Sunday 7th of August
The wind moves across the heath scape, Brushing seeded colour and texture, in a living purple picture.
Trickle, shimmer, tick and Om. Stream, grass, hopper and gun. wind cracks in the valley over.
Friday 6th of May
The Coming of the Ship
Sat here on a stool in the campsite kitchen. Tent turned raft in the grassy sea. I sit with Almustafa and listen as he tells me of his return home after 12 years on Orphalese. It's been 12 months since the coming of my ship.
The mist clings to the fort on the hill. Neither sun nor lighthouse can penetrate it's musk. Camp fires flicker and muffled laughs, cry. All left to the imagination as this ancient stronghold's history remains shrouded, only visible to those present in it's mystique.
I descend towards the forshore. To sit upon the ledge, above rocks that I sat upon sometime ago. My feet swing in sea green, toffee, Midnight and speckled white. In the gaps spark opulent pearls smoothed by the seas hammer in the workshops of her rockpools.
These rocks have a new fondness. They speak to me as the standing stones on the hill. Testaments to what has gone before, a feeling of what is now and the longing for what comes tomorrow. They are the books in the heaviest library, and I wish to read their pages.
With new inspiration and high tide reached. I walk out into the open sea. My seafaring soul returns to the salty swells, where she turns from green to deep blue.
Thursday 5th of May
Sketch at Sea Level
Wop, crackle and gurgle
Green, blue and purple
Rusted black rocks bake
Sharp shadows in the cracks
Sketch From My Tent Pitch, Below The Hill Fort (Pembrokeshire)
Radio hot, Kettle on
Small bird on the wire, Tweeting
Hazed Horizon smudged in the mist.
Up on the cragged hill
Rubbled walls encircle the peak
The high tide mark,
Where fierce men have washed and wilted
Coffee, gurgling
Wind whispering
Sweet, salty, cold air
White and yellow specked earth.
Tuesday 26th of April
Bloom Bloom Bloom
Purple Pink Yellow
Music written on the scored rocks
Scwaw Buzz Whisp Ripple
From the clifftop down,
I adjust my sea scope
Rusted fronds sway to the rhythym
above the sandy canvas, green.
Friday 25th of March
Parked up and rearranged, I stepped out onto the range
I swam out onto the purple carpet,
Gorse flower flourishing in a golden fumes,
Moorland pushed to the edge of the sea.
Rocks come in all shapes and sizes, but generally,
there are those which are jagged and those that are smooth.
On this beach they are reamed together likes the pages of the realist novel.
Walled by the a sandstone sea bed from a by-gone era.
This beach has been opened by the drumlins that flow through the druid's land.
They push the clay down the cliffside and leave it amongst the flotsam and jetsam,
That curate on the foreshore where the land meets the sea.
Collecting knotted line and small smooth colour,
those deep stories gather new memories.
and with the sinking sun, I slip away as the tide,
into the meditation of the train home.
Tuesday 22nd of February
The 11.57 to Sheffield. The clouds are moving through the sky, blown with heavy wet sails of a purple hue. The coming spring sun peers through.
Crossing the bridge, the brook bulges with broken branches and still water. Big chunks of cube rock millstone faceted by the masons tool, walked over all walks and the likes.
Haven't written anything for a couple hours. The wind came and the hailstones started giving me acupuncture. Everywhere water has washed, trickled, run and cascaded around me. A storm meditation.
The braken has been combed and the verdant heather bulked up a bit. Cerulean skies and sprinkled snowdrops set the peak parish scene.
Under a boulder, with the grinds flow hissing behind me, my eggs fry. lunch is up, eggs and rain spittled rye.
Slide and slip, I've got what I came for, watch the last rain drop drip.
Thursday 10th February
Rivers are high, Heathers in full green. Streams of iron oxide tint the river. Whilst the railway tracks creak under wheels. With my hand on the gritstone wall, I stride between the reed heads using them as stepping stones over the sludge.
Brushed amongst the grasses, bitten by the cold. Gold rolls over the ridgetop and glints the trees, whose bloom is upside down this time of year. They cling to the sides of Holloways punctuated by streams.
Making room for the bundles of white that look like the flecks in my hat against the hillside.
Monday 31st of January
Lowered down into the valley, new rubber between me and the road. Afternoon sunshine peering through gaps as the housing blocks stare down into the river. Theres a smell in the air, more than just the fermenting duck pond, just as foul. Huge yellow beasts swimming in the mud. I wait my turn to cross the county line. On the other side i eagerly return to the clay deposits along the river bank.
Vanished in the pale boulders. Rock armour for the modern day commuter. "our customers can be assured that both N******* and N****** rail will do everything possible to keep you on the move". An ancient scroll buried as the 12.26 rolls on by. A treasure has returned to its classified nature.
Wednesday 24th of November
Crisp morning trickle of the silver stream, with orange oak leaves scattered in a primitive ream, fluid earth peers out the river and slips down the hill. Hands working through the cool still. Under the viaduct with a Reddish Glow. Material is processed as the land flows.
Friday 6th August
Out amongst the waves, I start thinking about my place in the landscape; not directly making but rather being made upon. My body responding to the movement of the waves, my temperature lowering and my thoughts simplifying with the cold. The border between body and material dissolved in the saline. I see the world as material does. Responding to changes with identity and finding my path. The natural forces are the maker, orientating flesh and water in a chilly jig. The water and I gather for a short moment in time. This experience showcases that the maker, material and the landscape are one and the same. I am part of it, and it is part of me. This is a concept deep rooted in my making.
Walking along the tideline, picking up and playing with pieces of bleached driftwood or dried seaweed washed ashore by the relentless energy of the sea only metres from my bare feet. I interview these relics with questions such as, “how have you come to be here?” And “what might have happened to you along the way?” What I am observing is nature’s relationship with time and offering my thoughts to it. By working with this sense of place and attentive perspective, I gather a unique conversation with the cathedral of material that I might have walked through unexplored.
In a landscape filled with living materials, I wonder if the landscape itself has life of its own. This makes the idea of the landscape increasingly material. This is evident in the way that a place responds to the natural phenomenon that interact with it. Natural forces like erosion will smooth rocks to make pebbles, the wind will disperse seeds, changing the colours and form of that place. It is not just natural processes that influence place, there is the manmade that will alter and effect it too.
As I walk along the small sandy part of the beach, I am leaving footprints and scraps of material, picking up stones and passing thoughts*. With a small wooden item in my hand. I travelled into my imagination using its material reality as a springboard. Taking me to a place when this item was fastened to the side of a fisherman’s craft, rope strung through it fastening down his lobster creels. Merging the item with a bunch of knotted fishing line, a conversation begins to take place. The fishing line wrapped up into a nest and the wooden piece bleached by their time in the sea, something in common to talk about. These objects are formed together as “bundling of trajectories” illustrating the quiet power in the narrative on things.
Stepping out of the white horses and back onto the pebbles, which are jostling beneath me as I move between the tidelines, I stop and take in a purple carpet of dulse. Standing in the No Man’s Land between tides, looking just like Anthony Gormley’s sculpture ‘Grip’ from his Land series. “The sculptures will be like standing stones: makers in space and time, linking with specific places and their histories; catalysts for reflection”. Each sculpture converses with its setting in a different way, a large factor being their positioning. This prompts me to assess my role amongst the heather topped cliffs and white crested waves and even their position in the patchwork quilt we called land.