Monthly Archives: March 2018

Walking as Conversation (from a response to Judy Tucker)

My friend Judy Tucker  is currently writing a book chapter about walking in contemporary art practices and thinking about the links between these two activities in ways that go beyond the usual, obvious, connections (Richard Long et alia).

In that context, she asked me to note down a few lines about my current work, my move with, and beyond, ideas of deep mapping, and about the way I ‘walk with’ and collaborate. (We have known each other a long time, worked together in teaching contexts, and are joint co-ordinators for LAND2 with Mary Modeen). What follows is a slightly extended version of my response to her questions, which is I think relevant in the context of this blog because of the growing importance of walking as a relationship to the multiple layers of our environments.

I began by saying that I’m puzzled, and challenged, by the way the relationship between walking and art practice has been fragmented by very literal (and consequently divisive) notions of ‘process’ in relation to ‘product’. This is an aspect of my growing impatience with the way in which so much discourse on art still tends to work against a proper sense of its wider relationality. Because of that lack of a fuller sense of connectivity, it’s much harder to think about the roles of a poetics of walking in the work of a painter like Eamon Colman and the work of of Hamish Fulton than it should be. Since 1972 all Fulton’s work has, like Colman’s, been based on the experience of walks. But while Colman translates his experience of walks into the highly condensed form of paintings, Fulton translates his into a wide variety of media. This process of translating what is experienced through walking is, however, central to both men’s work and also an important aspect of my own deep mapping work. (Much could be said about that act of translation and it’s possibilities and difficulties, but that’s nay concern here). Anyway, Colman is one of the painters I’m looking at carefully now as I try to convert my experience of deep mapping into a new way of working.

Notitia 3: Birch Moss 2017

So, for about a year now I’ve been trying to make small, lyrical ‘micro-mappings’ that, in a compound and condensed form, evoke a rich sense of place, drawing on Edward S. Casey. (Casey identifies our experience of place as, notwithstanding its normally settled appearance, “an essay in experimental living within a changing culture). Specific places, many in the English/Scottish Border country I’ve been exploring for almost twenty years now, continue to play a key role in this. To Casey’s understanding of place, I’d add Doreen Massey’s insistence on what she calls: ‘a global sense of place’, all its connectivities out into the wider environment. So, part of walking in a place is about noticing, even conversing silently with, the traces of its wider life. The washed-out chocolate bar wrapper that is the slowly fading ghost of the multiple journeys of organic and inorganic substances (cocoa beans, pulped wood, metal foil) through the innumerable processes that feed the global consumer market. Or the curlew as it starts its migration from the upland Borders moors towards its wintering ground, perhaps even on some part of the Severn estuary that I’ll visit with my wife on one of our weekend trips out of Bristol to walk. Walking, conversation (internal or external) and noticing (notitia is the series title of the body of constructions I’ve been working on) are perhaps inseparable, at least unless you’re a Zen practitioner on a silent walking meditation.

Although, for a variety of reasons, I can’t walk as much or as far as I would like nowadays, I continue to ‘walk with’ people, for reasons that are related to what academics call fieldwork or research. (The difference lies in the fact that my reasons for ‘walking with’ are only partly instrumental, to do with ‘gathering facts’ or ‘getting at sense of the place’.  Other, less academic reasons, are sheer curiosity and the simple pleasure of walking with a congenial companion.

A while back the performer and artist Marega Palser (who recently contributed an invited post to this blog) invited me to walk with her in Newport. This invitation grew out of her interest in the possibilities of deep mapping, but when we walked together that became absorbed into her evident love of the town, its particularities and idiosyncrasies. In a sense that walk was undertaken simply in the spirit of seeing walking conversations in and about places as the most fundamental form of creative collaboration. As such, it was a truly memorable experience. But, of course, I can also ‘walk with’ people who are not present in any literal sense. In my case, when I’m walking in the Borders it’s often with favourite singers of old ballads, writers of various kinds, the spirit of the old farmer whose pronunciation of my name sounded like ‘iron’, with cultural geographers, and so on.

