixelated shimmering by the left-hand side of the porthole. Bro - it is a tiny gap (maybe one pixel) between the texture mapping of the window and the green stuff below. OK. I am not an expert but when I showed the glitch to CW he told me that cool green line you can see is a part of the wireframe, i.e. the skeleton that they build the whole world onto. Texture mapping is how they make the porthole look like it does (with colours, paint, and textures, etc). Anyway. Look hard between the two and that gap of darkness, and you will see it is somehow different from the night. My friend, when you look in to that gap you are seeing right thru to the nothing that the world is drawn onto. HINT: Do not spend too long looking in there coz you soon start thinking much too much about that nothing. Like what is it? Or what would happen if Ray could get inside it, i.e. not if he went out thru the porthole into space, because then obviously he would die (unless he was wearing a spacesuit) - but what would happen if he could somehow prize open the tiny gap in the world and go inside there, into the nothing that the world is drawn onto? Where would he be then? These are the kinds of thoughts that can send you crazy.” "

and another that threads through the book, is the continual reference to the programmers as the makers of the world: "the way they do the trees is beautiful"

this may not be an obvious connection to my blog which focuses on the neroche landscape, but it's important how other work relates / provokes thought / invites perspective, and 'the broken world' has certainly done that. and not least, reminded me of all the people, teenagers and kids in the blackdown hills right now who are sitting in generated pixel worlds while the rain pours down, fighting the demons, gangs and zombies and rescuing the world from certain disaster.

staple fitzpaine : cornfield : turning circle 4

2008-08-13T09:05:00.000-07:00

farm pets, flood water & turned chair

2008-08-13T08:17:00.000-07:00

august 13th :
a visit to wallace's farm shop for the artists meeting.
the animals are in their pens for the visitors to see...

i go out through hemyock and culmstock, retracing earlier routes to see what's changed:
floodwater hits the bridge in hemyock just beyond the neroche and aonb building,
this is the middle of summer
how do the fish deal with this?
where do the bank dwellers go?
how long can the butterflies wait?
the swifts left before the end of july, they must have sensed something
i wish i'd picked it up in the air too and made my exit
it's only 14 degrees c as i descend from hemyock

and the chair i photographed in may at a road junction outside culmstock...

... up-ended

returning again : banksy

2008-08-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

leaving hemyock yesterday, i called through the car park to see if anything had happened to the 'banksy' on the car park notice. it had gone!

here are a couple of photos i took march 14:

...and the ones i took august 1:

...someone had it...

or perhaps it wasn't a banksy after all
perhaps it was an imitation (would banksy let the paint run like that?) and someone tried to flog it and got nowhere...
perhaps it was an original and someone made their fortune
perhaps mid Devon CC just thought it mindless graffitti and naively cleaned up the car park
perhaps a parking attendant cashed in....

staple fitzpaine : cornfield : turning circle 3

2008-08-01T14:21:00.000-07:00

meeting / returning

2008-08-01T07:44:00.000-07:00

met up with megan at the bus stop in staple fitzpaine just after a partial solar eclipse which was barely visible from here and goes unnoticed. megan calver is the 'placement artist' with the neroche arts project. i took her to the cornfield i've been returning to, filming at different points of the year, to perhaps make a short film where the seasons change visibly around me. we talk while staring at the field and watch the rain approach from the escarpment.

megan noticed a sign out for tea in the church, so we go in: a friendly welcome, tea and donut, rambling conversation. they organise a cafe on friday and saturday mornings so that people from the village can meet up. i mention the listing in the doomsday book for staple fitzpaine and the conversation rambles around village life.

we head up to staple common. i've been wanting to return here since the herepath walk - it invites historical reflection around common land, people, agriculture and the enclosures act. this land has a different feel to it, the grass looks and acts as if grazed for centuries, the trees are kind of wise looking, and the banks around the edge of the field are mossy, and the right height and width for sleeping on. we go as far as a fallen pine.

lunch stop

second meeting with kate about the website design, where all my hard work over the past few days preparing materials pays off. we can both 'see' it, and what is needed, and after much talk of resolution, pixel size and load up time, i fully understand that the pragmatic issues will determine many of the artistic choices.

i want to map the entire neroche area, even though much of it has been beyond me in terms of contact, i want it to be there through the road junctions, names and waterways. but a background map (flash image) of this size (equivalent to size A0 probably) would simply take too long to load. so i am left with the notion of needing to collapse the 'real' map into fictional space somehow - to make a landscape with gaps/other connections. this seems reasonable in relation to an artistic process - but i'm resisting it. i can see that kate likes seeing the way i've mapped the area of neroche where she lives, and it is this sense of familiarity-unfamiliarity that i know will connect, particularly to people who live in the area. so i will have to live with the problem, and see how it unfolds.

