Tag Archives: Place

Items about place and how we understand it

Performing Place

Above is a link to a great article about the mutual creation of place. Place as relational. Place as performance.

To me this connects more directly to the idea of artmaking as co-creational with the artist, the materials, the substrate, the artform as partners. Place is performed. All art is performance. It exists in-process in realtionship with the maker, the materials and the viewer. The viewer includes the maker. She sees her own making, and it can tell her or show her new stuff.

Featured image is from Adobe Firefly from Adobe images.

The Analogue Object

After reviewing my photography and looking at images I had not looked at for years, my re-viewing also took another retrospective perspective.

Years ago I became fascinated by the whole idea of DTP, Desk Top Publishing. In those days I had access to Adobe Pagemaker here now InDesign. I briefly had a part-time job as a magazine editor but around this time the scope to publish online became more easily available and I had various websites. Whilst I maintained an interest in magazines and paper based analogue communications, the world fell in love with the digital on-line world. Like painting, the death of the paper newspaper, the death of the analogue has been predicted for ages. See here and here. But vinyl is being sold in my local supermarket again. Maybe the analogue is not to dead. All that stuff we did years ago that we no longer do is maybe useful after all.

I love the interweb but at heart I am a group worker, a carer, a therapist. I like the hands on. I have an interest in the digital and invite discourse online, but the idea of ‘friends’ and followers online kinda always bemused me. I am 65, forgive me.

I have lost touch with a couple of people I used to be.

Joan Didion

My re-viewing has taken me back to inDesign. I reconnected and actually did some online (YootYoob!) training and now finally understand the power of the frame and its relationship with content for example, something that drove me mad before. As a professional trainer I should know better than to expect intuition to guide me.

My goal is to develop work with art-making locally and I am exploring making a free newspaper to be distributed locally to invite fellow travellers to join in an art-making journey as well as people joining an online conversation. The image I have is a kind of Art Fanzine. See here and here. In the second link I loved the simplicity of the little magazine made out of an A4 sheet. So… the possibilities are endless. I want a kind of slick looking A4 minimal magazine like this here with a clear narrative inviting people to use art making to promote their own health and wellbeing, but also I could make little fanzines to promote my website, designed to be a bit more rough and counter-cultural. I like graffiti art and particularly stickers, here but don’t really want to be breaking the law to promote my work.

So I love my online digital object, but I have reconnected with the analogue object. It feels oddly counter-cultural.

Happy New Year

My daily walk in the morning is now overlapping the darkness before sunrise. I walk as the rookery wakes and masses in the nearby Oak tree. We now rise and depart together as the night’s darkness departs. I always say hello.

As the light of summer departs a new year is upon us. Samhain is the end of the year in the Celtic calendar. As dusk is the end of the Celtic day. The Celts started their day and their year in darkness. The proper order, for we all start in darkness, as do all seeds. A moment for time travel. Looking to the future. Remembering the past. Ones we have lost. Time is upon us.

So too am I remembering the past. I have been going back over my photography archive, all the way back to 2005 when I got my first digital camera. It holds 13000 photos. This surprised even me. I edited this down to my 400 best and put them up on my portfolio site. Click the image below to go to my portfolio and see the images. I chose a picture of geese because they are honking overhead now as they return for the winter. Time turns. It is circular.

Click me to see…

I also bring you Van the man singing Celtic New Year, on Jools. There is a very grainy clip of this on Yootyoob but this one is best. He starts at about 3m 55 sec. He so captures for me, that sense of darkness and light, longing for absent friends, some passed over to eternal darkness, and light, the looking forward to meeting friends again even if it is when we pass over into darkness. Like “Bette Davis said, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.” We begin and end in darkness. Peace at last. I head this post with an image of the coming green of spring. See you on the other side.

Celtic New Year – 3:56

Geological Time

An introduction to the vastness of geological time. I live by the Solway, between England and Scotland, once either side of the Iapetus Ocean.

My calculation gives humans appearing at 39.998 seconds.

That is the last 0.012 seconds.

At some point soon I will publish timeline calculators you can apply to a walk to measure human life against geological time. It makes geological vs human timescales physically perceptible.

Maths as Movement

Everyone knows that arithmetic is true: 2 + 2 = 4. But surprisingly, we don’t know why it’s true.

By stepping outside the box of our usual way of thinking about numbers, my colleagues and I have recently shown that arithmetic has biological roots and is a natural consequence of how perception of the world around us is organized.

Our results explain why arithmetic is true and suggest that mathematics is a realization in symbols of the fundamental nature and creativity of the mind.

Randolph Grace.

Britain – The Marginal Land

67 million people currently inhabit the United Kingdom – but what do we know about the original, first Britons? It’s no secret when looking back into pre-history that it was a time of mass migration for animals and people alike, but who were our early inhabitants, and what can we learn about them?


In this episode of The Ancients, Professor Chris Stringer returns to the podcast to shine a light on this mysterious part of prehistory. Looking back across millions of years, Chris helps us delve into our distant ancestors’ pasts, and illuminates what they were really like. Looking at the latest archaeological and scientific research, what can we know about the first traces of hominin activity on the British Isles?