“The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events… even the things that are most ‘thing-like’ are nothing more than long events.”
— Carlo Rovelli (b. 1956)
The past is not erased but enfolded into the present; objects, heirlooms, names on weathered graves — all are what Rovelli calls events and through imagination, these events, the times and people within, can be known to us — empathetically — through the mirror of our own lived experience.
In nature, where our lived experience best aligns with people centuries past, walking becomes an act of unfolding: each step a way of bringing the past back to life. How we experience the natural world — the trees, the sky, the wind and rain — can connect us to those who lived long ago. Despite the dissonance between our worlds, they would have known these phenomena in much the same way. In these things our worlds start to rhyme.
“Thursday, April 15 1802. The wind was furious … The wind seized our breath. The lake was rough. …When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow Park we saw a few daffodils close to the water-side. … I never saw daffodils so beautiful … the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake.”
— Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855)
“Shortly after dusk, the lightning appeared in the south and western horizon, and soon became most vivid, blue sheets of lightning following each other in rapid succession, but unaccompanied by thunder.”
— Jackson’s Oxford Journal, 1842
In The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes:
“If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.”
When we walk, we enfold ourselves into the past. Each footprint left in our wake becomes a word, and, as Tilley writes, the path a kind of text; one that is ‘read’ with our feet and interpreted through our senses. Imagination is our sixth sense.
Similarly, words written on a page are gestures through which, for a moment, the whole of their making, as well as their meaning, unfolds: the writer, the room, the world outside the window. When I or anyone writes or paints, the whole of the present is, likewise, enfolded — rolled and bound like a scroll.
Such is why I’m drawn to the gestures of Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. The characters impart not only meaning — trees 木, sky 空, sun 太陽, wind 風 — but in their strokes the whole of the time in which they were made is contained — the writer, the room, the world outside the window…
In my own work, I paint shadows directly in the woods with ink and calligraphy brushes. Each mark holds the instant of its making. The shadow becomes text, and the text enfolds the present into the past.
The painted shadow becomes like a language made, written, and read in the moment — then lost as soon as the moment has gone.
The videos I make of the shadows likewise become a poem spoken in this lost and silent tongue. We cannot hear it. We cannot speak it. All we can ‘see’ are the trees now gone; the moment that has passed.
To climb the peaks of our imagination and see a time long before we were born is, at the same time, to descend into the depths of our own non-existence, wherein which dark expanse, our imagination lights the dark as it does the paths that lead away from our deaths. Imagination and memory come together to blur the boundaries of our beginnings and ends, as if, like a book, the unseen words that might have been written before and after are suddenly revealed in all their infinite number.
— Author’s note, 2019
“No longer to be as we have always been, in those endlessly anxious hands – to leave even our name behind us as a child leaves off playing with a broken toy.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
Fragments, Patterns, and Memory
“The past is hidden somewhere outside the realm of the intellect, in some material object.”
— Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The light of the moon covers the earth, yet it can be contained in a single bowl of water.”
— Dōgen Zenji (1200–1253)
“It is more arduous to honour the memory of the nameless than that of the renowned.”
— Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
“For the things of this world are their stories, identified not by fixed attributes but by their paths of movement in an unfolding field of relations. Each is the focus of ongoing activity. Thus in the storied world… things do not exist, they occur.”
— Tim Ingold
“In Ersilia, to establish the relationships that sustain the city’s life, the inhabitants stretch strings from the corners of the houses, white or black or gray or black-and-white according to whether they mark a relationship of blood, of trade, authority, agency… you come upon the ruins of the abandoned cities, without the walls which do not last, without the bones of the dead which the wind rolls away: spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.”
“In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another… something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment.”
“Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.”
“The city does not consist of this but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past… The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand.”
— Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
“The inhabitant is rather one who participates from within in the very process of the world’s continual coming into being and who, in laying a trail of life, contributes to its weave and texture.”
— Tim Ingold
“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or ‘highlights’.”
— Bill Viola (1951–2024)
The past exists in fragments. Each trace — a word, an object, a ruin, a name — is both presence and absence: a time returned to view, diminished like the point of a star set against the vast mass of its origin.
Our present day comprises fragments of the past; a night sky strewn with stars appearing as if now, each belying their own unfathomable age.
Geographer Doreen Massey describes space as “the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far.” That is how I perceive the present.
Each fragment is a story-so-far: an entropic event, a life wound down to a name; ancient footsteps left in tesserae, ploughed up blinking in the earth. Fragments like the tokens left by mothers with their children at the Foundling Hospital, London — small pieces of fabric cut from larger garments, each carrying the memory of touch, the trace of identity, the hope of return.
The present then is our simultaneous perception of these stories-so-far; interconnected threads, with depth as well as surface. As Carlo Rovelli writes in Helgoland:
“The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. … ‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.”
It’s by extending a fragment out into an imagined wider world then that we can begin to feel our way towards an empathetic response to the past. This can also be achieved however by breaking down an object or an image into its constituent parts, whether the brush stroke of an artist or calligrapher, or the details of an nineteenth century photograph which I discuss later.
The following quotes allude to this sense of interconnection. First Barry Lopez:
“One must wait for the moment when the thing… ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”
And Christopher Tilley, in The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology:
“The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible — his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”
Taking Carlo Rovelli’s quote, everything becomes ‘other’. It’s everything that makes us visible and vice-versa. When we work with the past, we work with fragments. When we look at the mothers’ tokens we see the fabric from which they were cut, the dress from which the fabric was made, the woman who wore it, the places where she walked. Every attempt to extend or unfold a pattern is to weave with a thread of light. It is an act of empathy, a reaching-out across the gap between what endures and what has vanished, just as a star endures in sight, untold years after it has gone.
In his book White Holes, Rovelli writes : “the black hole does not end in a singularity, but tunnels into a white hole — a small, stable remnant, perhaps as tiny as a grain of dust, from which what fell in may one day emerge.”
I love this image. From the outside, the white hole is almost pointlike — nearly invisible. From the inside, it can stretch across a vast duration and distance — like a long, thin bridge through spacetime. In my mind’s eye, I conflate the mote and the thread, and see these holes as filaments, fine hair-like threads, connecting what was with what is. They are the voids left in the wake of a death, grief spun with the years to forgotten, holes from which, through empathy, what was, might yet return. They are the stories-so-far; fragments containing the whole; threads with which the present is made.