When I was working with the poet, artist and geo-mythologist Erin Kavanagh on the collaborative project that became The Crow Road, is wasn’t simply a collaboration with her. It was also very much about walking back in conversation with my childhood self into memories of a childhood landscape and then re-viewing it with Erin’s poem in mind. (Although, obviously, she and I also exchanged material of various sorts as well). These days, I’m starting to work as much out of ‘walking with and round’ old and familiar landscapes in memory as I do from fieldwork.

Notitia 7: Tamshiel Rig 2018

The current Notitia series, each a hybrid form made up of collage and painted construction, draws heavily on walking as conversation, along  with photographic documentation, in the English/Scottish Borders. That’s the underlying ground work. But they also play with notions of conceptual framing (echoed in the literal use of a frame incorporated into each work), and develop an earlier, quite shameless, borrowing from Polynesian stick charts. (Which I love as a tactile form of mapping). What I am aiming for, perhaps still rather uncertainly at present, is to make a richly polyvocal object/image that can interweave visual, tactile and conceptual evocations of material in and around a specific landscape, in the tradition of deep mapping, but while still finding the necessary degree of coherence to ‘work’ as a small construction hung on a wall.

 

Convergences: Debatable Lands Volume 3. Part ten – Something elusive

Something elusive

 One August morning in my childhood I remember sitting on the floor of my bedroom with my chin on the windowsill. A great flurry of rooks and jackdaws wheeled out over the big field behind the cottage, which had been cut for hay late into the previous evening. The field was dappled by swift shadows as a succession of small clouds blew past high above. I absorbed this unthinkingly, with the sun’s warmth, much as a cat might. The quality of these northern uplands that are, and yet are not, my home, was already settling into my marrow.

Now this is all bound up with a sense of something I can’t name but recognise as related to Don McKay’s notion of ‘wilderness’ as ‘the capacity of all things to elude the mind’s appropriations’.[1] But as soon as I write this I feel doubtful. In the past, London friends have interpreted my reluctance to talk about my northern childhood as indicative of some lack; an oblique reference to a problematic exile following the loss of my mother.

I think that’s nonsense, but ….

I suspect my not speaking about certain aspects of my childhood relates to something more complex and elusive than that loss; to my unruly love/hate relationship with the brooding and beautiful land in which I’ve lived and worked most of my life. A relationship that is also bound up with my intense dislike of a system of land ownership and management, based on a largely unacknowledged history of violence, that still determines so much about this landscape.

However, that child with her chin on the windowsill might, if you’d persuaded her, have admitted that her reluctance to speak about such things also had to do with her fear of glaciers. She imagined glaciers as vast implacable and deadly cows’ tongues, slowly rasping away the big salt lick of the world. She must have picked up on something Miss Richardson said at school and glaciers and ice fields haunted her imagination for years. She had nightmares about them freezing and eating everything living in the whole world. This seems so strange now, in a world of rapidly melting ice-caps, but was vividly real to her then. In that nightmare, vast sheets of rough ice came oh-so-terribly-slowly down the valley in the darkness, inexorably crushing and freezing everything in their path as they headed for our cottage. And with them came an overwhelming sense of an icy death without rest or stillness.

So perhaps Mum’s death had a part in my reticence after all.

There’s one other thing that may relate to the glacier business and my associated fear of the cold. I was a beanpole of a child who said she was hungry all the time.[2] (I’m sure now that wasn’t true.) Perhaps it was my way of protesting against being landed in this cold, wet, and windy place where I always seemed to have to find the energy to walk up yet another hill. I do remember early on enduring weeks of cold, unending, near-horizontal rain that so lashed the valley that the sheep and cattle seemed permanently huddled in the lea of whatever afforded them shelter. A rain that rattled on our roof and could even be heard over the sullen growl and rumble of the river, which normally ran so quietly some fifteen yards from our front door. So maybe it’s no wonder that the warmth and bounty of Mrs. Oliver’s Homehaugh kitchen looms so large in my memory. While it’s certainly the case that, as a child, I grew fast and did feel the cold, Miss Richardson was right when she told me that saying I was always hungry was ‘just a habit’. But, writing this now, I wonder less about the habit than the question: ‘hungry for what’?

Mum died when I was nearly seven. She and Dad were work partners too and, I believe, very happy despite problems with Mum’s foster parents. She was twenty-two and Dad thirty-one when they married secretly in a registry office the day after she graduated from the veterinary college where he taught part-time. Her wealthy parents, her adopted father the last of an old Catholic family, were appalled. Dad was a godless Scot of humble farming stock and, to add insult to injury, I came into the world three months earlier than was expected by respectable people.