map making

2008-07-30T04:04:00.000-07:00

a couple of days focus on the reality of the website : this is a new area of work for me : i have never designed a website before, or made it the 'outcome' of the work : usually i make live performance : so i'm dealing with all sorts of new questions : file sizes and types : loading time : the relationship between my artistic desires and the practical and structural needs of the web : accessibility : the file size of the 'background map' : it all feels quite sculptural in my mind.

this is what i've imagined : a 'map' which works something like google earth / google maps which has all the waterways, brooks, streams and rivers, with around 20 portals / buttons into pop up windows for specific materials - images, text, sound file or video - on migration and transience through the neroche.

i spend the day tracing OS 128 1:25 000 scale which has the detail i want : using carefully selected coloured crayons and experimenting with washing over some lines and areas. quite quickly i'm bored by tracing the rivers : and i'm also thinking what is the difference between 'my' map and the os map : what have i processed? : i begin to trace complex road junctions in the centre of the villages : churchinford has six equal spokes : quite beautiful, and then move onto just following some of the lines of field boundaries, roads and streets with the pencil : i like using the stationary i've collected : and then the names stand out to me, so i start extracting words out of the names of farms, parts of words, looking for words that include animals, moving or changing forms, weather. something starts to take shape : i realise i've only just begun.

i fold the map within the os map to get the creases and marks : i want this map to have a handdrawn and paper feel on the web, to retain the traces of its origins : scan parts of the map and look at them in photoshop : at 66% there is some of the texture and feel that i'm looking for : this is where i have to start.

these images hold some of the elements i think will work :

otter swim

2008-07-29T05:39:00.000-07:00

otter otter otter otter otter otter otter otter otter otter

filmed at buckfastleigh butterfly and otter farm

staple fitzpaine : cornfield : turning circle 2

2008-07-21T07:28:00.000-07:00

on landscape art

2008-07-21T02:20:00.000-07:00

Reading the chapter 'Elements of a new landscape' in 'As Eve Said To The Serpent' by Rebecca Solnit:

'In making landscape art, contemporary artists recognize landscape not as scenery but as the spaces and systems we inhabit, a system our own lives depend upon. In other words, there was no need to return to a landscape that had never been far from anything but our thoughts: it was the thoughts that had to change. The landscape is now thought of as ubiquitous - as the environment, a landscape that includes the microcosmic as well as the macrocosmic, economies as well as ecologies, the cultural as an extension of the natural, our bodies as themselves natural systems that pattern our thoughts, and our thoughts as structured around metaphors drawn from nature.'

....

'When the natural world ceases to be perceived as the scenery out there and becomes the systems and substances all around, we've moved from a mechanical to an ecological worldview, one that is implicit in many installations dealing with substance. In concentrating on substance rather than form as the bearer of meaning, artists assert the decisive significance of substance rather than regarding it as a neutral matter that takes on meaning as it is given form. The very notion of giving meaning to something is premised on a cosmology in which things don't have it yet, in which form is to content as spirit to matter, man to women, God to nature. Substance suggests that meaning is inherent in the world rather than something that needs to be inscribed upon it, and it proposes meanings that can be read in the world itself - the world as language.'

.....

'There are a number of parallel shifts, which together constitute a huge gesture that reverses modernism's gesture upward, out of Plato's cave - a retraction of that gesture of purity and transcendence against the body, the senses, the maternal, and against origins, mutability, ambiguity, a gesture of absolutes and universals. The countering gesture celebrates the sensory, the tangible, the feminine, the complex, the impure, the contextual, the local, the specific, the contingent, the fecund; it is mutable, shifting, ambiguous, immanent (generating what once would have been a contradiction: a spirituality that emphasizes the bodily, the mortal and the material).'

Solnit, R (2003) 'As Eve Said To The Serpent', University of Georgia Press

meeting : a transect

2008-07-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

I met up with Mike Ridge from the Somerset Butterfly and Moth Group. i'd made contact with him on Gavin's recommendation as i wanted to track some of the migrants coming into and passing through Neroche. Mike very generously offered that i join him on a 'transect' - a set route walked over a specific length of time, during the main part of the day to record the butterflies seen.

Thurlbear Wood is a disused quarry, and the low grass and scrub and plentiful thickets have encouraged butterfly populations. the summer has been so wet, i don't hold out much hope of seeing that much, but the sun breaks through for us, and a flurry of butterflies respond immediately to the heat.

I follow Mike around with a camera, recording our conversation - any attempt to 'capture' a butterfly so reminds me i'm not working for the bbc wildlife unit - i remind myself i'm here to map the journey with Mike, watching him observing, recording.

i slow him up i can tell - the whole point of a transect is that you keep moving, so you repeat the pattern of recording each transect as closely as possible, and partially so that you don't see the same butterfly twice (although you can't tell). i have a tendency to dawdle, wanting to stay still to see what comes towards me, to watch at close range a feeding Gatekeeper, and to feel the passage of the sun in a heliotropic kind of way. i fast realise i have to keep up, and the purpose of this moment is to follow the butterfly recorder and his notebook.