Nature, the Medieval, and the Child’s Imagination
“There was a time when meadow, grove and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light.”
— William Wordsworth (1770–1850)
“Woods are poised between reality and imagination… they span many lifetimes.”
— Richard Hayman
“But who knows the temporal dimensions of the forest? History is not enough.”
— Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)
“But forests reign in the past. I know, for instance, that my grandfather got lost in a certain wood. I was told this, and I have not forgotten it. It happened in a past before I was born. My oldest memories, therefore, are a hundred years old, or perhaps a bit more.”
— Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962)
In my childhood imagination, the medieval world lived on in the woods: knights passing through shafts of light, the sound of distant bells, the air heavy with myth.
The Middle Ages represented, for me, an ideal landscape — a childish vision of beauty, myth, and legend, enriched not by the possibility of, but by the reality of magic.
The young boy, beholden to wonder and enchantment, still exists; yet in adulthood that vision of beauty and magic has deepened, transformed. Enchantment has become something else. Imagination has become embodied, empathetic.
In The Subversive Stitch, Rozsika Parker observes that, from the perspective of the nineteenth century:
“The Middle Ages constituted an era that appeared to provide historical confirmation for the naturalness and rightness of the doctrine of separate spheres for the sexes.”
My work with pattern is not a commentary on these prejudices, but what compels me in Parker’s words is the boundary it describes — and how, in my work, that boundary begins to blur.
The woods of my childhood offered a freedom beyond such divisions: a space where identities could shift and merge, where magic fused with reality, where one could become a knight, moving between selves as if through shade and sunlight.
That sense of openness has become central to how I now explore the past — not as fixed, but as fluid, interwoven, and alive.
“And yet they, who passed away long ago, Still dwell in our blood, whispering.”
— Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
“The leaf has a song in it… and the leaf is singing still.”
— Mary Oliver (1935–2019)
“Is not all writing, all art, a response to a loss of some kind, an imaginative way of dealing with lack?”
— Carl Lavery
Grief, like remnants of the past, is both presence and absence. What is lost continues to exist — not as it was, but as an echo or memory; a vibration through time; a white hole where the raw and gaping void of loss is slowly spun to the shape of a mote, floating in some far-off year, within a shaft of sunlight.
When I was a child my mum would go out to sing. Before a concert, she and her friends — the women transformed in beautiful dresses, the men in tuxedos — would come to the house to rehearse. She would close the dining-room doors, their frosted glass patterned with leaves through which I could see their shapes as I listened to their voices.
Since her death, that memory has become an image of grief. When I listen to recordings of her singing, it’s like those rehearsals: I can hear her, transformed, but not reach her. The frosted pattern of leaves in the glass remains — doors closed between two worlds. They are a screen through which I can see her singing, but like summer recalled to winter trees, although I might remember her warmth, I cannot feel it anymore.
Another way I have examined grief is through a series of works which take as their source studio portraits of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. I’m particularly interested in the backdrops, in front of which the ‘sitters’ are placed to have their picture taken.
Often these feature scenes of nature – trees, bucolic landscapes, gardens – or images of idealised interiors. With these portraits, I remove the figures, and, using AI capabilities in Photoshop, extend the backdrops to become full landscapes or interiors. The results are often strange, unsettling images of absence and remind me of the backdrops one might find in a theatre when the actors have all left the stage. The fact my mum performed so much, in front of such backdrops, makes this sense of absence even more compelling.
There is a link here too with my childhood imaginings of medieval forests – that sense of an untouched, unspoiled landscape of the past. Wordsworth wrote in his Guide to the District of the Lakes, that we can only imagine, “the primeval woods shedding and renewing their leaves with no human eye to notice or human heart to regret or welcome the change.”
“To live is to crochet according to a pattern we were given.”
— Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935)
“We are, none of us, our own ideas of ourselves.”
— Adrienne Rich (1929–2012)
“And yet they, who passed away long ago, still exist in us,” writes Rilke, “as natural disposition, as burden on our destiny, as murmuring blood, and as gesture that rises up out of the depths of time.”
Rilke’s words capture what I feel most deeply about inheritance: that the past is not something behind us, but within us — alive in gesture, enfolded in thought, in the smallest movements of the body. We are made of continuities — a simultaneity of “stories-so-far.”
David Whyte, in Consolations, writes:
“Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived… what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.”
I imagine this signature as a patchwork of patterns, each corresponding to an approximate ratio of DNA passed down my family tree through female lines.
Each pattern is distinct, yet shares a common thread with those around it. When combined, they form a landscape — my landscape, my interior: a wood, a room in a Victorian house with William Morris walls, the fabric of an eighteenth-century dress.
“The photograph of the missing being will touch me like the delayed rays of a star… a sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze.”
— Susan Sontag (1933–2004)
Every act of creation begins at a boundary — a meeting point between worlds. In my work, that boundary might be between past and present, interior and exterior, masculine and feminine, imagination and reality. It might simply be the formal separation of colours on a canvas.
To cross a threshold is to enter another way of seeing while remaining oneself. Each movement between media, identities, or times becomes a kind of passage. Boundaries are not walls but invitations — places of interconnection, where the known world gives way to the unknown, where dissonance meets with rhyme.
I’m reminded here, however, of Carlo Rovelli: “‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.” In a sense there is no boundary at all — only interconnections.
And we are always in the process of crossing whilst ourselves being made of these ambiguous thresholds.
Borrowing from the world of physics (and again the writing of Carlo Rovelli) and what I’ve gleaned about entropy, I can look at a past moment as something which has a very low entropy. The past is like the sandcastle as opposed to the pile of sand (but with far fewer possible configurations of state than the castle).
This is because the past moment has happened and therefore its form is fixed; there are no different configurations by which it can enter the next moment as the next moment has also already happened. If we think of the moment we are living now, then we can think of it as having very high entropy as there are countless possible configurations by which we, as people living in this particular moment, can enter the next and so on. We are like the pile of sand as opposed to the castle.
If we are going to try and recreate a past moment, we have to try and rethink that moment as it happens, not as it was. So, when I look at the image below, a photograph of a street full of people taken in 1897, I try to imagine the scene just before the image was taken and for a short while after.