I used to pretend I don’t know how Mum died so as not to have to talk about it. In fact, Aunt Claire told me what happened. Mum got an infected cut that didn’t respond properly to antibiotics. She developed a fever and then became seriously ill. After eleven weeks of inconclusive diagnoses and progressively longer periods in hospital, she died from complications resulting from a neurotropic virus. It sounds clichéd, but I think part of Dad died with her. As far as I know he never so much as went out with another woman. But then I suppose his only daughter might have been the last to know if he had.

I owe a lot to Miss Richardson, but I took her entirely for granted then. She taught me to look, listen, and think carefully about what I saw and heard. She illuminated our lessons with her knowledge and enthusiasm as a highly competent amateur naturalist and well-respected local historian. She could be stern, even frightening (she needed to be, given some of the children she taught), with a brisk matter-of-factness that almost hid her essential kindness. But whatever our various quarrels with her when we were under her charge, I never heard an adult she taught speak ill of her.

 

I always enjoyed her stories and, when I heard she’d died, I came up from London for the funeral. Everyone turned out to pay their respects, including lots of former pupils who’d moved away. Her funeral gave me a sense of our community here that nothing before or since has matched. It helped me decide to move back north.

[1] The reference is to Don McKay (2001) ‘Vis-à-vis: Field Notes on Poetry and Wilderness’ Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Gaspereau Press MMI, p. 24.

[2] This once led to a strange exchange that Flora didn’t understand at the time but which stayed with her. She wrote in a letter to me that Miss Richardson had an eccentric woman friend, a regular visitor to the village, who was a folklorist from the Highlands. She would often come into the school to talk to the children and, on one such visit, overheard Flora complaining about being hungry and called her over. Flora vividly remember her saying, very seriously: ‘be careful what you say lass, or a just-halver might hear you. You don’t want one of them’. This stayed with Flora because she had absolutely no idea what the woman meant, seemed to be entirely serious, and so frightened Flora. The following passage is from Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan’s Scottish Fairy Belief (2001): “Humans who ate a lot yet never seemed to gain any weight were believed to have ‘a voracious elve’ called ‘geirt coimitheth, a joynt-eater, or just-halver, feeding on the pith and quintessence of what the man (sic) eats, and that therefore he continues lean like a hauke or heron, notwithstanding his devouring appetite” (p. 63)].

Convergences: Debatable Lands Volume 3. Parts eight and nine

Many Selves

I can quite easily name some of my day-world selves. There’s the practical and pragmatic ‘countrywoman’ who is intermeshed with Lizzy’s local and regional worlds. Then there is her intellectual sister, the somewhat brittle ‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘European’ who learned her politics (and no doubt her tendency towards disdain) in London. Then off a bit to one side of them, and always slightly detached, there’s the ‘Mender and Maker’, on whom we’re all economically dependent. Back from these three there’s the ‘Listener /Respondent’ who first contacted you and who, I suppose, is the dominant voice in all this writing. She hovers uncertainly between my day-world and the night-world selves, who I’m far less certain about.

Maybe because we only find each other on the edge of reverie, catch each other’s eye at twilight, ‘between the dog and the wolf’, and then whisper to each other while playing games of hide-and-seek in dreams. There’s certainly a girl like the thin, uncertain schoolchild who loved Cat and Kate so fiercely. But then there’s her brother (?), a strange boy who might be the double of Dad’s uncertain little daughter as she was on the cusp of puberty. There’s a gaunt, older, woman who sometimes wakes me at night, whose yearning for a helpmate and bedfellow still unsettles me. And there are many others, odder and more elusive. For example, a woman dressed all in green, young or old is hard to say, someone I once tried to paint. In my painting she was thin-lipped, angry, righteous, and pale as death. For reasons I no longer remember, I called her Our Lady of the Roadkill. There are also numerous other, shadowy, beings (human and otherwise), many of whom have stalked me since childhood and, maybe, before. The shadowy revenants and composites, including a person who’s somewhere between Mike and Hamish, and various doppelgangers of friends like Richard and yourself.

