Water in the landscape

“All the water features we can see in the landscape - springs, streams, rivers, lakes, ponds, bogs and fens - are joined together. Even if there’s no physical overground connection between one and another they’re all part of the seamless web of water that pervades the soil and the permeable rocks below. Open water is no more than the visible part of a hidden whole that is much bigger. Water features are accents of extreme wetness in a landscape which is nowhere totally dry. ”
— Patrick Whitefield "The Living Landscape"

Heavy rain this weekend.  On Sunday morning, early, I extended my walk to take a look at the stream and the pond.  The stream, which is usually no more than a trickle, was turbulent and milky-coloured.  The pond was also opaque, which made the reflections of the trees look even more like a drawing on the surface of the water.  I enjoyed the visual trickery - I could see the real branches hanging low over the water, the reflection of the branches above and stray leaves and twigs just below the surface.  Above, below and beneath.  And then to complete this game of perceptions, a duck would glide across the reflection, which would shatter and then re-form as the water became still again. 

“It can be hard to tell an artificial pond from a purely natural one but natural ponds are probably quite rare. Ponds and lakes can’t be formed by water erosion because water doesn’t make hollows. It cuts down ever deeper along its course. In fact a stream flowing out of a pond will eventually drain it, though this will take a long time if the rock is hard. ”
— Patrick Whitefield "The Living Landscape"

This pond is on ex-farmland, on heavy clay soil and may therefore be man-made.  A solution to the need to water livestock in the days before mains-fed drinking troughs.  It's deep.  The stream runs in one end and out the other.  The pond is actually two connected ponds - one packed with bulrushes and lined with willows, the other larger one more open.  It's one of the more interesting features in an otherwise rather featureless country park.  

Many of the landscapes I'm drawn to are those where the land and water meet.  Marshes, estuaries, coast.  And the interaction between the land and the water at the edges is what interests me. The way one shapes and influences the other.  There's this constant dialogue between the two elements.  In tidal areas, this occurs before your eyes over the course of just a few hours.  According to Chinese thinking, these are very yin - female - landscapes.  Soft, watery, dark, life-giving, flowing, shape-shifting.  But of course the point of that thinking is that it is the continuous interaction of yin and yang that drives the shaping of these landscapes, even if it seems that water dominates. 

“Some landscapes are dominated by water. Many of these are highland landscapes which are wet because it rains so much, covered with blanket bogs and drained by rivers which roar in spate after every heavy rainfall. Others are in low-lying, flat places where it may not rain very much but drainage is slow. Most of the latter kind have been drained for agriculture and are now far removed from their natural state. But the water is still there. Though it may be confined in artificial waterways and straightened rivers, it’s ever ready to burst these bonds and flood the land like it used to. In these places you could almost say the landscape is not so much formed by the interaction between people and the land as between people and water.””
— Patrick Whitefield "The Living Landscape"


A new drawing space

Late autumn - and it is getting colder, darker and (recently) wetter.  The clocks change tonight and it will be dark even earlier.  My studio is outside.  It's heated with a portable radiator that I need to switch on at least half an hour in advance to reach a bearable temperature on a cold day.  The result?  When I only have an hour or two it's been getting harder to get out there.  

The original idea was that one of the workbenches in the studio would be the drawing bench.  But that hasn't been working.  Dyed cloth, sewing materials, reference books keep taking it over.  Drawing is banned from the sewing table (for obvious reasons).  The dye bench (which is great for drawing) is constantly occupied with dye vats at the moment.  So despite best intentions not a lot of drawing gets done.  What to do ... 

I decided to set up a drawing desk indoors.  

It involved not one but two trips to the dreaded Ikea.  Don't ask.  

Window.  Radiator.  This is bliss.

And it seems to be working.  



62 Group: Ebb & Flow

I made a flying visit to Grimsby at the end of this week to see the 62 Group's latest exhibition.  A 400 mile round trip from one end of the North Sea coast to the other.  This was in fact rather appropriate as a significant number of Grimsby fishermen apparently migrated there from the Thames Estuary in the late nineteenth century, when the town was developing as a fishing port.    

"Ebb & Flow" is a response to Grimsby's history as a major fishing port and to the excellent museum collection at the Fishing Heritage Centre in particular.  The exhibition is divided between the latter and Grimsby Minster.  It was interesting to see how different artists responded to the theme.  Some made direct reference to the fishing industry or the port while others made more indirect reference to the theme of tides, flow or change.  