To do that, I might zoom in on a detail – one of the people – and imagine them moving. I imagine the noise of the scene, the sounds they might have heard and think about what they might have been saying.
One thing I find with photographs like this, is that it’s often those people who are in the background and who are completely oblivious to the picture being taken that allow me to animate the scene, to reintroduce a sense of entropy. People or details, such as open windows, are a particularly vivid way of achieving this.
In the picture above, the horses and carts locate the photograph in the early 1900s but it’s the windows – the open windows – which help me locate myself in the time. Why? Because the rooms behind the windows are spaces outside the photograph; spaces oblivious to the photograph being taken. It’s as if they have escaped the moment frozen by the camera.
The open windows also speak of a time before the photograph was taken and therefore give the photograph a sense of duration which, like the rooms behind them, also extend the boundaries of the image. When the photographer took the photo, the windows had been open a while beforehand; people had opened them and I can begin to imagine those moments. I can imagine being in one of those rooms (I think of the wallpaper, the patterns, the dresses), looking out through the open window and seeing the horses down on the street and hearing the sounds of the city. These open windows therefore can help us see the past moment as it happens rather than as it was. They ascribe the picture a duration and give it flow.
In his book, The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli writes: “The growth of entropy itself happens to open new doors through which entropy can increase further.” In the case of this image, Rovelli’s doors are our windows but the effect is the same. We begin to disorder time and locate among these details, pockets of potential. Instead of everything being fixed, there is room for manoeuvre, for change; entropy increases.stead of everything being fixed, there is room for manoeuvre, for change; entropy increases.
“Each line is now the actual experience with its own innate history.”
— Cy Twombly (1928–2011)
“Rinsho is not imitation but conversation.”
— Tanimura Kishō (1922–2008)
When we attempt to engage with the past, often what is left — whether a name, a ruin, an object or story — is like those scraps of fabric. In our mind’s eye, we can take the scrap and attempt to extend its pattern to form a view of the world long gone: the dress from which it was cut, the woman who wore it, the streets down which she walked. Whether a name, a ruin, an object or story, the process is the same; we take a fragment and, in our imaginations, extend it.
But in this endeavour we are always like a parent, claiming a child with a mismatched pattern, pointing out the parts that rhyme, aware of those which don’t.
And it’s in the dissonance and rhyme that much of my work is located. Rinsho is the art of studying and copying the works of great calligraphers as a means of internalising their brush techniques, rhythm, and spirit.
By copying my own shadow texts, for example, I seek a way back to the moment of their making — to unfold what was, at the time of their making, enfolded. In some respects all my work is like the art of rinsho; not a copying of, but a rhyming with, the past.
As part of my practice I sometimes walk, and whilst walking, I write down lists of things that I observe. For example, on a walk on 26 February 2024 I wrote:
The sun comes out and warms my face Bright on the lake The ground rises Moss-covered stump Old leaves crunch beneath my feet
When I read them back, days, weeks, months or years later, I pick up the thread and find myself back in those moments, tracing my path, just as I might copy the shadows painted in the woods. Reading the lists becomes a kind of rinsho.
And it’s in those walks that I take inspiration for the patterns I design, each different but each with a common thread that links them together. In some works I juxtapose two contrasting patterns, each with a shared motif — a branch perhaps running seamlessly between. One pattern is small, the other many times larger. One is our contemporary world, one the world of the past. There is dissonance and rhyme, just as when, through our own experience, we imagine the lives of those who lived long ago. Our worlds are vastly different, they dissonate, but our experience — in natural phenomena — rhymes.
Once, at the Tower of London, I stood before a wall on which, in 1541, a prisoner, William Tyrell, had carved the following:
“Since Fortune has chosen that my hope should go to the wind to complain, I wish the time were destroyed; my planet being ever sad and ungracious.”
It’s one thing to read this and sympathise with William’s plight. It’s another to kneel down where he must have knelt to carve it; to glance through the window at the sky. Our worlds may be entirely different, but the sky is just the same and our knees can feel the same stone floor of the cell. It’s a small thing, but we can, kinaesthetically, empathise in some small way with William.
“Rinsho is the practice of matching one’s breath and step to that of the ancients.”
— Teshima Yūkei (1901–1987)
Is that not what we’re doing when we empathise? Matching our breath and step, if not with the ancients, then with those who went before us.
I have, in the past, made a lot of work on landscapes that have witnessed trauma, whether battlefield sites of World War One or sites of the Holocaust such as Auschwitz. I was struck when reading ‘Underland’ by Robert Macfarlane by this particular passage:
“Dissonance is produced by any landscape that enchants in the present but has been a site of violence in the past. But to read such a place only for its dark histories is to disallow its possibilities for future life, to deny reparation or hope – and this is another kind of oppression. If there is a way of seeing such landscapes, it might be thought of as ‘occulting’: the nautical term for a light that flashes on and off, and in which the periods of illumination are longer than the periods of darkness.”
The landscapes I produce therefore also harken back to the work I have made in the past about these sites of violence. There is the rhyming of the natural world and the dissonance of experience.
I like too, the term ‘occulting light’ to describe that sense of thinking about the past, of reaching into the dark as a means of empathising with people in the past. The light of our present day experience shines, seeking out those parts, in the darkness of the past, where the pattern might rhyme with ours. But it’s only when the light is off, in the afterimage glowing in our eyes – and our imaginations – that we see where those connections lay.
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”
— Simone Weil (1909–1943)
“The body is our general medium for having a world.”
— Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908–1961)
Empathy is not only an act of imagination but, as described above, an act of embodied imagination — a means of perceiving and understanding phenomena through the whole of one’s being. It is akin to the mode of seeing described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). Goethean observation is a participatory method that moves from detached perception toward intimate understanding. Beginning with exact sense perception, the observer attends to a phenomenon’s visible details without judgement, letting the facts speak for themselves. Through exact sensorial fantasy, imagination is used to perceive the phenomenon in time — to sense its life, change, and movement. In seeing in beholding, the observer quiets their own activity so that the phenomenon may reveal its inner gesture or character. Finally, in being one with the object, perception and thought merge in an intuitive grasp of the phenomenon’s essence.
This process transforms observation from analysis into relationship: knowledge arises not by dissecting the world, but by entering into a living dialogue with it.