All I can be certain of is that all these figures are somehow part of myself and none of them quite what they seem. They’re one reason why I’m writing all this.

Familiar animals

I sometimes wonder which animals would act as familiars if I were the ‘skinny little witch’ Lizzy once named me during a schoolyard quarrel? I imagine there would be at least three.

The first is called Finn by his owner. He’s a large white dog belonging to an ex-soldier who I greet regularly as he passes me on his bicycle. He and Finn live in a homestead made up of small sheds and a caravan, all set back from the path through the lower pasture beside Home Burn. Finn has the shed nearest the path but only barks if you go too close. He and his master appear disinterested, self-sufficient, uncomplaining. Both seem beings of considerable intelligence. I recently watched Finn as, untethered, he hunted rabbits across the low meadow and among the broom bushes that fringe it. He’s a swift and terrible killer. Mostly, however, he watches over the valley floor, its guardian and familiar.

The second is the large black cat who lives with Barbara Graham, a young widow, and her two boys in the end-of-terrace cottage next to the graveyard. The small steep fields above and below the terrace are his fiefdom, although occasionally I glimpse him much further away. (I assume from his swagger that he’s male.) I often notice him at dawn or around sunset, those in-between times. Then he haunts my peripheral vision, a lithe black presence suddenly animating some otherwise taken-for granted corner of land. He’s a mercurial figure, happy to mediate between my day and night worlds, moving purposefully or idly as suits him, out there at the edge of the human order and, sometimes, vast, shadowy yet soaked in moonlight, through my most private dreams.

I don’t know this cat’s name. He watches me speculatively when I past him, as if calculating something. Once he came slowly down the top of a wall and invited me to rub his head and under his chin before moving on. The quality of his purr was astonishing, a skin drum full of bees. He too is a skillful hunter and extraordinarily strong. I’ve seen him jump from the roadside to the top of a dry-stone wall with the corpse of a fully-grown rabbit in his jaws. I think he knows he has my greatest respect for this and his other qualities.

During our single face-to-face encounter, I was struck by the rough, luxurious density of his fur. He appears at a distance to be black but, in sunlight and close to, is a dark chocolate brown that shifts in intensity as he moves. The density and luxuriousness of his fur reminded me somehow of pubic hair. (I hear Kate say questioningly: ‘really, pet’, followed by her pirate’s dirty chuckle). That’s to say of the time when, a little girl of maybe five, I walked in unannounced on Aunty Claire to say I couldn’t sleep. She was standing with her back to me, quite naked, in front of the full-length mirror. Everything was dimly lit and smelled lovely and, in the mirror, I saw this thick luxurious dark triangle under her belly where I had only my little pale purse.

When I asked about it she quickly covered herself with a towel and laughed in that way adults do when they’re about to lie to children. She said: ‘Mummy will tell you all about it when you’re older’. But, of course, Mummy didn’t because by then she was dead. Ironically, it was Aunty Claire that Dad asked to explain the ‘facts of life’ to me. I’d known them for some time by then however, mostly thanks to Kate, but pretended I didn’t so as not to disappoint her.

There’s something uncanny about this cat with his dense black fur, something that differentiates him from solidly literal Finn in the meadows below. There is absolutely nothing uncanny or liminal about Finn. What you see is what you get. The cat, however, while he is preternaturally present and so invites me to be the same, is equally familiar in the shadowed between-spaces that link day and night, insidious memory and lucid dream, together; as much a carrier of sleeping souls as of dead rabbits over seemingly insuperable obstacles.

There is a third familiar, one I find myself strangely reluctant to write about because I feel its silent presence as being close to the void of death. I identify ‘it’, (I cannot provide a gender) and, indeed, there may be a pair, with the great ‘white lands’ of the high hills, the bleached expanses of Molinia and other rough grasses up there where the hares dance and have their forms. Unlike the other two familiars, I see it in a space now almost entirely outside the realm of current everyday human concern, a creature of the night wind and half clouded moon.

It’s a great white barn owl that hunts among the tumbled walls and collapsing sheds either side of the top road. I usually see it gliding somewhere along the stretch of road that runs up under the long gray outcrop before it climbs the last ridge and takes you over into the next valley. I suspect this spectral bird nests in the last of the old quarry sheds left standing. I’ve seen it no more than a dozen times in almost as many years, although I drive that way at night at least once a fortnight during nine months of the year. But I always sense its presence there, wondering if the headlights will catch its feathered bulk in silent flight out over the night landscape.

