Exhibition and a marsh walk

November 29, 2015

A day off from studio work yesterday to deliver work to Bircham Gallery for their Christmas Exhibition. If you are in Norfolk, the exhibition runs from 5 December until 13 January and you can see my work alongside that of several other gallery artists. The above image is of a piece called Transient, which is a favourite of mine.

Of course we could not go all that way without heading out for a walk across the marshes. After some brief sunshine first thing in the morning it was grey and cold with a wind from the north-west, that grew stronger and wetter as the afternoon wore on. We started from Morston and headed west across the marsh along the southern edge of the Blakeney Channel. It was low tide and I love seeing the channel exposed with most of the water drained out of it. There was fresh seaweed and other debris strewn along the edge to remind us that the ground we walked on could be underwater again in a few hours.

But in the meantime there is this bleakly beautiful landscape spread out between the edge of the marsh and Blakeney Point in the distance. Brent geese, curlews, redshanks, gulls pick their way over the surface looking for food. The surface changes between mud, shingle, sand creating changes in colour and texture across the surface. And the creeks reflect the light, silver grey, twisting their way towards the channel.

Morston Blakeney Channel 02 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Morston Blakeney Channel 03 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Morston Blakeney Channel 04 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Morston Blakeney Channel 2015 Helen Terry.jpg

Green and Grey

September 6, 2015

I have been doing lots of walking. In North Norfolk and closer to home in Essex. August was unusually dull and wet but there were still a few bright sunny days. But now, as summer shifts into autumn, the first mists have appeared ... and lots of rain.

Wet weather strengthens the greens in the landscape. Brilliant greens against all shades of grey. Walking through the pine woods at Holkham, the pouring rain turned the moss an almost lurid emerald. On another day at Cley, mists veiled the ridge behind the marsh, muting all the colours in the background - blue-greys, green-greys.

Back at home, two days ago, we went for a walk around Two Tree Island. A nature reserve, the island is tiny and sits in the Thames Estuary between Leigh on Sea and Canvey Island. Saltmarsh and mud flats edge its northern shore where it runs into the estuary. The skies were pale, animated by banks of heavy cloud - greys tinged with blue and even violet.

Observing the transition between silver water, grey shining mud and the grey-greens of the salt marsh. All kinds of edges.

Edges

February 15, 2015

Last week I was in Norfolk, celebrating my birthday. We spent most of the time walking on the marshes and coast around Cley and Blakeney. On the day itself, we walked along Blakeney Point. Not all the way, owing to the cold and shortness of the winter day. Blakeney Point is a four mile long shingle spit that acts as a barrier between the North Sea and the coastal marshes. It is thought to be at least 4,000 years old at its core. And it is moving - very slowly - by about 1 metre per year towards the shore, so that the creeks and the salt marsh that have developed over thousands of years in its shelter are being gradually squeezed between the Point and the Cromer Ridge to the south. Old maps reveal how much the coastline has changed. Harbours have vanished, channels and creeks move and change shape.

When I walk here, I'm very aware of edges. The edge of the sea, the marsh, the creeks, the channel, the ridge. "Edge" suggests there's a point where one thing stops and another starts - each part separate, distinct. But it isn't like that here. Most of the edges here are dynamic - different when the tide is in to when it is out. And they are highly contested. What looks like a definite edge often isn't. When you look closer, water is encroaching into the marsh and cutting its way through the mud. Marsh plants creep out into the mud and the shingle, knitting soft, shifting ground into something firmer. Most of these edges are places of change, transition, succession. They are places where things are not settled. Not decided. Small changes in the local environment - tides, time of year, weather - and one side gains ground over the other.

The daily mark-making practice passed the "can-it-be-done-away-from-home" test. And many of the marks became about edge qualities.

Winter

December 14, 2014

I have been away for most of December. The studio is cold and littered with half-unpacked work and supplies from workshops I've been to. The most recent was one with Matthew Harris at the Committed to Cloth studio. The starting point was text - treating handwritten text as a form of drawing. We played with this until our drawings no longer resembled any intelligible writing. I had a lot of fun experimenting with three dimensional drawing using wire and torn shreds of cloth. I loved the shadows this cast on the wall or the table.

At one point Matthew warned us we should expect to feel a little lost as we began to experiment and move away from our starting points. This certainly proved to be true! That feeling of not knowing where you were, what you were doing or where things were going was unsettling. It was an interesting experience to be consciously aware that I was lost and observe myself trying to find my way again! The way my mind started searching for connections to things I already knew or ways of making what I was doing intelligible (to myself, that is). Which, of course, is how we learn. And if we never allow ourselves to get a little lost occasionally, we never move forward.