This method, which I often use, shares much with my wider practice. Goethean observation calls for the softening of boundaries between the observer and the observed — a reciprocal awareness, almost the moment Barry Lopez describes when “the thing ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there”.
“To cross a threshold is to enter another way of seeing while remaining oneself. Each movement between media, identities, or times becomes a kind of passage. Boundaries are not walls but invitations — places of interconnection, where the known world gives way to the unknown, where dissonance meets with rhyme.”
This is at the heart of Goethean observation. Through it we come to see the object as a story-so-far rather than a fixed or isolated thing. It becomes other. To borrow from Christopher Tilley, the object — whatever is being observed — “sees” the observer in a manner comparable to the way a mirror sees: it defines a point of view that renders us visible in return. We recognise that “nothing exists in itself, independently from something else.” We see it in the object, and we recognise it in ourselves.
And perhaps this is what enchantment truly is: the moment when the distance between things dissolves — when the world, for an instant, reveals itself as one continuous gesture.
I have made good progress on my pattern work and have arrived at a place where the concept and the aesthetic are now where I want them to be. The idea of the ‘dissonant’ and ‘rhyming’ pattern still holds but having used an hexagonal template (traditional, of course, with blanket design) the overall image now has much more aesthetic appeal. And, of course, being a traditional design (the hexagon), it fits very well with the overall concept; history, fragments, tokens and, for want of a better phrase, world building; the idea that when we think of the past, we are building the world within our imaginations.
For my own benefit, I’m going to recap on the work so far.
First of all there were the ‘Dissonance and Rhyme’ images; two similar but contrasting patterns (see previous post).
I wanted the designs to have a pastoral aspect and so I took the lines above and imagined them as branches, appending leaves.
Again, I like these designs very much and will continue to use and explore them further.
Working on my family tree, I wanted to create something which explored the fact that we, as individuals, comprise fragments of our ancestors’ DNA. I love the fact that I can look on Ancestry and discover someone I am very distantly related to (owing to the fact that we share a very small amount of DNA) and that by comparing our family trees, find the place where our trees converged, sometimes from an ancestor alive in the mid 18th century.
One can imagine a blanket, stitched in the past being handed down through the generations; one which, might be patched up over time with new patterns. Taking this idea, I thought of how I am made up of lots of different patterns, some more extensive than others and decided to use the hexagonal template design to show this, where, using my mother’s maternal line, my grandmother would be so many patches, my great-grandmother so many less (about half) and so on, stretching back to the 18th century.
I began with a square design first.
I love the fractured, fragmentary quality of these; that and the fact they are nonetheless complete pieces with an overall, homogeneous look.
Taking these further, I extended the images to have the same ratio as a blanket.
It didn’t take much to then adapt these to fit with the scrolls I’ve designed previously.
My work has always been, in part, an attempt to know the past as a present-day, lived experience; to empathise with those who lived before me and see the natural world as they would have seen it, before so much was lost.
In 2018 I visited the Foundling Museum in London, established as The Foundling Hospital in 1739 to receive and care for abandoned children. It was an emotional experience, not least because of the scraps of fabric left by mothers with their babies; a means of identifying their child in the event they might reclaim them in the future. Amounting to over 5000 items, this sad catalogue is Britain’s largest collection of 18th century textiles.
When we attempt to engage with the past, often what is left – whether a name, a ruin, an object or story – is like those scraps of fabric, and the dress from which the fabric was cut, the world from which they’re estranged. In our mind’s eye, we can take the scrap and attempt to extend its pattern to form a view of the world long gone; the dress from which it was cut, the woman who wore it, the streets down which she walked. Whether a name, a ruin, an object or story, the process is the same; we take a fragment and, in our imaginations, extend it.
But in this endeavour we are always like a parent, claiming a child with a mismatched pattern, pointing out the parts that rhyme, aware of those which don’t.
And it’s in the dissonance and rhyme that much of my work is located.
Recently, I have begun a new series of works (above) where two different patterns are joined together to create a single piece. These patterns will eventually be printed onto fabric and stitched together but at the moment they exist as prototype designs. In the main, the two fabrics will be different, but there will be parts where the patterns rhyme, illustrating that in order to empathise with someone who lived in the past, we have to find the common thread – the rhyme – which binds our otherwise dissonant lives. Most likely, that ‘thread of experience’ will be our experience of nature; the feel of the sun, the wind and rain; the experience of walking amidst trees and watching the play of light and shadows on the ground. Or seeing the sun in a blue sky and the moon on a starry night.
So far I’m very happy with the way the work is progressing. The images above are prototype designs which I will eventually work up to incorporate natural elements, particularly trees in response to the shadow videos and paintings I have made in forests.
It doesn’t matter how different our lived experiences are; we all shared an experience of the natural world. As Paul Fussell wrote: “…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.”
That is what these works will do; propose moments of pastoral, of common experience which then can allow us to empathise with people in the past, whatever their lives were like.
This work is one which, like the grief it represents, changes over time. It began following the death of my mum in 2022 with three empty diffusers I found in her home.
They diffusers spoke to how I felt then. The bottles were empty – or almost empty – where once they were full. The reeds did nothing but smell faintly of what had once been, carrying nothing into nothing; ‘air traded for air’ as Rilke put it. They were the perfect metaphor for loss.
I wanted therefore to do something with them along with those I had in my own home. I thought about the glass containers, about what what they represented. To me they were the like the presence of my mum in the present day. They were transparent. You could see the present distorted through the glass, just as now I sometimes see the present when remembering my mum. I can’t see her, but I can hear the things she might have said. I see what I see distorted as if by her words, her laughter.
When I remember mum, I am using that presence – the shape of the glass – from which memories come not only of the past, but also of the present; as if she is still there with us, looking at the world as it is now. Planting the glass containers with wildflowers reflects that feeling. Memories are like the seeds. They sit within us and with the sun, the rain, all that is present now in our everyday world, they grow.
Memories are not relics – things left over from the past. They are a part of life now, growing and flowering, continuing the life of the loved one after they’ve passed away.
I have just finished reading two books; ‘Helgoland’ by Carlo Rovelli and, ‘Cracking the Walnut’ by Thich Nhat Hanh. It was in Helgoland, a book on Quantum Mechanics, that Rovelli mentioned the writings of an ancient, Indian Buddhist called Nāgārjuna which, he said, had had a profound effect on him. Having read some of Thich Nhat Hanh’s writing before, I found a commentary of his on the writing of Nāgārjuna which I subsequently bought.