 

Marega Palser – guest post

One thing leads to another…

For this sharing of words, I’d like to talk about living and working in Newport – the South Walien one as opposed to the one with the softer edges of Pembrokeshire.

The Newport I live in is often referred to as ‘a Shit’ole’ , ‘Rough as Fuck’ , and seen as a place you pass through on the train or coach on your way to other places. It lies on the banks of the River Usk, once busy with boats and ships, dating from when the Romans were ‘resident’ at Caerleon to the Industrial Age of coal and steel. 

Because of the huge tidal range of the Usk, it has the ability to totally transform the appearance of the city – from a watery reflective ( depending on weather ) state, to a thick mud bath ideal for wading birds. ( someone once described it like “looking down on a mini Atlas Mountains” ).

Years ago, if anyone had said to me –  one day  you’re gonna live in Newport, and what’s more, you’re gonna like it ! . . . I would not have believed them – No fecKin’ way !! I grew up very much with Cardiff and London in my blood, and as I just mentioned, Newport was a place you passed through.

My first encounters with the PorT – as it’s commonly referred to – was in the early “90’s, coming to rehearse with a band I was in at the time called The Terrorist Ballet Dancers from Hell. We would rock up at a house in York Place and spend hours in the Basement getting stoned and playing music. It was here I got to meet a handful of Newport’s creatives – fresh (ish) out of Art College who’s one of many creative outlets was putting on happenings known as UFO nights, usually at TJ’s  night club. The club would be decked out in a plethora of materials and dead foliage which would then be projected on, to create a pretty trippy backdrop for the soundtrack of the evening. 

It was through my adventures to the PorT and getting to know a wonderFuLL combination of people that would partly inform the next chapter of my life – meeting Paul Burwell who was one of the founder members of Bow Gamalan.  

Paul Burwell was a true maverick – mouthy, stubborn, and a person who got truly excited by noise, and anarchic energy. There was no hierarchy involved in the Gamalan and the very experienced played alongside the less so… it felt like a right of passage, a place where you were allowed to try things out , a testing ground of finding who you might become…

When I started writing this sharing of words, I had no intention of writing about Paul Burwell ; in my minds eye I thought I would quickly skip to the Newport of the Now … but I guess this is a great example, and a way in to getting at the heArT of what I would like to write about – for it seems to be that when you are not looking for the direction in which you are going that you seem to find the direction,  

PART 2.

Empty Shops.

If it had not been for the Ryder Cup being held in Newport back in 2010  I wonder if the Empty Shops Project would have come in to being as quickly as it did. This sounds cynical I know, but…

Around this time I think it is safe to say that there were as many  dying and empty shops as there were shops ‘Open for business’ ( a term later coined by Newport City Council to remind Newport’s inhabitants that despite the outer appearance of the city looking semi-derelict , everything was … ‘Open for Business’ and indeed, ’Open for Pleasure’….

The time leading up to the Ryder Cup became active in the respect of making Newport more aesthetically pleasing to the eye and one of the solutions was to give the empty shop spaces over to artists ( local and beyond ).

The new residents not only gave the city a new breath of life and colour but most crucially became spaces where you could meet other artists and people both interested and curious about art. For many, it became a life line.

It was in one of these shops where I first worked in Newport ( along with my husband / partner, Gareth Clark ). As the performance duo Mr and Mrs Clark, we were asked to ‘activate’ a shop space to host a project called ASSEMBLY initiated by National Theatre Wales. The idea behind the Assembly projects was to gleen information from locals about themselves and where they lived and then to make an evening’s event in which stories and scenarios would be shared.

It was through this experience of very much making it up on the spot that we started to engage with the eclectic mix of people that live and pass through Newport city centre.

I remember the waves of trepidation and fear as ideas that had til that point resided in the head, were now going to be tried out – in the flesh. Our first day of StuFF involved offers of a 30 second portrait ( of which I did many ), a lunchtime installation which was housed in the shop window,  in which Mr Clark was wrapped in bubble wrap, and E. ( entrepreneur and expert in experimenting with narcotic mixes ) sat in a deckchair, and someone else might have been wearing a rubber cows head…. ( if it wasn’t on this occasion, it certainly happened at a later date ). This window of visual stimulation offered a different experience to the usual consumer experience and was the first step in what would be the beginning of many creative acts in the Port.

