NEWS & UPDATES
September
Personal Practice : Being told to move on and out into the world.
Autumn on the border between England and Scotland is approaching. Students and teachers are returning to school. It is for many families a time of change.
Over the summer I worked on a large painting. This was in response to arts and research I had been doing locally. Our house sits at the northern limit of Brampton Kame Belt, a vast area of sediment dropped by the melting of glaciers thousands of years ago.
On our arrival in our house decades ago we had been told by a neighbour about a flood that came down the ridge above our estate and into her house as a child. There is no water course anywhere nearby so we put it down to childhood memory. Then, through my walking and art making, I found a culverted stream and confirmation of the story. The stream was culverted in 1972, after a flood, so it was a real event, hence the culverting.
Much of my art making involves walking and creating art objects in response. It is never meant for display, just my way of exploring a place and my experience of it. I became interested in the idea of the land as the substrate of experience, the unconscious if you will, with water as a symbol of emotion or affect.
Looking on the Britice Glacial Map I found that just north of our house was a glacial lake, and on my walks, a site where clay was abundant.
This was, I believe, the head of the lake. I took clay and made clay figures and used the clay in paintings.
I baked the clay in a domestic oven and explored putting the figures outside to dissolve over time and return to the substrate from whence they came. Click the slideshow below to see the change.
I found this very satisfying. I have an image of them as a kind of worry doll, being put out by a worried person as a way of animating the worry going back into the earth.
Then I worked with the clay in painting, mixing it with acrylic medium or just domestic epoxy to make a medium. I also put it onto a base of black acrylic paint, let it dry and then removed it with a hair drier to see what happened. In the end the object before the removal was much nicer, in fact curiously beautiful. The slideshow below shows the painting before the removal of the clay, some close-ups, and the painting afterwards.
The final piece was not as I hoped. But the thing before the clay was removed was very interesting. I liked that it made itself, it made itself beautiful, and was entirely temporary. The only permanent thing was the picture of the process of it being made. It struck me as a kind of performance, and it seemed to tell me something. I see this all as work in progress. But the beauty of the moment, captured as a picture, as potentially a work of art in itself, talked to me of a way to make the process of making, the artform itself. I felt a need to show this in public as ‘Art’ or as performance.
What I took this to mean was that it was time to take my art making out of the very fruitful and rewarding realm of purely personal arts research practice and out into the world of public practice. With my background in groupwork outdoors and with art, it told me to take this to do with other people. Our art may speak for itself without explanations.
So I found the Ramblers Association was looking for Wellness Walk Leaders and I did the training and am doing three Mindful Art Perambulations.
Ramblers Wellbeing Walks
I have three walks in September, October and November. These are targeted at anyone wanting a short, easily accessible walk including people in wheelchairs and seniors.
The link to the first can be followed by clicking the picture or the link below.
Moving Space 