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.