We got to meet the many artists and people who are creatively minded through putting on events like this, often using a cabaret format where all art forms and creative endeavours were given full license to bang up next to each other.

If the term Outsider Artist/s applies to those outside of the ‘art establishment’, then Newport is rich in Outsider Artists. – This may also explain why it is so difficult to pin down what exactly the ‘art scene’ in Newport is, because it is many things to many people ; it is an independent, many headed animal that seems to fly under the radar, seeking out the gaps and spaces created by others.

The Empty Shop project provided the foothold into further collaborative adventures  both in and out of empty shops, and it was through these experiences that I started to get a true understanding of how arts practise can start impacting on the everyday rhythm of a place. It’s when people start to stop you to ask what are you going to be doing tomorrow ? that you know you have caught their attention, and more importantly, their curiosity !

TOP TIPS for creating art in places that do not have a visible ArT space.

  • Think of everywhere as a play space.
  • Make it Accessible ! 
  • The word accessible is terribly over-used, and will usually be applied to target ‘minority groups’ for funding purposes. The use of the word in this case means :
  • Make work so it is visible
  • Let people stumble across it, get curious
  • Talk about it – answer questions and ask questions
  • If you are working inside, have the door open – even if it is cold outside
  • Look at what is there ( and not there ) and use it as a playground, a set, a canvass 
  • Involve people in the making and direction of what it is you are doing
  • Be the Bridge between the passing punter and the art work.
  • If you can’t gain access to empty shops, use the front of them to display work or make a pop up space – the worse thing that can happen is someone will ask you to take it down !

DEEP MAPS – WALKING the INNER DOG

If I had a dog, I would walk it regularly. I don’t have a dog, so I walk my inner dog instead.

Walking through Newport, especially if you follow the river, it is not too difficult to spot its industrial past. Tracks and man made, mud worn docking areas still follow the river down stream, and walls still hold remnants of metal hooks and rings, evidence that the industrial age was very much part of the fabric and making of the then town – now City. 

It is a place where things, people and events nudge and bang up to each other. There is a feeling of defiance about the place and an air of independence. 

Today, the tide was on the out breath, revealing wave patterns, reed banks and seaweed patches – good fodder for waders. It goes without saying there was the token shopping trolley, a couple of bikes, off cuts of trees…

The breakfast bar ( slang for the riverside peeps who like an early morning tipple ) is in session … ( we are familiar faces to each other and wave a Hello )…

Stepping off the feeder road, the rhythmic banter of the car auctioneers voice weaves between passing lorries. 

At the Transporter Bridge I meet an Irish man on a bike. He has time on his hands ; reason for being in thePorT is due to football – the beautiful game. He’s been here to interview the manager or spokes person at Newport County, who recently beat Leeds Utd. He has an hour before the train back to London and we end up following the River back into town. It is through his questions about the place that I realise what a gateway and Junction Newport is – There are entrances and exits to many geogrphical possibilities here… 

Usk, Abergavenny, Brecon, the old canal routes, mountains…

Iggy Pop once said, ‘Always know where you Spiritual Exits are…’ , this has always resonated with me and might have an added explanation of my love of the Port… you are never too far from getting out of it…literally.  

It is an interesting time to be living in a place like Newport. For so long it has been in the shadow of cities like Cardiff and Bristol, unable to compete with its Big consumer heavyweight neighbours. When the shopping centre was still in its paper form, we did suggest to the council that it may be better to think about creating an alternative centre, one that would house a public square in which veg could be grown, surrounded by smaller, independent traders. Alas, they did not go for it. . .  Quel Surprise !

 

About Marega

Marega is a performance based artist living in Newport, South Wales. Originally trained at the London Contemporary Dance School , and later studying Fine Art at Howard gardens ( then UWIC ) in Cardiff, she has worked and played solidly in the grey area that lies in between disciplines since the mid-eighties.

She is one half of the performance duo Mr and Mrs ClarK.

www.mrandmrsclark.co.uk

 

Photo taken outside the old elysium gallery in Swansea.