Little haloes

It has been a while since I have managed to get down to the River Nene.  So that hot October weekend, I got out my summer dress again and walked from Woodford to Denford Lock, and then Islip to Titchmarsh.

The path from Woodford takes you down a narrow walk between two fenced off fields with horses lazily munching.  Faithfully I followed this path and over a stile.

It was very peaceful and still in the hot sun.  Certain sounds became prominent, crows calling.  In the distance the sound of the water rushing over the weir seemed to be calling me back to the river.

I followed the sound and suddenly I saw the river glistening in a gap between the trees.  A sudden jolt of excitement and an audible gasp.  It was just like bumping into an old friend.

I have found in my walking projects that I become very attached to the specific landscapes in which I walk.  I get to know them in intimate detail and I feel a definite sense of belonging, both ways:  they belong to me and I belong to them.

This walk is beautiful.  You can walk right along the river's edge for quite a way, eventually coming to the weir where the river splits in two, and then on to Denford Lock.

I wandered off the path at one point, and just followed the river bank.  A pretty plump rabbit saw me and stopped.  I stopped.  Then I walked a little more.  He also moved on a bit.  Then I stopped.  He stopped.  We continued this game for a little while until he decided I wasn't a threat and disappeared off into the hedgerow.

Across the river was a small wooden house on a pole.  A birdhouse sentry.  Quite odd.

Canoeists waved at me as they paddled gently, bringing back memories of the day we canoed from Thrapston to Oundle back in May, how tenderly the river seemed to hold us up.

I lost track of the Nene Way at Denford.  It would have taken me on to Islip but I couldn't find it.  So I turned back.

With the weather so hot it seemed like a summer day that would go on and on... but of course the sun was soon on its way down and right in front of me on my way back.  The soft light made the autumn colours glow, playing across the water's ripples and illuminating the translucence of leaves.  A handfull of blackberries kept me from getting too thirsty.

Approaching the bridge again, I saw a swathe of dried thistle heads, the sun light creating a glow around them, like a crowd of faces with little haloes.

Walking from Islip to Titchmarsh the next day, I started walking between lakes and the river.

Formed by the old gravel pits, the lakes are now the Titchmarsh Nature Reserve, and of course abundant with birds.  I often saw a large black bird flying above, which looked like a cormorant to me.  Later on, I heard a rather mournful sound, almost a weeping, from behind the trees near the lake.  Having looked up the sound a cormorant makes, it did sound just like this.

Countless swans covered a lake, as far as you could see.

You feel surrounded by water, lakes to the left and infront, the river on the right.  The sailing club had a wonderful stillness today, being a hot Sunday, everything sitting quietly in symmetry with undisturbed reflections.

 

 

 

Again, walking back the sun was low, shadows long and the light golden.  Colours seemed heightened, bright red thorns against the blue sky.

The weekend had been all about light, the sun bringing alive the leaves, water, shadows, a sense of stillness only animated by the ever changing play of light as the sun gently lowered behind the horizon.

The Art of Touch

Thursday saw the launch of a big project I have completed with Leicestershire Artworks, "Touch Table".

The Touch Table is a project coordinated by me with Lisa Webb, Artworks Officer for Leicestershire, commissioning 10 artists to create 20 works which can be explored by touch.

The project complements two other pieces of work we had undertaken previously, the Held in the Hand projects, which commissioned artists to create pieces that can be picked up, held and explored.

These projects can be enjoyed by anybody, but are specifically created for the benefit of people with special needs and people with dementia who would particularly benefit in exploring the sensation of touch.

The Touch Table is a special table that can have various artworks slotted into it.  It holds the art panels so that people can run their fingers across them to feel the textures.  Not only do the artworks include different materials and textures but there are ones that spin using magnets and handles, ones that you can press into and they bounce back, and pieces with buttons, ties and pockets that can be undone and explored.

The launch was a rather grand affair, held at Ulverscroft Manor, with canapes and drinks, and speakers from the local councils as well as Stephen Dorrell MP, Health Minister.

For me, working with Lisa on the brief for artists and then developing ideas with various artists for their specific pieces, it was fascinating to see people's responses to the pieces when they were all laid out together.  Throughout the project, our challenge had been to commission works that were wildly varied yet would create complete sets, covering as many different touch responses as we could, using every possible material, using old skills and new technologies.