As Rovelli writes:
“The central thesis of Nāgārjuna’s book is simply that there is nothing that exists in itself, independently from something else. The resonance with quantum mechanics is immediate. Obviously, Nāgārjuna knew nothing, and could not have imagined anything, about quanta – that is not the point. The point is that philosophers offer original ways of rethinking the world, and we can employ them if they turn out to be useful. The perspective offered by Nāgārjuna may perhaps make it a little easier to think about the quantum world.”
Signlessness is one of the three doors of liberation, along with with emptiness and aimlessness. I’d always found the idea of signlessness and emptiness rather sad, bordering on nihilistic, but reading ‘Cracking the Walnut’ I understood how I had been viewing these terms incorrectly. If we think of an object in and of itself as something which has ‘self-nature’ then we are not seeing that object (and thereby ourselves) as what they (and we) really are.
We are not things isolated from other things. We are things which manifest because of other things, which in turn manifest because of other things and so on. Objects (and again, ourselves) do not have a beginning and end as such (no-birth and no-death). But rather, when we die, we change. (This is not to say we reincarnate; we don’t die and become born again as another person or thing – that’s clearly nonsense.) ‘Cracking the Walnut’ goes deeply into the concepts of no-birth and no-death and ideas of dependent co-arising which is beyond the scope of both this blog and my current understanding, but the ideas of signlessess and emptiness are about this co-arising. We are not separate things (selfs) existing outside of other things, but changing manifestations of a connected world.
As Rovelli puts it:
“‘I’ is nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.”
We are ’empty’ and ‘signless’ because we are not things in ourselves independent of other things.
It’s interesting that when I read Rovelli’s book and then words of Nāgārjuna (as explained by Thich Nhat Hanh), I realised that in some respects, I had been thinking along these lines in the way I perceive historical objects or places in my work, particularly when it came to the process of Goethean Observations.
One can look at it as what it appears to be; a glass bottle dating to the 3rd century CE. That is its ‘sign’. But when we look more closely, we can see that it’s so much more than ‘just’ an ancient bottle. It’s sand, heated then blown into the shape of the bottle. It’s the place from whence the sand came; it’s the sea and the long process of rock weathered down into grains. It’s weather, wind and waves. It is the breath of a man who lived nearly two millennia ago. It’s one of many moments in his life. It is his learning, his skill, his thoughts and mood that day. It’s the place in which it was kept; the oil it contained and the woman who rubbed the oil rub on their skin. It’s the grave in which they were laid with the bottle; the dark, the silence, the chemical process that caused its iridescence.
It is then, empty. Not because there is nothing in the bottle (there is, of course, air), but because it has no self-nature. It is not a thing independent of other things. It is, as Rovelli put it above, ‘nothing other than the vast and interconnected set of phenomena that constitute it, each one dependent on something else.’ The sea, the sand, the breath, the thoughts, the hands, the skin, the grave and so on. And, just as it is for the bottle, so it is with us.
In a recent blog post ‘Genius‘, I mentioned David Whyte’s book, ‘Consolations’ in which he writes:
‘Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived: memories, hurts, triumphs and stories that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.‘
In turn he describes the genius of landscape as being:
‘Geniusis, by its original definition, something we already possess. Genius is best understood in its foundational and ancient sense, describing the specific underlying quality of a given place, as in the Latin genius loci, the spirit of a place; it describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream or a bridge across a river. It is the conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself. It is the breeze on our skin, the particular freshness and odours of the water, or of the mountain or the sky in a given, actual geographical realm. You could go to many other places in the world with a cliff edge, a stream, a bridge, but it would not have the particular spirit or characteristic, the ambiance or the climate of this particular meeting place.
A place then is also empty. It is a ‘vast and interconnected set of phenomena‘.
Suddenly, more quotes began to come to mind; quotes I have used many times before; all of them seeming to concur with this way of thinking. I mentioned some in another blog post, ‘Knowing We Are There.’
One is a quote from American author and essayist Barry Lopez:
“One must wait for the moment when the thing — the hill, the tarn, the lunette, the kiss tank, the caliche flat, the bajada – ceases to be a thing and becomes something that knows we are there.”
Another by Christopher Tilley. In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’, he writes:
“The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… The trees and mirror function as Other.”
Interestingly, I drew a diagram to represent my thinking when I read Lopez’s quote, and now, over a year later, having read Rovelli’s work and the work of Nāgārjuna, it makes perfect sense.
There is not a tree and a person. There is interconnectedness.
But this interconnectedness isn’t confined to the present moment. In a post called ‘Measuring The Past‘, I wrote:
“To climb the peaks of our imagination and see a time long before we were born is, at the same time, to descend into the depths of our own non-existence, wherein which dark expanse, our imagination lights the dark as it does the paths that lead away from our deaths. Imagination and memory come together to blur the boundaries of our beginnings and ends, as if, like a book, the unseen words that might have been written before and after are suddenly revealed in all their infinite number.”
When we think about emptiness and the idea that we are that ‘vast and interconnected set of phenomena‘, we begin to see that that network isn’t confined to what we perceive as ‘now’, but rather a network which stretches back in time.
Whenever I’m in an art gallery looking at a painting, for example, one of JMW Turner’s, I often think of all the people that have stood where I am standing looking at that same painting. The painting might be hanging in a different place, but over time, thousands would have stood exactly where I am standing in relation to that same painting.
The painting is a node in a network linked to everyone who has ever stood and looked at it. I in turn am in that same network, linked to each of those people.
We can interpret Barry Lopez’s and Christopher Tilley’s quotes as revealing how it is not simply about us, as subjects, observing other objects. They too ‘observe’ us. That is, they manifest at that moment, because of us, because we are looking and vice-versa.
Before reading any of the above books I thought in this way whenever i thought about objects in museums. It’s how I can build the worlds to which those objects belonged, because essentially, it is the same world. There is only one of these vast, interconnected networks; one in which everything that exists and has ever existed is connected.