Mike reminds me of my dad who was a steam railway enthusiast; there is a dedication, a persistence, a way of acquiring and giving out knowledge, a factual recording and collecting of data that is very particular to this generation somehow. (I hope i'm not 'over-grouping' these kinds of men together here - yes i am - for it seems to be quite a men kind of thing to do). They are very pragmatic, and don't seem to spend their time endlessly questioning the nature of the universe, but devote themselves to practical tasks as a way of living in, and perhaps coping with the world. This kind of tenacity has a 'get things done' thing happening, as compared to my zen like heliotropic state which is all based around awe and wonder.

"entering a situation with a 'mind of don't know' privileges process over outcome" (Lucy Lippard)

I pause on a faded and worn out Ringlet, and photograph it. Mike suggests there are better examples in the next field, this one is not a good specimen. I'm thrown back to my young ornithologist days with Rachel where we would carry our bird book and binoculars to call out species seen - a sense of the world as a list of things sighted rather than of things observed in process; object over experience. Our ornithology didn't last long i don't think, but now i'm glad of it when i watch the birds feeding out the window. I like to know the patterns and shapes and to distinguish them, so i attempt to both name and experience. We see what we want to see, we stack up our desired order of things and lean on it.

"There's a learnt behaviour, an accumulated conditioning about our world - name and form. The activity of deluded consciousness is naming and forming. 'I' become the subject and give the object substantiality. I've made it solid when it doesn't need to be. Name and form are peppered everywhere - they indicate how all things are delineated and differentiated.

Take something on the move - a flowing river. You place a grid over it to view it, and you try to make it solid, to see it and delusion is seeing that conceptual framework as all of reality rather than purely for what it is. It is not that we cease to use name and form but that we are no longer enthralled to the pictures and the realities that gives us. There is a freedom there, from the image. So the grid over the river gives us a way of seeing it, but it's not the whole way of seeing it, just a temporary perspective - it gives you a certain amount of information but not the actuality or reality of what the whole might be, or what is really going on, or all the possibilities."

Notes made during talk by Dr John Peacock on 'The Structure and Limits of Experience - Self Identity and Continuity' at Sharpham Centre for Buddhist Studies, March 2007

I like staying at a distance and following Mike's thorough notation through the frame of the camera; he has a strong and inspiring knowledge of species and habitat and i quizz him thoroughly about migrants, climate change, conservation and human intervention (yes yes here I am naming and forming).

178 butterflies seen this morning. 7 species: Ringlet, Marbled White, Gatekeeper, Meadow Brown, Small Skipper, Small Heath, Large White, Comma

A lunch stop with a beautiful tortoiseshell landing on the gravel in the car park.

Then to Staple Common for another quick transect, a passing below some of the oldest oaks in the Blackdowns (the images here do not do justice), and a forest clearance by the Neroche Scheme as part of their programme for bringing back native species. yes brutal it looks, and only time will tell.

It's hard to see why i've included this photo below, but if you enlarge it, it's a striking example of a new sapling growing on a dead fallen trunk.

"...And dead are their children and their grandchildren and all those rolling rows of generations between them and us who got born, grew old, and died; they turned up and around like teeth on a hay rake, and then down, and we are the front row now."
from Annie Dillard - 'The Living'

interdependence

2008-07-11T04:35:00.000-07:00

i went to see 'the unwinking gaze' the other night, a film following the dalai lama over the past few years during his negotiations with china over tibet. then reading a connected text today, i found this:

"...it's impossible to find any object not related to all the others. In his book The Heart of Understanding, contemporary Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh uses a simple sheet of paper as an example to illustrate this idea of interbeing. Everything has some connection with this sheet of paper. If we follow all the constituent elements to their source ... we find that in reality the sheet of paper is empty. It has no separate self. It is made up entirely of non-paper elements, and is empty of an independent identity. Empty in this sense ... means that the paper is full of all things, full of the entire cosmos.

Needless to say, what holds true for a sheet of paper also holds true for an individual. We are each made up of non-individual elements. Thich Nhat Hanh also tells us that when we meditate, we are in no way cutting ourselves off from the rest of the world. The suffering that the meditating individual transports into his or her heart is society itself. When we meditate we do it for all beings. We do it even for things that are incapable of meditating. To echo an ancient saying, we are now at the very heart of ecology itself."

