Six islands

February 29, 2016

Wallasea Island, Foulness Island, Potton Island, Havengore Island, Rushley Island, New England Island - six islands. Clustered between the River Crouch, the River Roach and the North Sea - or rather Maplin Sands. Separated from each other by creeks. Restricted access over land. Only fully navigable at high tide.

A boat trip. The wind was in the east and it was bleak and cold. Even colder once we were out on the water. An icy, biting wind and no shelter. Poor light. All the colours greyed out. I've walked along the banks of the Crouch on a brilliantly sunny winter day and the colours were so rich - russets, golds, deep blues and greens. But this time everything was silver, grey, brown and black.

I like the marshes best when the tide is out. The exposed mud and the way it reflects the light is far more attractive to me than when the channels are full of water. But I was interested to see the shore from a different perspective - from the water rather than the land. And in this bleak, cold light the edge of the marsh was reduced to dark lines dividing water from sky. Horizontals. Only the occasional vertical line - channel markers, breakwaters, fence posts.

The islands have always been remote. Isolated farms. Nature reserves. MOD ranges. Smugglers ... Places for people who people who choose to be at the edge of things.

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.

Marshland

March 14, 2015

“When the 19th century art critic John Ruskin wrote that “mountains are the beginning and end of landscape”, he was, on this occasion, wrong. For some of us, it is at the shore’s edge that landscape truly begins and ends, where the land meets and inter-penetrates with the sea and the sky. It is also where many geological eras and human belief systems find their fulfilment or nemesis. In his introduction to S. Baring-Gould’s novel, Mehalah, set on Mersea Island in the second half of the nineteenth century, Fowles refers to the “vast God-denying skies, the endless grey horizon, the icy north-easterlies on the Dengie flats in winter.”

— Ken Worpole "350 miles: an Essex Journey"

One of my plans for this year is to spend time exploring the Essex marshes. I sometimes feel that I know the Norfolk coastline better than my own so I decided it was time to redress the balance. At the beginning of January we walked out along the Dengie peninsula. It was bitterly cold. The tide was out but the mist made it hard to distinguish water from mud flat anyway. At one point I watched a flock of Knot disappearing and emerging out of the mist as they did their "dance" over the mud flats.

The walk is along the sea wall, with salt marsh to one side and farmland to the other. The difference in the colour and texture of the land on each side is stark. I was reading John Cage at the time and there was a bit about the visual equivalent of silence being "nothing to see". So I was thinking about this as I walked through this bleak, flat, featureless landscape. But gradually you adjust, so that each line of posts, a bend in a creek or a change in the vegetation becomes an event. So instead of "nothing to see" the small details become more striking - almost "noisy".

We went back last weekend. This time it was a bright, sunny March afternoon and warm enough to regret some of the layers I'd piled on. I love the way the colours of the marsh are changed by the different light.

My drawings at the moment are dominated by diffuse edges and long horizontals, punctuated by short vertical strokes.

My current reading list:

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.

Helen Terry

fabric, colour, texture, art, craft, creativity.