When I came home I started re-reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost". She talks about how for artists "the unknown ... is what must be found" - it's where the work comes from. But I also recalled this point:

“Explorers ... “were always lost, because they’d never been to these places before. They never expected to know exactly where they were. Yet, at the same time, many of them knew their instruments pretty well and understood their trajectories within a reasonable degree of accuracy. In my opinion, their most important skill was simply a sense of optimism about surviving and finding their way.” ”

— Rebecca Solnit (quoting Aaron Sachs): "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", chapter 1

The willingness to explore and find new things requires a willingness to tolerate the sense of being lost. But some robust skills to build upon and having some sense of where you want to go can make the difference between just being helplessly confused and finding a way through - in artistic terms as much as in exploration.

Meanwhile, Winter arrived here at the beginning of December. The wind moved to the north and the temperature plummeted. The last leaves are clinging to otherwise bare trees. The first regular frosts have appeared - silvery edges to the leaves and frozen puddles. The sky has been a study in grey - sometimes stormy, sometimes like pearl - and occasionally pale, cold blue. Sometimes the only colours in the landscape are a myriad of different greys with a shot of brilliant green of moss on a wall or winter crops in the fields. Some people think this is a dull and dreary time of year but I love the colours and the way the landscape changes in winter. Everything is stripped to its bones and you can see the underlying structures of the trees and the land. All the lines are emphasised.

I've been in Norfolk for a week - long walks on the marshes, by the sea and across fields. Plenty of opportunity to appreciate the winter landscape.

Amazing light effects - low sun under a bank of cloud over the roadbeds at Cley

Twilight.  A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point. — Twilight. A very low tide in the Blakeney Channel (seen from the Morston side) made it look as though we could almost walk across to Blakeney Point.

Morston.  Low tide.  One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats. — Morston. Low tide. One of the landing jetties for the seal trip boats.

Beautiful colours and lines - a decaying Gunnera leaf

Stone books

May 2, 2014

“Rocks are the record of events that took place at the time they formed. They are books. They have a different vocabulary, a different alphabet, but you learn how to read them.”

— John McPhee "In Suspect Terrain" (1983)

We think of stones as the epitome of permanence. We use expressions such as "set in stone", "heart of stone", "solid as rock" when we want to convey that something is fixed, unyielding, impervious to influence. But this is not the reality. It simply reflects the difference between our human perception of time and the unimaginable amount of time involved in geological processes.

I've been reading about the work of Ilana Halperin, specifically her exhibition "The Library" for National Museums Scotland last year. Ilana trained as a stone-carver but became interested in this relationship between geological phenomena and human life-spans. "The Library" included agates that were formed during a volcanic eruption in the year the artist was born; minerals that record the impact of a meteorite on the Earth's crust millions of years ago; etchings on "books" of mica that are millions of years old and sculptures made by the artist using geological processes in caves and geothermal springs. What is so inspiring about this is the way these works overturn our perception of the relationship between geology, biology and time.

I went back to Robert Macfarlane's "Mountains of the Mind" and re-read one of my favourite chapters - "The Great Stone Book", and particularly this passage:

“The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called “deep time” - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

Yet there is also something exhilarating about the contemplation of deep time. True, you learn yourself to be a blip in the larger physical projects of the universe. But you are also rewarded with the realisation that you do exist - as unlikely as it may seem, you do exist.””

— Robert Macfarlane " Mountains of the Mind" (2003)

But the other aspect of Ilana Halperin's work that intrigued me was the specific history of the minerals she used. And I began to think about my own collection of stones. These are predominantly flint, picked up over the course of several years of walking along North Norfolk beaches. Each one was originally selected primarily for its marks, colour or other physical features but now I was curious what those marks might signify in geological terms.

The "outside" of the same piece - the "cortex", stained with iron perhaps.

I have learned that flint is a form of quartz (silicon dioxide) that occurs as nodules in sedimentary rocks such as chalk. It is derived from material in the bodies of marine organisms, the skeletons of which mix with chalk and organic matter in sediment on the ocean floor. It is thought that chemical changes within the sediment, perhaps related to the decay of organic matter, cause the silica to accumulate and form concretions within the chalk. In some of my flints there are mysterious veins or fragments which thus may be residual traces of minerals or organisms trapped inside the stone during this process of formation.

Inside the nodule, the stone is usually dark grey and glass-like, while the outside is often covered by a coarse, white layer, called a cortex. The cortex looks a little like chalk but is actually quartz. So, many of the patterns in my flints have been formed where the cortex has been worn away by the sea. Lots of them have a pale bluish tinge - maybe where the cortex has worn down to the thinnest "veil" over the darker interior of the stone? Many also contain other colours - black, yellow, rust - which are apparently traces of iron and other metal oxides, sulphides, hydroxides or organic material.

Knowing all this, the stone I picked up on the beach becomes a document. It holds the memory of organisms and processes stretching back millions of years and is itself part of the ongoing geological history of the Norfolk coast. The marks and traces - which remind me of maps, drawings or other symbols within my personal experience - have their own significance. And, from the point I picked it up, I arrested its ongoing transformation - if I had left it on the beach, the sea would have continued to wear it down. Now it sits on my desk in stillness, removed from its geological context, as an object of study.