The Power of Buddhism, (1996) HH The Dalai Lama & Jean-Claude Carriere (pg 26-27)

blog : 'geological'

2008-07-10T03:44:00.000-07:00

...zooming around looking for like-mindedness, i came upon quantockdreaming, a project about the romantic poets and the quantocks which i remember being launched last year, but didn't know who had won the commission. this site by ralph hoyte and antony lyons is very interesting, and i came upon this striking quote and reference:

"A thought on the nature of blogs - including this blog - is that they are ‘geological’, or more precisely - sedimentary, they build up as layers, as does a geological sequence. The ‘axis’ is vertical; the past is buried, but also exposed to the prospector, the seeker. They tell a story - of a changing (mental) environment, and are open to ‘mapping’. I expect this seam to be explored further, and to emerge in the finale expo."

antony goes on to write about edward tufte:

While on this topic, it is impossible not to mention Edward R Tufte, and his beautiful assemblages of ‘informations’.
“The world is complex, dynamic, multidimensional; the paper is static, flat. How are we to represent the rich visual world of experience and measurement on mere flatland?.....To envision information - and what bright and splendid visions can result - is to work at the intersection of image, word, number, art. The instruments are those of writing and typography, of managing large data sets and statistical analysis, of line and layout and color”

One of the challenges in ‘Quantock Dreaming’ will be to consolidate the year’s explorations and journeys into a concise presentation which retains the essence of both place and process. An aspect of this is the search for a fusing, or juxtaposition, of on-the-ground response (i.e. local) with a remote-sensing element (eg satellite, aerial photos, web-search). The ‘remote’ is also the time away from the Quantocks, yet still thinking of the Quantocks. (All thinking is anyway ‘remote’)"

quoted from Antony Lyons
Blogging : Winter Walking + Map Musings (AL)
quantockdreaming.net

i feel very similarly about the neroche project, and it was good to read antony's insightful thoughts.

passing through : rain storm

2008-07-09T07:57:00.000-07:00

high summer in neroche.
after a day of heavy rain i went to the bbc weather site to lift pictures of the rain as it passed down, through, over.

things passing through: cars and what they do

2008-06-30T05:31:00.000-07:00

into the blackdowns from athelney through curry rivel. i wanted to return to 2 places i had seen on previous journeys. i have been struck by how the neroche area is triangulated by 3 roads: the m5, the a358 and the a303. as soon as you turn off any of these roads, the sparseness, emptiness and quiet of the blackdowns descends, and almost instantly you are disorientated, lost.

i came out onto the a358 opposite bickenhall, and then south, pulling into a green lane where a hedge trimmer was working. parked up, feeling conspicuous and went to investigate this strange relic that you can just see from the road.

is it a monument, a gravestone, the last of a derelict house? it is a cross of four walls in a circle, with a hole in the top for a flagpole perhaps, and it says C.L.W. House 1935-2006 - is it for a life? money spiders were running all over it and their negotiations and encounters ran in parallel with the constant passage of cars and trucks.

i emailed the Neroche Scheme to ask about it, and a few days later this came back:
"yes, this was erected by Mr House who lived on a farm in Ashill (and made cider) .... he was very annoyed because he wasn't allowed to put a sign up on the new bypass to sell his cider, he could only put an advert on a trailer and move this around. So he built this monument (he was allowed to do that!!) - he had cancer and thought he was going to die and put up this mausoleum as a protest against the authorities.
He lost a lot of business from passing traffic and had quite a fight
with the local council.
We didn't know he had died, but presumably he did in 2006."

then onto the a303, and a return to the hillside cafe and tearooms where i filmed the traffic passing in front of the closed building. the breeze-blocked-up windows, a thriving plastic pond, abandoned flower garden - i crossed the road to take photographs, and couldn't get back - a blind bend on the main tourist road to the west country overflowing with cream teas. whenever there is a break in the traffic (not so often) a peace descends and momentarily settles. a speckled wood negotiates the give way sign. the green lane right opposite the cafe broken by cars, exists as if in another world.

staple fitzpaine : cornfield : turning circle 1

2008-06-27T07:53:00.000-07:00

staple fitzpaine : doomsday 2008

2008-06-27T06:54:00.000-07:00

From the Doomsday Book for Somerset:
"The Count holds STAPLE (fitzpaine) himself. Two thanes held it before 1066; it paid tax for 10 hides. Land for 9 ploughs, of which 7 hides are in lordship; 3 ploughs there; 6 slaves; 20 villagers with 6 ploughs & 3 hides. A mill which pays 30d; meadow, 24 acres; pasture 1/2 league long and 1 furlong wide; woodland 1 league long and 2 furlongs wide. 1 cob; 10 unbroken mares; 10 cattle; 50 sheep; 100 goats. the value was £10; now £12. A garden in Langport belongs to this manor; it pays 50 eels."

i passed through staple fitzpaine to see what I could find for a contemporary entry: i sat in the car observed by neighbourhood watch, made a cloud, and then went in search
...

intimate animate - new video

2008-06-26T04:06:00.000-07:00

I have just finished editing this video that I've made for projection/installation. It's composed of footage that I've collected over the past year from different events: a wedding on Dartmoor, the Boxing Day hunt meet in South Brent, and the river Dart in flood at Dartington. It's not about or for the Neroche project, but speaks something of the kind of work I like to make. Here it's to do with intimacy, connection, and relationships of touch - the meeting point between a hand and a head, between the water and the heads of the daffodils.

native 2

2008-06-24T01:00:00.000-07:00

into the Blackdowns from Devon.