Thinking in this way, the glass bottle is a node in that network. However, like the painting, and like everyone who has ever looked at the bottle or the painting, we mustn’t think of the objects as something static (something with a self-nature) that stand like chess pieces on a board. Everything is in flux. The bottle is not a thing which came into existence fully formed in the 3rd century CE, just as the man who made it wasn’t born fully formed years before. They are both manifestations of other phenomena. The bottle is sand, fire and breath. It’s the sea and the waves, the pull of the moon; all things with which, in my own life, I’m familiar. If I think of the sea, I think of my holidays as a child. The sea and the sand become nodes linking me with the bottle, just as a breath links me with the man.
This weekend, two years after her death, we scattered mum’s ashes into the sea at a few places that have played a part in our lives as a family; Chesil Beach, Swanage and Shell Bay.
Swanage was a favourite destination for several years. We often went there with my nan and grandad (pictured below), and as we stood on the beach on Sunday morning, my thoughts were with them as well as with mum and of all the times we spent together, there on the front.
I’ve always liked the headland behind us in this photograph. It’s one of those features which reminds me so much of the past. The photo below of teh headland was taken by me on a school trip in 1983.
The image below shows the same headland, along with my brother in his dinghy, around 1980.
We then moved on to Shell Bay, another beach which occupies a special place in our childhood memories. The image below is of my mum and my nan on Shell Bay, again around 1980.
The image below, also on Shell Bay, shows my mum in the sea having tumbled out of my brother’s dinghy, and my dad on the beach looking on.
It was almost on that very spot that we scattered more of mum’s ashes, and it was so poignant and quite poetic, to watch the waves coming in to almost gather her up and take her away.
The image below is one of the extended backdrops I’ve created using early 20th century studio portraits.
It has, I think, a connection with other recent work (below) which I’ve been making using graphite powder and oil, not only in its look, but also in the fact these images are both unreal landscapes. The image above is a portion of a studio backdrop which has been extended in Photoshop. That below was arrived at through manipulation of oil and graphite.
The third image below is a screenshot from a video I made called ‘The Gone Forest‘. Again there are similarities between this work and the images above, not only in its look, but also in what it shows.
It’s part of a landscape, one which once existed, but which is now a part of the past. In essence, this landscape is unreal in that it no longer exists; it isn’t a place we can go to except, as in the case of the images above, within our imaginations.
This fourth image is one of numerous shadows I have painted in woodlands using Chinese brushes and ink. It is like part of a lost language; a word created and written in the moment, describing that moment. In effect it represents what was ‘now’; the nowness of a lost moment.
Given the fact these look like Chinese/Japanese writing, I looked at using scrolls as a medium; incorporating both the painted image using oil and graphite as well as one of the characters painted in the woods.
I used to work quite a bit with oil and graphite and have, in the last few days, returned to this medium. So far the results have been very encouraging, despite being without a studio and so having to work in the garden.
As well as sticking with oil and graphite, I have also begun experimenting with adding pastel; just white in these cases, but again I like the results, particularly the way the pastel mixes with the oiled paper to create texture.
Following on from these, I then started looking at how this approach could be used with the recent scroll work I’ve been doing. Again, the result has been encouraging. The image below is very much a prototype, but I can see the potential.
I was recently gifted David Whyte’s beautiful book ‘Consolations’ by a friend in which, for the word genius, he writes:
‘Geniusis, by its original definition, something we already possess. Genius is best understood in its foundational and ancient sense, describing the specific underlying quality of a given place, as in the Latin genius loci, the spirit of a place; it describes a form of meeting, of air and land and trees, perhaps a hillside, a cliff edge, a flowing stream or a bridge across a river. It is the conversation of elements that makes a place incarnate, fully itself. It is the breeze on our skin, the particular freshness and odours of the water, or of the mountain or the sky in a given, actual geographical realm. You could go to many other places in the world with a cliff edge, a stream, a bridge, but it would not have the particular spirit or characteristic, the ambiance or the climate of this particular meeting place.
By virtue of its latitudes and longitudes, its prevailing winds, the aroma and colour of its vegetation, and the way a certain angle of the sun catches it in the cool early morning, it is a unique confluence, existing nowhere else on earth. If the genius of place is the meeting place of all the elements that make it up, then, in the same way, human genius lies in the geography of the body and its conversation with the world.
The human body constitutes a live geography, as does the spirit and the identity that abides within it.
To live one’s genius might be to dwell easily at the crossing point where all the elements of our life and our inheritance join and make a meeting. We might think of ourselves as each like a created geography, a confluence of inherited flows. Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived: memories, hurts, triumphs and stories that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.‘
I was really struck by this beautiful passage, not least in relation to my own work and, in particular, the shadow calligraphy I have been painting in woods. In particular, the passage regarding our ancestors really struck a chord. ‘Each one of us has a unique signature, inherited from our ancestors, our landscape, our language, and alongside it a half-hidden geology of our life as it has been lived: memories, hurts, triumphs and stories that have not yet been fully told. Each one of us is also a changing seasonal weather front, and what blows through us is made up not only of the gifts and heartbreaks of our own growing but also of our ancestors and the stories consciously and unconsciously passed to us about their lives.‘
The scrolls I am preparing to make in particular resonate with David Whyte’s words, being as they are pictures from my childhood, including my grandmother’s garden.
The characters of each scroll could be that unique signature, not only of the present moment but also of our ancestors. It combines, which I always love, the idea of now and the past. It is, as David Whyte says, our language; the text of our story and the story of our ancestors too.
I’ve been working on the theme of backdrops lately, using those in early 20th century portrait photographs such as that below.
To begin with, I remove the figure standing in front and then, using Photoshop, fill in the blank sections where the figure has been removed.
I have then extended the ‘canvas’ using Photoshop to generate missing information.
This fits in nicely with the idea of reimagining the past, where those who lived are obviously missing and what we are left with is a fragment from which we have to build an imagined view of the past to stand in front of.
I discovered a lovely Japanese word today which describes the very things I’ve been painting and filming in the woods. Komorebi 木漏れ日 (pronounced kō-mō-leh-bē), means, literally, ‘sunlight leaking through trees’ and describes the rays of light dappling through the leaves of trees and casting shadows on the forest floor.
The fact that I’ve been painting these shadows as characters which themselves resemble Japanese characters makes this word even more fitting.
In my work I have always been interested in the past and how we can empathise with those who lived long before us. I like to think about how we access the past and how we build a picture of the long lost world as best as we can. We might start with a fragment of pottery, a detail in an old photograph, a piece of writing, a coin – it could be anything; but we often start with a fragment.