Me with some of the artists at the launch.  L to R:  Sue Hague, Dr Lionel Dean, Austin Orwin, Richard Dawson and me.

It was great to see some of the artists finally meet each other, they instantly started to spark ideas off each other!  They, of course, had had no sense of the work of the other artists, they were just deeply involved in their own individual pieces.  Lisa and I were the only ones who had had any vision of how it would all work together, and we could finally see this coming to fruition and being enjoyed by everybody.

Thanks to all the artists who contributed their skills and talent, it is a truly wonderful collection of high quality tactile art.

To find out more about Touch Table and the Held in the Hand pieces, which are available for loan to schools and groups throughout Leicestershire, click here.

Animated artists, young people and museums and the Ticket Exchange!

A little gap between posts as I have been on holiday.  But here's a little look back at some of the things I am involved with...

Just for a giggle, three of the Associated Artists at Nottingham Contemporary took part in "The World is Your Stage" - the longest stop animation film ever!  A project created by Brendan Oliver & Brendan Randall.   See our contribution and more about the project.

(Influenced by the current Jean Genet exhibition, our piece was about power and role swapping.  Obviously!)

Also, my new project has been launched.  These leaflets are going out across Leicester and Leicestershire inviting young people to take part in an exciting project with New Walk Museum to create new innovative resources for visitors.  Click on the image to see a bigger version.

And most recently, Carole Miles and I have started our Ticket Exchange activity on the trains in Derbyshire for the Undiscovered Networks project, which has been going really well.  We are blogging about the project here.

Following walls

This week I had to present a proposal in Wolverhampton and talk about the beauty of maps.  We began talking about maps as lines to follow, and I have an idea about maps being on walls and linear, like a trail through a building.

They are building a new Leisure Centre and the architectural design is lovely, with curved green walls throughout.  I have started playing with ideas of curved walls and maps that curve around them...

or maps as ribbons...

... maps as three dimensional drawings, taking you on a physical journey as you walk alongside them.

Geographical maps are two dimensional drawings representing a three dimensional space.  What if a map works back in three dimensions, drawn across a space?

Like contours across the space?  Or as a map transposed onto somewhere else?

A walk in the Peak District.  Following walls.

Curating walks

I have been thinking about the nature of curating for some time. At Nottingham Contemporary the current exhibition, Jean Genet - The Courtesy of Objects, has been curated in an unusual and interesting way, almost creating a portrait of Jean Genet through a collection of other artists' works.

I have led workshops about curating before at the galleries. It's often the unseen creative process that people forget about. You tend to focus on the artworks and the artists in an exhibition and yet everything you see is also framed by the curatorial concept. The fact that you may not be consciously aware of this as an audience gives a curator a lot of power. It could even be considered manipulative!

Maps from the Wellbeing Walks finished this week and ready to go!

I've started thinking about all the walking and mapping projects that I have been doing for the last few years in terms of curating.

In a sense the mapping process is like the curation of the walk.  A particular walk can take on its own theme.  A map then identifies and draws together the theme or overarching idea about a place or a route and attempts to present this as a coherent truth.

Detail from Myth Maps, Snibston

I have used walks as a way of exploring a place and discovering something of its character, which is then made visible in a map. The process can be transformative and also enables the map maker to develop a quite intimate relationship with a particular place or landscape. 

Detail from Myth Maps, Snibston

I have been talking with LJ, a colleague at the Contemporary who has just finished her Art History degree and is interested in curating and mapping, about exploring some of these ideas further. We hope to propose an action research project some time in the future which will pull together a number of these interests.

The grammar of Nature - gift or product?

Richard Mabey explains an important idea about our changing relationship to trees in his book "Beechcombings":

The fundamental grammar of our relationships with trees changed.  Before, 'growing' had been an intransitive verb in the language of woods.  Trees grew, and we, in a kind of subordinate clause, took things from them.  In the forest-speak of the Enlightenment, 'growing' was a transitive verb.  We were the subject and trees the object.  We were the cause of their existence in particular places on the earth.

Mabey thinks that somewhere around the second half of the 17th century the way we refer to trees, the way we speak about trees and woodland, and therefore the way we think about trees, began to change.  And that has changed the way we behave towards trees and how we value them.