i wanted to drive up through Dunkerswell - my brother used to go for burn-ups there in his green ford cortina in the 70s so it's always held a strange association. the road up from Honiton is long and straight. banger racing courses - piles of tarp-covered heaps held in place with car tyres. moto-cross stadium - closed off, foreign looking. i'm very out of place here.

watching swallows trace the length of the cut silage grass - huge fields, the expanse of agricultural green that runs for miles in all directions. the airfield recalls a news item about fears of terrorists using small planes. a glider circles down fast over the field, i can't make out its scale, i realise it's remote controlled, a flag, three men looking down.

i trace a journey between the horizon and my map that I made in 1996 from Buckland St Mary and along this road down to Ottery St Mary - I was touring with Horse and Bamboo Theatre, and we walked across the Blackdowns with horses and wagons. i wanted to find the place we camped, to see if there was any atmosphere left present for me. these are the things i remember: we could see Glastonbury Tor far on the horizon through a gateway, there was a car accident in the night at the crossroads, hardly anyone came to see the show, there was a feeling of loneliness and we wanted to leave. the landscape and that journey through it have stayed with me.

i call into a farm shop - they have nice wooden signs. i buy some strawberries and some potatoes - "Devon ones now, no more need for Cornish" (the farm-shop-keeper). i ask to photograph the signs, and end up filming the flags and listening to the sheep that move towards me. there is a field full of farm equipment, a barn, a going-out bonfire smoking steadily in a metal feeder. the scene is soft, long distance, familiar - i want to film it but it's too much to frame.

i'm still wondering about the word native - native species, to be native to a land. And also everything that's 'League of Gentlemen' about 'local'. i don't relate to flags even though Bjork's 'declare independence' lyrics were temporarily encouraging, and the one at Glastonbury Festival 'Here I Am' delightfully stated their purpose. so i made this film.

small bird in hand

2008-05-27T05:50:00.000-07:00

bird : may 22 2008

driving through Culmstock tiny bird standing facing white line at edge of road stopped looked small bird standing still stunned picked it up you know that amazing feeling when you hold a small bird i filmed it sorry small bird but we had to collaborate somehow fast heart beat fluttering body held light in my rapt warm hand i sensed the power of my strength in the lightness of its eye i saw its head flatten at the passing of the truck that could have been its end breath thinnest legs placed on grass bird still bird looking around then flew up into the tree and gone turn back to the car

view

2008-05-12T16:34:00.000-07:00

in the woods

2008-05-11T10:07:00.000-07:00

walk 2 : staple fitzpaine herepath opening

2008-05-10T02:17:00.000-07:00

A significant moment : the opening of the Staple Fitzpaine Herepath.

Me and D plan to walk the circular route that has been a long time in the making by the Neroche Scheme - it's a circular route that joins existing bridlepaths with new ones to make a circular path. We arrive for the opening ceremony, with lots of horseriders, walkers and dogs. The 'gateway' has a ribbon strung between two posts which will be cut.

Rather brilliantly, the local press photographer stages the whole event for his camera and manages to erase any chance of the actual event happening in the present tense!

The best moment of the occasion was when J gave the landowners bouquets of flowers for letting the public path go through their land - it was very moving, my eyes filled up.

Me and D accidentally get in with the 'long walkers', and find ourselves setting off in a group - oh no. we desperately try to think of a way to extract ourselves, but they are very caring and don't want us to get left behind, lost, or abandoned in case of an accident. all those things are quite attractive to me at this point. i go into a field to have a pee, deliberately lagging behind. but the man at the 'back' of the group waits for us, even turning to walk back to check on us. at this point we are blatant. he looks a bit crushed by our desire to go it alone, and sets off to join the group with a 'well don't say i didn't tell you' kind of look on his fleece.

we lag, wander, photograph. soon we're well behind. horses pass in the opposite direction - walkers clockwise around the path, horses anti-clockwise.

this passing of horses, the continual smell of the approach of neatsfoot oil and sweaty saddlery, and the sound of hooves on the common.

non-human encounters with orange tips, variety of whites, yellowhammer, blackbirds, brimstone, deer, speckled wood and holly blue. the walk was marked by butterflies travelling along the Herepath at a whole other pace and relationship.

huge trees on the way up to Castle Neroche - tall tall. and right by the Herepath there,
a pair of mens underpants hanging on a tree. i filmed them from various angles.

the common after Castle Neroche was really extraordinary - Staple Common it must be - before I looked at the map I knew it was common land - a very particular feel to the land, and trees and quality of grass somehow. I really liked it there, and the derelict house is kind of amazing - how swift that decline has been. Thurlbear woods were enveloping, green green.

the only time we lost the trail was after the Farmers Arms on the road there, shortly after the yellowhammer flew out of the hedge. we cut back up a farm drove to rejoin the Herepath at the start of that big ploughed field. just before re-joining the path we saw a roe deer, i stopped so suddenly that D walked straight into the back of me - the deer must have seen a human comedy moment. we all locked eyes quite close over the hedge for a good few minutes; encounter, presencing.