With that fragment, we can then build outwards within our imaginations, trying to experience the world from which the fragment is estranged. We can try to hear it, feel our way around it, see movement as if it’s now and, as I’ve written before, one of the best ways to do that is through the natural landscape. After all, those who lived in the past would have known what it is to walk in the natural world.
We experience a wood in much the same way as someone a hundred, two hundred or five hundred years ago. Yes, their experience would be different in that they would know the natural world differently, but they would see the trees moving in the wind, see the sun make shadows on the ground, see the clouds, the sky, feel the rain and so on. We might not be able to experience a town or city as they would but we can better know a wood as they would have known it.
I have been doing a lot of work in woods lately, painting shadows cast by the leaves of the trees and I like the idea that trees themselves start off as seeds, and that from these small beginnings they grow, reaching out into the world around them. Seeds and trees are therefore a good metaphor for how I try and experience the past. Starting off small and growing up and out to feel my way into a world that no longer exists.
With the shadow work I’ve been doing, the shadows are like the traces of the past – the fragments. With them, we can try and imagine the trees which cast them, building out to picture the sun, the sky, the clouds, birds and all the other trees in the wood.
The wood therefore represents the past; a world in which we might find ourselves walking, experiencing it as best we can like those who lived before us. We start with a seed and planting it within our imaginations, we allow it to grow into another world.
Thinking about I might represent this pictorially, I’ve recently been looking at scrolls and have come up with some ideas of how I might create some work using the format, using the shadow calligraphy I’ve been creating in the woods.
Scrolls are very precise objects – almost ceremonial. They have a form that is both rolled and unrolled and this is something which interests me as regards my work on empathy and the past. The rolled scroll is like our beginning – our fragment, our seed or acorn. It’s like that first bit of knowledge which once untied we begin to unroll. And as we unroll, it’s as if the acorn is growing, reaching out as it begins to build the world of the past.
I love this idea of unrolling. In my Goethean observation, I noted the following in the final phase:
The solidity and tightness of the rolled state – the past hidden. The untying. The unrolling and revelation. The fragility and expanse of the unrolled state – the past revealed. Then as now. Delineated. Breathing. Defined. Sounds. The re-rolling and hiding. Quiet. Ceremony and calmness. Past and present as one.
I can add to that – growing. The scroll is the tree rising up and putting out its branches while putting down its roots into the ground. I like the idea that as the scroll unrolls, it somehow keeps expanding.
One of the things I’ve been looking at is how I can use the scroll’s background. Rather than just using a piece of material, can I use that material as a canvas somehow?
Quite a while ago I was looking at the backdrops used in studio portraits of World War I soldiers (see ‘Backdrops‘, . ‘ WWI Backdrops‘, ‘Backdrops (Odilon Redon)‘, ‘The Past in Pastoral‘) and so I thought that I could use these backdrops as a background for a scroll. The image below is something I did several years ago where I isolated the backdrop in the postcard.
The following is how it might work as a scroll, complete with a character painted in the woods.
The studio backdrop is something in front of which people would have stood to have their picture taken. Those people have long gone and we – or whoever is looking at the scroll – are standing in their place. The painted character is that which I painted in a real wood and represents a moment – ‘now’. When I imagine a past event, I am trying to imagine someone who lived at the time. In a sense, our imaginations are like a theatre where we assemble this moment, complete with backdrop, props, actors and maybe even a script. The idea of the backdrop works very nicely with this.
I’ve been looking at ways of developing work with scrolls and in particular, how to utilise the background of the scroll to compliment the character (the main focus of the artwork).
It was whilst looking through some old family photographs that I found one of my grandparents, taken at Shotover in 1952. This is the wood where I have been spending time recently, painting the characters for use in the scrolls.
Taking the photograph of my grandparents, I had the idea of using that as the background image, with two of the characters painted in the woods (see image above) positioned on top. The result was, for me, unexpectedly moving.
I’ve always been interested in the idea of the ‘nowness’ of a past event, and how, when we look, for example, at a photograph from the distant past, we can find details that help articulate that sense of now. For me, in the photograph of my grandparents, it’s the shadows at the top of the tree trunk. They point to the space beyond the edges of the photo – the sun, the sky, the canopy of the trees etc. and that sense of ‘now’ is further articulated by the characters painted on top, after all, they are themselves tracings of shadows painted at a particular moment in time.
There are many different interpretations of the Geothean (a method of observing as described by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749 – 1832)) method, but the one I prefer to use is that described by Iris Brook in her paper, “Goethean Science as a Way to Read Landscape,” which is, basically, as follows:
Now the observer attempt to approach the object from a clearer, more objective standpoint.. This stage was called by Goethe, exact sense perception and is characterised by a detailed observation of all the ‘bare facts’ of the phenomenon that are available to our ordinary senses. It is an attempt to see what is present with as little personal judgement and evaluation as possible.
An example of trying to let the facts speak for themselves from Goethe’s own work is his extraordinarily detailed observations of colour phenomena. Rather than draw hypotheses or work from a theory his investigations involve colour as experienced by himself, as used by artists, as created by dyers, as used symbolically, as seen in animals and plants and so on.
For the student attempting to carry out this stage with their own phenomenon, drawing can be a useful tool, because in drawing our attention is brought to previously unnoticed detail or patterns.
Another tool used is to ignore some knowledge, for example the names of things… Attempting to find another word to describe the part you are indicating to someone else often leads to a looking again.”
2. Exact Sensorial Fantasy [imagination]
“The second stage of looking at the phenomenon is what Goethe called ‘exact sensorial fantasy’ (Exact sinnliche Phantasie). An aspect of this activity is to perceive the time-life of the phenomenon, that is to see the phenomenon in time. This means no longer seeing the thing in an objective frozen present as prompted by the first stage, but as a thing with history. That history can be drawn from the phenomenon with the use of an imaginative faculty that cultivates temporal and physical relationships…
The shift between the two modes of seeing is a small one, but the world does look very different when seen in a state of flux.
