Showtime!

Still from one of the films made for my MA.

Finishing off and reflecting

Next week I shall be putting up my MA show. It is held in the Architecture building of UCA Canterbury, a surprisingly uninspiring space for any learning or presentation.

In the meantime I have to finish all the presentation materials that I hope to display, last week I handed in the last piece of written work that was required for the course. The Critical paper was fairly short, in words, but had to be concise and reflect on my final project which took a lot of photographs, drawings and film, so it became a fairly lengthy document.

To date there are four films that are on my Youtube Channel ‘Trace and Traversal’. Sharing the films on Youtube was the best way to publicly ‘air’ them. I hope to have two of these films running at my show. ‘The Summer Solstice full-moon walk on the Salt Way’ film has been edited by Erin Lauren-Hayhow and I find it beautifully mesmerising. This will hopefully be run on a loop, it has background sound but that is ok to hear as low noise in the display area. Watch the film here.

Second still from a moving film...

The other film explaining about the Storywalk concept has a narration by Chris Jelley and I hope to have some earphones ready for people to ‘plug in’ to the film if they wish.

Watch his introduction to Storywalks here.

  

Last night I worked on the profile of the walk. It is a foam-board cut out representation of the topography, which will show the length of the path to scale showing the undulations of the landscape. This is unlike a geological cross-section, which would possibly run across the area along a set grid reference. My profile is constructed from using a website that enables me to pin-point locations on a map and obtain the longitude, latitude and heights above sea level. It has been very useful for plotting the route using many historic references to the Salt Way. The website is http://gridreferencefinder.com

Photographs of the smallest three scaled models

I have nearly finished three small-scaled studio models that are to be on display. These are a set, which represent the site-specific way-markers that I have designed for the Salt Way which tell the story of Salt-making in their construction. The models construction needed to be thought upon, I refer to this in an earlier blog, but I finally worked out a method and I think they look quite beautiful. I have always admired the work of Rachel Whiteread and during my research I have further researched and referred to her work.

Here is a link to an article on her 

Next is an except from my critical paper that explains the process of making the models.

‘I cast the models in the natural environment, firstly creating a negative of the form that I wanted, putting a square mould around it and filling with plaster of paris, creating a square imprinted form that when extracted also left a trace of its existence as a curious feature on the ground. I had initially planned to make the models in another way but experimenting with the process itself encouraged me to explore the idea of imprinting my models using a negative form instead, staying honest to the ideas of my project has highlighted on the importance of trace in the environment.’

My project has been about finding meaning in the landscape, looking at how I could create a design strategy to connect people to an unfamiliar place by their interaction with it in a variety of ways. I looked in depth at traces left in the landscape and our traversal through it.

This hopefully explains why I am contemplating calling my show and related publication (yet to be completed!) ‘Trace and Traversal.’

There is tonight and another full day left to finish that and many other pieces of work ready to display the following week. Wish me luck!

the natural growth of things

The 1986 Prospectus of Medway College of Design, the view is from the college, still easily recognizable today.

The Gulf Between

It may be surprising but I have steered away from creating Art for most of my working life. I put this down to choosing to go to Medway College of Design back in the late 1980’s. It was not an art and design college. The environment was very creative and we had great fun. I am still in contact with a lot of my friends from that time. I studied Spatial Design and we did ‘Visual Studies’ once a week, which was really the only 2D creative illustrative work that we produced. The timetable for the week was full time. We would go in for 5 full days and have work to carry out over the evenings and weekends. I loved it. Most of the work was either working from a brief to create a design and concept or learning basic draughting skills, using parallel-motion drawing-boards, set-squares, understanding perspective and many other graphic communication skills. Drawings, photos etc were all about getting the concept of your design over to others in a clear way.

There is nothing wrong in this, it has set me up well for a career in design, but has created a gulf in my mind between the idea of Art on one side and Design on the other. This gulf keeps being bridged more recently. It is something I recognise and am now allowing myself to explore.

A metaphor perhaps, whilst preoccupied with one thing, another (often a treasure)can be found. A pupae, discovered when I was sweeping the earth around the art installation. 

I chose to go back to the same place to study for my MA. Part of this was admittedly through nostalgia, another was that it was comparatively easy to travel to and had a MA course in Design. Ironically my research during the last couple of years has led me to more art that I had ever imagined would be useful in a design MA! I have created three way-markers for the Salt Way route that are site-specific art installations, or put another way, site-specific design interventions. Perhaps they are the same thing. I now understand that one informs the other, there may be no separation of discipline. But for 20 odd years I have believed that there is. So the realisation that actually it is all creativity and art may be used to communicate an idea is going to take a little longer, but I am getting there.

The scaled piece completed. When scaled up this would have trees planted around it in a circle.

This weekend I have created a half scale model in the woodland part of my garden of one of the way-markers. It is the first one in the series of three that celebrate the process of salt making. Bearing in mind the Salt Way is an ancient salt trading route, which has been forgotten in time I believed the markers could be a catalyst along the path that would not only show the way but also form a narrative, prompting questions and hopefully enthusiastic answers from the local community.

This is the area in which I would like to site the scaled up version of my design. Just above this woodland rill, on the flat ground.

I found the whole process of making this piece very meditative. Firstly I measured out the circle with a hoop and then cleared the inside of fallen leaves. This in itself, working in silence was a pleasure. I moved the hoop and made the diameter slightly larger as the bowl that I had chosen for the centre was larger than envisioned and therefore warranted a larger frame around it.

Then I dug a shallow recess in the earth and placed the bowl into it. The wind got up and blew the cleared leaves back into the circle. I then thought that as I was clearing the earth, I could do it in an archaeological excavation way, brushing the surface lightly and revealing a more solid surface below. In doing so, I saw that the earth that was gently brushed away was weighing heavy on the perimeter of leaves, holding them steady, allowing them less to blow around.