we got back to the field at 6pm having taken our time, photos, and stops along the way. There was no one in the field when we got back except a car with 3 women and a couple of dogs. all the chairs folded and stacked in a marquee ready to be taken down. I always seem to be last to return at things like this.

thinking about walking the herepath

2008-05-01T06:45:00.000-07:00

For a good few weeks before the herepath walk, i think about how i can contribute to the event artistically. i am interested in the possibility of encounter, meeting and conversation, and of course i want these to just 'happen'. yet i'm going to an event where there will be lots of opportunities to meet, talk, and i want to maximise these. i am reluctant to do too much, to interfere with the walking, or worse to take other people towards something they don't want to particularly engage with; i don't want to construct anything where i have to say "excuse me, could i ..."

I consider these things:

- giving out pre-addressed postcards asking people why they walk in the blackdowns.
no go: so what really, people feeling obligated to complete, superficial responses, awkwardness and neediness in distributing them

- carrying something symbolically around the route
no go: can't think of anything significant, so what anyway, richard long did it so much better

- a mini printed card to give away to other walkers/riders with listing of all the things that are passing by / through Neroche landscape while we are walking the Herepath (a list of things on the move). or a quote relevant to walking....
no go: participation for the sake of it, everyone's doing their own thing so why get in their faces?

- plant wildflower seeds or plants for butterflies as i walk the route. i like this idea and begin researching appropriate seed sources or plants.
no go: gavin is clear about the need for 'native' plants to distribute and spread themselves without importing seeds or plants from elsewhere.

This is very important in relation to my thematic:
what do we consider to be native in a landscape that has undergone continual change?
at what point in our pastoral history are we freezing the landscape in order to call something native?
what does it mean this term native when applied to this context: to originate in a land? to be born in a landscape and live in it? to come from that place and stay in that place?

I understand what G means, and immediately see me ordering scabius seeds from some web site to distribute in the Neroche as meaningless. but i'm also left with a feeling of complexity and blur. at what point is something native in a porous and changing ecology and environment, and who decides where and when that line is?

Then in the observer (20th april), a very interesting article on kinder scout in the peak district. 'the mass trespass in 1932 began a revolution that opened the countryside to millions' - the article went on to track the environmental damage caused by walkers, and ended with this invitation:

'The 76th anniversary will be marked by a 'mass' planting event on the early May bank holiday weekend organised by the National Trust. Walkers and volunteers can go to help plant cotton grass while they are on a walk.'

I email G and J with the link to the article and suggest some kind of collection / re-distribution seed / plant bank for walkers to use in the Neroche landscape as some kind of legacy for the project. if the Neroche scheme is opening up this environment to more people, how can they help to sustain it as well as use it?

Walk 1 : to Luxhay and Quants

2008-04-25T17:31:00.000-07:00

artist's plan - march 26

2008-03-26T09:49:00.000-07:00

*collecting process:*

1. walking:
- between springs, following waterways, walking the length of a river, around a reservoir.
- between dawn and dusk, and in relation to specific times/measurements
- finding on foot what I view from Google Earth, making connections, finding translations.
- as a way of encountering people, non human life, plants, narratives.
- tracking boundaries, perimeters and movement across them
- collecting sound. ideas and images

2. driving:
- as a way of crossing and navigating the neroche area and finding my way, including passing on the M5
- as a means of getting to interview and talk to people
- collecting images, video and sounds
- contributing to pollution and climate change

3. google earth & internet:
- a satellite perspective from above the landscape to find curiosities, traces of contemporary and historical movement, and to map places to walk
- as a source for other materials and connections such as youtube blackdown hills sites

4. investigating and researching:
- Rebecca Solnit, Richard Long, Alan Solnfist, The Harrisons, Miranda July, Simon Whitehead, Francis Ayls, Annie Dillard & Richard Mabey.
- rural politics, conservation and leisure, agriculture and migration, countryside as depository, darknesses, isolation, contemporary and historical perspectives.

5. mapping:
- routes and paths, water flow including water table and rivers, geological shifts, weather and prevailing wind, animal bird and butterfly migration, dust and air, seeds, flights paths, historical migration and human movement.
- tracing a map of Neroche landscape through springs and waterways and some additional transient and moving features (emotions, stories, memories, ideas, particles)

6. interviewing / speaking with:
- conservationist
- butterfly and moth expert
- waterways engineer
- migrant worker
- person who held, or attended raves
- postwoman, or horse rider

*outcome / realisation*

at present i am seeing the outcome (the thing that’s lasting and public) as a website directly linked to the neroche site, driven by my artistic interpretation of the neroche landscape. currently it manifests as a mapping (drawing) of all the springs and waterways in the neroche landscape and using them as 'portals', routes or hotspots to reveal collected images, sounds and stories from the moving and changing landscape. It ideally would work in a similar way to google earth - the user would be able to move across the surface, drift across the landscape, and then click on hotspots to reveal other layers, memories and ideas in relation to things which are migratory, transient or passing/passed through, including me as the artist in relation to trips/walking I’ve made.