The work of five artists caught my attention in particular.  The first was Hannah Lamb.  Her piece Baptism explored the experience of cold water swimming.  It consisted of a triptych of organza panels printed using the cyanotype process.  The imagery, on separate panels, showed the head, hands and feet of a woman and succeeded in conveying the idea of someone in water.  But what I loved was the way Hannah also conveyed the sensual aspect of being in water. With the most minimal, delicate stitching she suggested the touch of water against a finger or a swirl of water across the toes.  For me this lifted the work from being a simple image on cloth to something altogether more tactile and sensual.  Hannah's blogpost about this piece is here.

Hannah Lamb "Baptism"

Hannah Lamb "Baptism" (detail)

Sue Stone is based in Grimsby and her pieces - two in the museum, one in the Minster - told a story about people in the town.  The colour palette and format remind me of the colours of old photographs.  Here too though the detail of the stitching and appliqué add to the image, so that when you look, there is far more information than in the picture alone.  In Portrait of a Grimsby Girl the bricks are covered with stitched writing telling you details about the woman's life.  In The Unknown Statistic, which is about the children left behind by fathers who went to war and never came back, the man is not in the picture but, across the wall is a fluid line of embroidery tracing the sense of the tune he whistles as he walks away.  Close up, I was fascinated too by the stitched patterns used so effectively to show the textures of the figures' clothing.  

Sue Stone: "The Unknown Statistic"

Sue Stone: Portrait of a Grimsby Girl (detail)

Jane McKeating's piece consisted of five large panels titled "Red - a sampler".  At first I thought these were painted but they are digitally printed from Jane's own drawings.  Inspired by samplers, paintings and symbols in the museum, the panels trace the "ebb and flow of a red mark through the passage of time."   Each panel shows a sewing machine - a progressively more modern one - stitching a length of bright yellow cloth.  Apart from some white stitching, which adds texture to some of the panels, the only stitching is the red "stitched" line.  As the sewing machines evolve, so does the mark, from a basic straight stitch in the first panel to a more complex computerised design in the fifth.  What struck me, however, was the juxtaposition of the domestic sewing machines with the "high vis" yellow cloth, suggesting protective or waterproof clothing.  So many thoughts here about the connection between the lives of fishermen on the sea and their wives, mothers, sisters at home.  

Jane McKeating: "Red - a sampler"

Jane McKeating (detail)

In a completely different vein, I loved the work by Ann Goddard.  Discarded consisted of five bundles of driftwood, twigs and rusted metal "tangled" together by shreds of vintage fishing net and wire.  There is a reference to "ghost nets" - lost nets which continue to trap debris, fish and other organisms.  To me each bundle was like a three dimensional drawing.  There was a larger, related work in the Minster, constructed of willow and wire which had a similar effect.  

Ann Goddard: "Discarded"

Finally, I loved the ikat weaving of Christine Gornowicz, particularly the way the receding verticals emphasise the sense of movement in the horizontal flow patterns in the one below.  I recommend a visit to her web site to see more of her beautiful work.  

Christine Gornowicz - "Flow"

Christine Gornowicz - "Flow"

62 Group Website

Ebb & Flow Facebook page (with more photos and details of the artists and their work)

If you can't get to Grimsby before 2 November, the Ebb & Flow catalogue is available here

Liminality

After my last post someone mentioned threshold theory to me.  This has its roots in anthropological studies of rites of passage, but in educational theory a "threshold concept" is one that, once understood, changes the learner's view of the subject: 

“... there are certain concepts or learning experiences, which resemble passing through a portal, from which a new perspective opens up, allowing things formerly not perceived to come into view. This permits a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something. ”
— Ray Land, JHF Meyer, Caroline Baillie, preface to "Threshold concepts and transformational learning" (2010)

These are the difficult bits - the things that are hard to grasp and challenge the learner's existing ideas or understanding.  But they are also the parts that make the difference between a working understanding of a subject or true mastery.  

“Difficulty in understanding threshold concepts may leave the learner in a state of “liminality”, a suspended state of partial understanding, or “stuck place”, in which understanding approximates to a kind of “mimicry” or lack of authenticity.”
— Meyer, Land & Baillie - as before

This totally makes sense to me in terms of where I find myself.  I have these individual pieces of inspiration, skills and knowledge and a sense of reaching for an understanding that will bring them all together .... that is tantalisingly just out of my reach.  And to reach it, I may have to let go of some of my existing approach ... which is discomforting.   In the meantime, there's that sense of dissatisfaction - that nothing is quite in its place.  