I'm thinking about doing more with these - studying and drawing the marks more closely with a view to generating more ideas for imagery and marks on cloth. At the moment, though my studio is given over to making new work. I have had a fantastically productive week and my studio wall looked like this (when the sun was out earlier this week). It feels good.

Soft greys

April 13, 2014

Cley Beach

A short visit to Norfolk yesterday. A bright day but a band of cloud hung over the coast, filtering the light. All the colours were muted to these soft greys. We walked around Cley Marsh. The reeds, bleached by sun, wind and sea. Marsh harriers in the sky, lapwings on the field, avocets on the scrapes. The North Sea at low tide, quiet and subdued.

Arnold's Marsh

Cley Marsh

barred

reed lines

reed lines

mud lines

sand lines

and I know these colours ...

Remedies for over thinking

March 28, 2014

When I start to feel as though my mind is going round in circles, I know it's time to get out of my head and do something. Anything. I'm reading a lot at the moment. This is generating masses of ideas but they are confused and abstract. I need to connect my thinking back to my work.

A flying visit to Norfolk last weekend helped. It was a stormy day and the light was changing constantly - dark, icy cold hailstorms followed by brilliant spring sunshine. Walking along Holkham beach I picked up shells, pieces of sea-blackened wood and bones - tiny rabbit bones amongst the dunes. I found a rabbit skull that was almost totally buried by the soft grey lichen that had grown up around it and held it so tight it wasn't possible to pick it up without breaking it. I wish I had photographed it because it has stayed in my memory. I was fascinated by the patterns on the shells I found - miniature shibori patterns to my eye. We saw spoonbills and watched a red kite soar over the grazing marshes, scattering smaller birds. Later, when we sat down for dinner, my notebook came out and I scribbled furiously, trying to get down the ideas that were flooding my mind before I lost them.

Another remedy - get back into the studio and start working. So I have been preparing cloth for shibori. I like to do this in batches and so I am piling up various stitched and bound pieces ready for dyeing. Some use traditional shibori methods, some are very unorthodox and traditionalists would surely frown at them. However I'm only interested in what kind of marks they generate. Most are techniques I have tried and tested before but I am also experimenting with some new ideas. One was such a pain to do that I rather hope I don't like the results so I don't have to do it again!

I am still thinking. And my thoughts are guiding my choices about how I manipulate the cloth. But I am out of my head and thinking with my hands. As I handle the cloth, I am making connections with my conceptual ideas, but my hands and my eyes are now contributing to the thinking process.

And a third remedy. Get out of the house. Talk to people. Look at or do something different. Today I went to see this exhibition by Karen Christensen - whose work could not be more different from mine, and yet I still found connections to things that matter to me. I had a nice lunch, spoke to a friend, wandered around Leigh in the sunshine and came back to my studio refreshed and ready to work.

all work shown in this post is by Debbie Lyddon

Debbie Lyddon: Caught by the tide

March 9, 2014

This weekend I went to see Debbie Lyddon's exhibition, "Caught by the Tide". I've followed Debbie's work for some time. There's a particular interest because she draws inspiration from the same stretch of North Norfolk coastline that I do. It is always fascinating to see how others respond to the same place and reflect upon the differences and similarities.

The similarities: we are both interested in the things that the tide washes up onto the beach and the effect of the sea and the weather on these and materials in general. However, where I tend to focus on the marks, Debbie's focus is more on how the material itself is changed - "the processes of change that occur when cloth is exposed to the elements or left to be washed around in the sea for years."

Debbie's work is very tactile. Cloth is exposed to sea water, rain, coated with wax, varnish or salt. You reach out to touch something that is obviously cloth … and unexpectedly it is hard, stiff. Salt crystals glitter and form encrustations where cloth has been soaked in salt water which is then left to evaporate. Rust stains form where wire has been stitched into the eyelets. Colour is minimal. The focus is on the cloth and the way it is changed by these processes.

Debbie is a classically trained musician and has a particular interest in how you can make the sounds of the coast visible. Drawings capture impressions of the sounds heard in the landscape. Eyelets and tubes project from her wall pieces and are like the finger holes of wind instruments. In fact there is a strong three dimensional element in her work - waxed pots and cylinders hold beach finds or encrusted salt - and a clear relationship between the wall pieces and her free-standing work.

Reflecting on my own work, there were two things I took away in particular. First, something about texture. Dye doesn't change the handle of the cloth - that's part of the point of using it. But it could be interesting to experiment with changing the texture in some areas … and see how this might alter, resist or soak up the dye.

Second, something about working in three dimensions. I've already experimented with incorporating 3D elements into my wall pieces but what would it look like if I took ideas from these into free-standing pieces?

More about Debbie Lyddon:

Web site

Blog

Article about the exhibition on Textileartist.org