Detail of the dampened swept surface of the circle and the magical reflections in the water.

When I was happy with the clarity of the circle I went to fill the watering can up with water to pour into the centre bowl. As I did so I accidentally sprinkled some on the earth by the bowl. This took on a deeper colour emphasising the contrast between leaf strewn wooded floor and a specially cleared space. I decided then to deliberately sprinkle most of the water around the bowl, in the circle leaving a smaller quantity for the bowl itself. The water in the bowl settled and the overhanging branches and leaves from the surrounding Beech and Hornbeam were reflected in the water giving it a magical, detailed moving surface.

This way-marker is to be about the process of gathering and harvesting. Saltwater would have had to be collected to make salt. This way-marker is designed to honour that part of the process; there is a bowl in the centre to collect water and the plan is to plant trees around the circle and form them over the years to a vessel shape, a form that tapers out as it rises. I will choose native trees that have purposely been coppiced in the past in this area. The Blean woods, through which the Salt way travels on its way to Canterbury, are a remaining part of the Northwood that covered most of Kent in the past. These woods have been worked and coppicing was a method through which people have sustainably harvested wood for many different uses.

The Ash Dome by David Nash

David Nash is an artist that has created a living sculpture using Ash trees, his work is called ‘Ash Dome’ and located at Cae’n-y-Coed in Wales. The circle was planted in 1977 and now is shaped to his vision. Kew had an exhibition of his work between April 2012 and 2013 called A Natural Gallery and these photos are from their website.

Here is a photo from the exhibition,it shows his artwork communicating the idea of the concept.

Here is a link to some more.

http://www.kew.org/web-image/ash-dome5.htm?gallery=Ash-Dome-through-the-seasons

The photo of David Nash sketching in the wood looks really like he’s enjoying himself and it has inspired me to emulate that idea of capturing an image outside, in situ. I have decided I shall go and draw and paint my design later on today, literally bridging that gulf between art and design in my mind.

 

David Nash sketching in situ. 

I now realise from completing this blog and reflecting on my ideas, experience etc, that from trying to dig deeper into my understanding of Design, through studying it at this MA level, I have found the treasure that has been naturally growing in me:  Art. 

Capturing Words

A page from Hamish Fulton's 'Walking Through'.

This is the eighth blog so far. The children have broken up from school for the summer holidays and it is hot.

This heat makes sleeping through the night quite tricky and anytime spent awake at night has been filled with anxiety and constant musing on the Saltway project, my final critical reflective paper and a myriad of other things.

Last night I thought enough was enough and I wrote out a four-week timetable of what work (and play!) I wanted to fit into this limited time before the private show on the 30^th of August. This, coupled with the fact that I go to yoga on Thursday mornings helped me sleep far better and therefore feel much more relaxed now.

It was very exciting to receive a link today from Christopher Jelley to the edited film of the Storywalk that he wrote and we filmed last week. It is a really good film that explains the Storywalk concept succinctly alongside beautiful images of that balmy summer evenings’ entertainment.

I will put a link on here to it as soon as it goes live, which hopefully will be over the next few days.

I have been toying with the idea of creating a publication for the MA show that explains about the Salt Way in the form of an Artists book, a psycho-geographic account of the experience of travelling the path. This idea came from looking at a publication, which was lent to me by a friend, by Hamish Fulton. It is an A5 size landscape book called ‘Walking Through’.

There are just two photographs at the endpapers; the main content is handwritten text. The words are evocative of the experience, the layout spread across the page like a beautiful poem. I wonder is this how we mentally experience a place or is this the unique work of an artist? Do we walk and create words for what we see? Do explanations come to us so naturally we dismiss them as familiar and therefore redundant?

To look at another’s record of a walk and the experience that that represents feels like a gift to me. It allows me a glimpse into another world, into one that I too could participate in if I just honoured the sense of exploration and dived in. Just imagine what words would come from just a regular walk if we just looked, listened to our minds and wrote the words down.

Digging up some London Clay from the foreshore.

Soon I shall walk to the beach with my sons to see how far the tide has gone out. I need to collect some London Clay from the foreshore to use in at least one of my models that I am going to create for the MA show. I shall try and listen to the chatter of my mind and see if I can capture any of it in words when I get to the beach. Then I shall do the same exercise when I walk out to collect the clay. A major concern is that I will forget the words, so I may try and take a Dictaphone, notebook etc.

So, I am off to capture words and therefore capture a period in time. We are taking two new shrimping nets to try out in the sea and a bucket for my clay. The combination of nets and words reminds me of a section in one of my favourite books, ‘Sexing the Cherry’ by Jeannette Winterson. In this chapter Jordan helps people as ‘their words rising up, form a thick cloud over the city, which ever so often must be thoroughly cleansed. Men and women in balloons fly up…and, armed with mops and scrubbing brushes, do battle with the canopy of words trapped under the sun.’

Ok so not quite as I remembered, no (shrimping) nets for a start. They are trying to eradicate the words by scrubbing, not capturing them as I want to do. There is one last quote from the book that I find enchanting.

‘I was sorry to see the love sighs of young girls swept away. My companion though she told me it was strictly forbidden, caught a sonnet in a wooden box and gave it to me as a memento. If I open the box by the tiniest amount I may hear it, repeating itself endlessly as it is destined to do until someone sets it free.’

I will practice capturing words very soon, I will place them in a notebook and hopefully this exercise will inspire me to listen more to the walking chatter, that is informed by our observation of the world around us, keeping the odd precious one as a memento.