I feel this attitude can be applied to all Nature.  Nature changed from being a gift, such as in the act of foraging, where we can seek and find things that we can use and are of value to us, and we rejoice in the finding of these things.  Now Nature seems more like a product, like so many items on a market shelf.  Something we can produce ourselves and "perfect" (whatever that may mean!), something we can acquire.  From Capability Brown's creation of "natural" vistas in landscape design to today's contrived cottage gardens, we have embraced Nature in a strange way which both admires its random beauty and yet seeks to control it.

I love my garden and the careful trimming and pruning of this and that.  I love the joy that I get from a plant that rewards my efforts.  But this is a very different experience to being somewhere like on the River Nene.

In our River Nene project Three Jos in a Boat, we have very much had the sense that we are in another world.  A world of Nature.  A place that we are not of.  A place that has its own rules, rhythms and lives that continue regardless of and indifferent to our existence.  A place where we have little influence.

Man's relationship to Nature (in our Western culture, anyway) has become separated - it is in the grammar we use, the way we speak about things.  Man and Nature.  Two different, separate, opposite nouns.  In gardening and in agricultural practices we spend our time battling with Nature's way to make it work to our own rules.

This may be changing.  Attending a conference in Leeds a few years ago on Design Activism, I met people from the Permaculture Association.  Permaculture is about sustainability, a word we hear all the time these days.  But it is more than that.  It seems to me that the principles of Permaculture are about integration, about us becoming more integrated with Nature's laws once more and becoming a part of that system, instead of our continuing to try to be a dominant and controlling force.

Perhaps we need to change our use of language again.

(All the images in this post are a gift from the River Nene.)

River Foraging

I have been walking along parts of the River Nene, sometimes accompanied by photographer Kate Dyer, for our Three Jos in a Boat project celebrating "BB".

Alwalton was the furthest point that BB reached in his book "A Summer on the Nene".  The village is beautiful, very quiet, with a few unusual buildings.  Two footpaths to the river, one which takes you to a bend which seemed shallow enough to wade, the other taking you to Alwalton Lock.

The plaque reads "Henry Royce, co-founder of Rolls-Royce, born in Alwalton 1863

There are in fact two locks here.  Alwalton Lock is prominent on the landscape and there were many people around walking their dogs.

 
But following the path towards the other lock that can be seen in the distance, you enter into a cool woodland area and stumble across the most remarkable eerie green pool.  A small boat tucked away at the side. 

The way the light came through the trees and lit up the green algae was quite astonishing.

Follow the path the other way across the field and footbridge reveals further interest.  Wild flowers growing up to the side of the water, a splattering of bright colours.

One bank completely clothed in these bright yellow daisies

A conical building in the distance... at first I wondered if it was a kiln, but approaching it closer the windows suggested an old mill or store, perhaps?

At the other end of BB's route, Kate and I explored the area around Higham Ferrers and Ditchford.  On the map it was apparent that there were lakes scattered around the river in this area.  It appears that the lakes were formed by the abandoned gravel pits, where gravel was once quarried.  We wondered how this landscape would have been when BB came by here, would the quarrying still have been underway and would this have been a bustling industrial site?  Did BB write about this or was he only interested in the more picturesque?

Only occasional glimpses of the gravel pit lakes through the trees

BB did bemoan the fact that the countryside and natural things all around him were giving way to "progress".

"Look ye also, while it lasts." 

Perhaps he would have been heartened to know what we found:  as the industry has disappeared, nature has moved back in in the way that it does and is thriving!  The Higham Ferrers path is quite hard to find, but once on it there is a Nature Reserve and a haven of foraging potential!  We found (and sampled!) a great variety of berries coming into ripeness.  A little early perhaps?

Plums, sweet and juicy

Blackberries, abundant and delicious!

Sloes, just turning blue

We were heading for a bridge marked on the map but when we got there the bridge was unsafe to cross.  An elderberry bush had claimed it for its own and grew right up through the middle!

The bridge seen from the opposite side

Walking to the bridge from the other end, approaching from Ditchford, through a small holding with sheep and lovely chickens, past the sewage works, the area has none of the romantic elegance of some of the village areas that we have visited along the River.
 
Once you get back to the river, the roar of the traffic running right parallel to the river is deafening.  Driving on that stretch of road, you could easily be completely unaware that there is a river just a few yards away!  Lorries could be glimpsed trundling by behind the trees.

But still by the river nature carries on, millions of small creatures and plants living out their lives in parallel to ours, regardless of the road.