- some of these collected pieces (audio clips/video/images) could also work on the hand held system.

*questions I’m asking*

- how practical or realisable is this? is this the best manifestation of the work?
- could there be a way of using Google Earth / You Tube to host/ghost some of the work so that people come across it in different ways?

- I would like to avoid making DVDs or books that won’t necessarily find a life or be distributed. I like the idea of making something that is ‘immaterial’ in itself - it reflects the nature/content of the work. The website would need to be very accessible and user friendly, and crucially, simple to maintain.

things passing through : cafe red car

2008-03-14T14:08:00.000-07:00

there's

someone living in here the light is on at night it's on all day there's someone living in behind here

meeting : rural time

2008-03-14T10:49:00.000-07:00

I'm in Hemyock to talk with G and J from the Neroche Scheme and from the Forestry Commission, to ask them questions about natural history, migratory species, and significant events in the landscape. we cover all the topics. we talk about conservation, climate change.

All sorts of beginnings come from this meeting, a kind of network is laid out on the table, people to meet, species to track (invisible, rare) and events to consider.

When i ask G about a sense of personal events that have 'passed through' Neroche for him, he talks about two things, two houses where he played as a child. One is now gone, there's nothing left, it has almost vanished into the ground, and in such a short space of time. The other was bought up, converted, done up and now the owners like to keep their privacy. they bought a cottage for a rural life, and they don't want paths and people running through. they have a high fence, and some solid boundaries.

The polarity of the stories of the two houses become kinds of marker points for me at either side of my peripheral vision.

They recall my own childhood to me within my 'square mile': a milkstand in the hedge, almost gone now, hardly anything left, and so quickly. And there, some new commuter houses where Quandary and Merrylegs' (!!) stables were. The village's architecture visible in my mind's eye now, my sense of place written between my hands and feet via nerves (and horse dust). My immediate ability to recall both somatically and sensually where I 'was', and all those other things 'were' - it's electric. Palimpsest, accretion, disappearance.

"It may be that loyalty to something as immaterial as ideas sets thinkers apart from those whose loyalty is tied to people and locale, for the loyalty that ties down the latter, will often drive the former from place to place." Rebecca Solnit 'Wanderlust - a history of walking'

culmstock : some things there

2008-03-14T10:06:00.000-07:00

travelling up from south devon, crossing back over the M5 on the way to Culmstock were these at the side of the road, small white portals right by the motorway bridge, right by the roadside

and on into Culmstock, where a small ending was occurring

beside the actual and symbolic small 'deaths' in the village life, another demise; the tenderness of class 4's ceramic tiling work was a warmth by the skip - the ducks are so Yellow, the sheep so White and there's a Strawberry at the door

and out the other side, wrapped countryside

passing

2008-02-20T09:13:00.000-08:00

some weeks just drift by

without me realising

heat seeking

2008-02-12T08:13:00.000-08:00

if you were to travel over neroche, or indeed any landscape, with a heat seeking camera from above, as if you were a satelite with a very strong magnification range, what would all the life forms look like in the night, what patterns would they make?

human shapes asleep in their beds, birds in nests and hedges, animals in burrows curled round or waiting in the dark, all with a beating heart. what would it look like, all that red warmth emitting.

all the beating hearts, some a flutter, some knocking almost. fur and feathers, and skin, red glowing, making warmth that never burns or boils only heats.

natural england

2008-02-12T07:38:00.000-08:00

the countryside as depository:

fridges

takeaway containers

dumped bodies

tied plastic bags

stashed drugs

condoms

empty lager cans

unwanted pets

clothing

silage wrapping

murder weapons

burnt out cars

car drive winter landscape

2008-01-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

monument

2008-01-31T07:17:00.000-08:00

a steering group meeting, and then to Wallace's Farm Shop, where i met a very lovely Hungarian waitress who admired my orange cardigan - we got talking and she told me of her remarkable life story so far, and how she came to be in the Blackdown Hills; answering a web ad for an au pair here, she couldn't speak any english but wanted to learn, so she just set off from her village in Hungary not knowing where she was going to end up. we talked about what it was to be an outsider, and the process of integration into a close-knit community, and the bizarre feeling in the Blackdowns - what is that?

then i headed to the monument, the one i'm always driving past along with most of you, on the M5 - a landmark for the driver. it's cold, very windy, and a hording surrounds the monument - i think it's supposed to be suffering from structural insecurity.

i film it from multiple angles through the holes in the hording, attracted by the 'gunfire' sound of the wind moving the riveted metal, with the stilled old canons partially revealed. a timely helicopter flies past; old and modern warfare. everytime i've come to the Blackdowns so far, a helicopter has flown over or exercised in the area - guess it's an attractive distance from Yeovilton airbase.

it's a bleak january day: exposed, harsh air, pale light, muted.

artist's plan - january 30

2008-01-30T09:20:00.000-08:00

- to make a lasting piece of work for the neroche project, which will be realised as a video/sound work (possibly supported by image/text work) both as a complete work in itself, and in small, randomly accessible sections for handheld computer (pda).