“A threshold has always demarcated that which belongs within, the place of familiarity and relative security, from what lies beyond that, the unfamiliar, the unknown, the potentially dangerous. ... all journeys begin with leaving that familiar space and crossing over into the riskier space beyond the threshold.”
— Meyer, Land & Baillie, as before

But while it was fascinating to me to come across this thinking and to see how it relates to what I'm doing, the real lightbulb moment related to a different aspect.  I realised just how strongly I'm attracted to things that encapsulate that liminal edge - the space "in between" where one thing becomes another.  

Tide turning.  Snettisham (June 2014)

In the landscape, it's where the tide alternately reveals and conceals the land; 

all the edges disappearing ... Holkham Bay at sunset with the tide turning (July 2014)

... where the sky merges into the sea so that you can hardly see the horizon;

Blakeney Channel (March 2014)

... where dry land merges into mud and then water on the marshes.  

It's also those other transitions - where one season begins to turn into the next, changing light at dawn or dusk, marks of ageing or decay ... I could go on but you get the idea.  I like the fact that the edges between these things are not clear or distinct.  There is an ambiguity, in which you know that something is changing but it is a pattern of one thing flowing into another - not a clear stop / start.  

And these are just the visible manifestations.  I can also see links to ideas that are important to me about the boundary between knowing / not knowing; processes of change and transition; and the nature of our relationship with the wider natural world.  

Salts Hole at Holkham.  (September 2014) 

Salts Hole (above) used to be connected to the sea via a network of saltmarsh creeks.  It is now cut off by a ridge of sand dunes and pine woods that has taken many years to form.  The water is salty enough to support saltwater creatures such as sea-anemones, even though it is now almost a mile from the sea.  The brackish water both reflects the sky and conceals what lies within the pool.  It is both transparent and opaque.  It is the essence of a liminal space.  In many cultures, pools have been seen as gateways (thresholds) to another place - the underworld, underwater lands - and as a symbol of the unconscious.  So many layers of liminality.

I want to develop this.  It's already there in my work, but I think I can do more with it.  Which suggests a way forward.  


More about threshold concepts (pdf)

More about the anthropological origins of ideas about liminality 


A sort of hiatus

I don't think I really know what I'm doing at the moment.  I'm questioning lots of things about my work.  And pondering several, as yet unresolved, ideas.  I'm not sure - yet - where my work might go next; but it feels as though something is shifting.  This is not exactly the most comfortable place to be.  

I know the worst thing I could do would be to stop working.  That would just increase the frustration.  So I figured I might as well use the time to try new things and prioritise the experiments and play - rather than force myself to make more of the same just to satisfy my need to feel I'm "Working".   So while I'm in this awkward between phase, here is a round-up of what I have been doing recently.  

Colour mixing.  This is partly preparation for another colour study.  I figured that while I'm not doing anything else I might as well progress this.  This puts me in research mode - logical, analytical - rather than creative, but it's all part of building the underpinning knowledge.  

Experimenting with folded forms.  I came across a book, aimed at graphic designers, that looks at many different ways of folding printed material.  So I tried out a few.  I liked the different ways pages were revealed or concealed.  They suggested different ways of telling a story.  I was thinking about book forms.  

Painting pages with ink.  Sometimes this is all I feel like doing.  I used scraps of lining paper, newspaper, packing paper and painted them with washes of ordinary fountain pen ink.  Diamine make this in lots of different colours.  It behaves a lot like dye, which is probably why I like it.  I enjoyed just washing one colour over another and seeing how they changed as they ran together on the paper.  Turning wet pages over and laying them on top of each other meant that they stained and marked each other.  I like these accidental marks.  

I also like the accidental marks that end up on the sheet of paper I always lay underneath to protect my work surface.   Accidental drawings.  

Then I started playing around with the painted pages.  Folding and layering different textures, colours and marks.  

Until I ended up with all these on my studio wall.  I like the way the paper behaves compared to cloth - more structural.  Inspired by my earlier paper folding experiments, I was folding and wrapping pages around each other to hold them together.  Then I stepped back and looked.  

The middle one with the leaf print was one of the first ones I did and it bothered me.  Although I like this kind of imagery in other people's work, it confirmed for me that in my own I prefer the imagery to be more ambiguous.  In fact, studying what I had done, I could see that it was all about lines and edges, overlapping colours and textures.  I like the way many of the lines emerge from and disappear into the background.  And, as with the folding experiments, I also like the sense of things being hidden and revealed between the different layers.  

I doubt these paper pieces are particularly light fast but I am wondering whether they could be developed into "work" in their own right.  Perhaps they will influence what I do next with cloth too.  

Drawing.  In between all this, I've started drawing my flint collection.  Using different media, different scales, close up details and larger more abstract impressions.  Just observing and playing around with the marks and colours.  Lines, edges and marks again.  

I'm sure all of this will feed into my work one way or another.