- the overall aim of the work will be to present a different yet complimentary perspective on the neroche landscape, something which can work alongside the other works produced, yet has the capacity to be more unusual in form and content.

- the work will take as its starting point and will explore: the migratory, the transient, the passing through - species, flora, fauna, weather, light, human history, satellite and flight paths, walking routes both ancient and contemporary, commuter routes, transport lines, and will explore these thematics in relation to time - geological time, seasonal time, clock measurement and imaginative time.

- one or two examples may be tracked from each selected area (eg a species of butterfly, bird, one geological layer, flight path, lived life) to create a sense of a shifting, moving inter-connected landscape and culture rather than a notion of fixed locality - it’s a work that promotes a porous, moving landscape in dialogue with the other, the non human, the phenomenal.

- significant sources and influences: the here-paths, the perimeter boundary, the neroche map, a vertical cross section of the landscape, google earth images. specific interviews will happen as part of the work with people in relationship to Neroche - eg. a natural historian, a long term inhabitant, a transient traveller, a child perhaps - and these voices would be worked in with collected and found sound/image.

- relationships would be worked between what’s mapped and what’s experienced, the visible and the invisible, the paths in relation to their endings/beginnings, the satellite image in relation to the eye and ear level perspective, the patterns made by nature/culture set in relief to the process of continual change. - the research: a series of walks through neroche on the paths and along the perimeter, interviews with 3-4 specialists in species/locality movement, using video, images and sound.

- the composition: will be determined by materials gathered, and very probably assembled in specific relationship to a measurement/time/shape directly taken from the neroche project eg. the neroche map with here-path routes and boundary. the work proposed is ambitious, a little uncontrollable and wide-ranging so it has to be distilled, simple and very focused during the making.

images from google earth

2008-01-24T08:48:00.000-08:00

i floated over neroche all day collecting images from google earth. i was struck by the marks made by human activity, by tractors and farm machinary, by both the desire paths and formal patterns of some fields.

but i was taken by this next image the most: a landscape divided in two by satallite scans at different times of the year, one in spring and one in summer - a visible meeting of seasons across a landscape.

the first meeting

2008-01-08T09:20:00.000-08:00

the first artists meeting.
windy, grey, some rain. we travel through from hemyock to castle neroche getting an inital impression and sense of the escarpment.

i make a list in my head of all the things passing through and think of things that are non-locatable, impermanent or invisible, things that appear and disappear, vanish without even knowing they were there. and movement in relation to time. there was a glacier here? there were tigers, mammoths? what if i take a vertical sample from the top of the atmosphere to the deepest rock? what is the 'volume' of this place?

i spend time beginning a notebook and stick in references that i think will continue to trigger: quotes from Richard Long on paths and maps, Victor Burgin's UK 76 photos, Mark Wallanger's christmas wrapping paper design, some Annie Dillard and Rebecca Solnit references, and start collecting books on migration, land art and mapping.

"walking shares with making and working that crucial element of engagement of the body and mind with the world, of knowing the world through the body and the body through the world....wherever you go, there you are" (Wanderlust, Rebecca Solnit)

first thoughts

2008-01-04T07:35:00.000-08:00

i wake up thinking about migration - the Arctic Tern making a bi-polar expedition each year. why all that effort? why that journey, flying from its Arctic breeding ground to the Antarctic and back again each year. perhaps it's for the daylight - the bird sees two summers each year. i'm thinking about the notion of 'everything changes' in relation to things repeating, cycling, having pattern. i like going back to the same places time and time again - each time i see more of it, i see it differently, and of course it is different. does the Arctic tern have this experience? - yes i imagine so. i heard from James M that warblers migrating to Africa go back to the very same bush every year, they are completely specific in their geography and sense of place.

in beginning to think about what the focus of my work will be, i know that i don't want to make live performance - i want to work instead with writing, image and sound primarily collected through walking.
i consider re-enacting my brother's 'burn-ups' in the 70s in his ford cortina at dunkerswell airfield, writing something in tyremarks on the expanse of concrete for the people in planes to see, or alien visitors, or migratory birds. i have other ideas too that don't feel right for this particular commission.

so i'm thinking about my work in Neroche both being about and in the landscape, and in relation to the other artists and the scheme's objectives, and also needing to fulfill the brief i have - to make something 'lasting'. my impulse is to move outwards from the landscape and to connect to it through 'elsewheres', through the moving elements of the place.

so i begin to think of Neroche being a place for me to map migration, to track what is passing through the landscape and to see this location as something porous, somewhere in conversation with other places and times. i also wonder if studying these transient elements might say something in relation to humans and our perception of place.