In this phase the imagination can be used as a tool to vary what is seen and attempt to imagine it otherwise. The obvious link to the phenomenology here is with the use of free imaginative variation. First suggested by Husserl, this is a means of deriving the essence of a phenomenon by pushing the eidos of the thing beyond what can be imagined. The second stage could be seen as a training of the imaginative faculty in two directions: firstly to free up the imagination and then to constrain it within the realms of what is possible for the phenomenon being studied.”
3. Seeing in Beholding [Inspiration]
The first two stages of Goethean method could be characterised as an engagement with the phenomena, first by seeing its outer static appearance objectively and then by experiencing something of its inner processes. In the third stage one attempts to still active perception to allow the thing to express itself through the observer. We attempt to step outside of what has gone before and make space for the thing to articulate in its own way.
The detailed information is somehow transcended, but just as exact sensorial fantasy requires exact sense perception to anchor its dream-like activity, seeing in beholding needs the content and the preparation of the other two stages if the researcher is to articulate the thing. Goethe terms the changes necessary to our everyday consciousness as the development of ‘new organs of perception’.
To experience the being of a phenomenon requires a human gesture of ‘self-disspation’. This effort is a holding back of our own activity – a form of receptive attentiveness that offers the phenomenon a chance to express its own gesture.”
4. Being One with the Object [Intuition]
“The first three stages of the Goethean method involve different activities and ways of thinking and these could be characterised as first using perception to see the form, second using imagination to perceive its mutability, and, third, inviting inspiration to reveal the gesture. The fourth stage uses intuition both to combine and go beyond the previous stages.
Being one with the object in this fourth stage allows the human ability to conceptualise to serve the thing: we lend it this human capacity. When the phenomenon being explored does not have the ability to think, it is the most participatory part of Goethean observation.
Our ability to think creatively and to initiate future action is the faculty being used here and thus the dangers of abstract creation not tied to the phenomenon are great.
Being one with the object allows an appreciation of the content or meaning of the form as well as the form itself… At this stage of the process of Goethean observation it is acknowledged that the phenomenon is at its least independent of human reason.”
1
The object is long, perhaps two feet in length. It is off-white in colour and comprises a rod around which a white material is wrapped, bound with a pale gold braid. The object feels nice to hold; it has a nice weight with a texture that is both smooth and rough to the touch. The gold braid is attached to a wooden, half-moon shaped rod of wood around which the top of the scroll is fixed. The braid is wrapped around the circumference of the scroll and as I unwind it, the scroll seems almost to relax. Once unfastened, I begin to unroll the scroll from the top and at once I’m presented with the dark turquoise material patterned with small flowers in gold. It’s a little difficult in the artificial light to be sure of the exact colours. This section of material extends about 18 inches as I continue to unroll it, whereupon it meets another section of material which, centred on the turquoise backing, extends 3/4 of the width of the scroll. It is just over an inch high and again comprises a pattern of flowers, again in gold, but with a cream coloured background.
As I continue to unroll the scroll I see that this small section of material sits at the top of a section of paper on which the characters of the scroll are painted. The first character extends about 12 inches, comprising four distinct sections of brush work. Obviously I can’t read what it says, and as I unroll the scroll down further, smaller characters appear on the left next to a slightly larger one. Underneath these three smaller characters is a red, printed icon. Underneath the larger character beside these three small characters are two more larger ones. As I continue to unroll the scroll, the paper section ends with another small strip of material matching the one at the top but narrower. The dark turquoise material extends beneath this another 10 inches and as I continue to unroll I reach the bottom where the scroll is wrapped around the heavier, ivory coloured rod. There’s a lovely, defined feel to this action, where the end is reached.
Looking at the characters, I can see that they obviously have meaning, that they are painted with an obvious purpose. I can see where the ink is heavier and where it has bled into the paper and also where the brush is dryer. Here I notice the ink is streaked. Even though I cannot read what it says, I can read the gesture of the calligrapher as he or she moves down the paper. As I look at the characters, I can see that along with the gold flowers patterning the dark background there are also flowers in a darker, turquoise colour. The gold of the two strips at the top and the bottom of the paper part of the scroll match the hanging braid at the top of the scroll which in turn picks out the gold flowers of the background giving the whole scroll a sense of unity. Overall the scroll is just over 1m 60cm in length and just over 45cm wide
2
The scroll obviously comprises different parts; the backing material and strips of fabric, the wooden rod at the top, the plastic one at the bottom, the gold braid for tying and hanging and of course the paper section with on which the characters have been written. I can imagine the mind of the calligrapher, how as they wrote these characters, they might have sounded the words in their head. I can almost hear the sound of their thinking along with that of the brush being dipped in the ink and then scraped across the paper. To someone who doesn’t read that language, these words are mute, but because of that I can almost hear their sound in the mind of the calligrapher, perhaps because mine is quiet. I read the scroll by following the gestures. The words become a language of the moment in which they were made.
The sound of the brush on the paper is different where the density of the ink is different. I can almost hear the fullness of the brush touching the surface of the paper and as the ink is released from the brush into the paper and as the brush loses the ink I can hear the sound of the brush change from a slide to scrape, like rolling waves, falling to scrape on the shingle of the beach. I can also read the pauses between the characters where the calligrapher loads the brush once more with ink to make the second character. Here , the sounds of the place in which the words were painted find a way in. Again, there is the same change from the full sound of the loaded brush to the scrape of the ink as it’s lost.
The parts where the brush is dry, where I can hear it scrape across the paper, is where I can see the gesture of the artist most clearly.
Once made the paper would be cut to size and mounted on the material. Was the material chosen specifically for this text? Does it add to the meaning? That I can’t say, but I like the contrast between the precision of the background (the straight edges of the material) and the fluidity of the brush work. Where I can hear the sound of the brush work I can almost hear the sound of the scissors cutting the straight edges of the material, the strips and the paper.
As I roll the scroll back up, it’s as if the scroll is rolling itself, as if it has spoken long enough and needs to rest again. As I roll, I’m aware of the change where the dark material and the text changes to the off-white reverse of the backing material. This plain, off-white material is silent, unlike its interior, where the pattern and the text have spoken. I can just see the text through the material as I roll it, whispering as it’s gradually rolled away.
Did the scroll hang anywhere or was it always rolled up? Was it gift for someone? Did the text have any significant meaning for whoever gave it or received it?
Having rolled the scroll up its full length, it is once more the coiled scroll. I pick it up and I’m aware of the difference between the rolled scroll (quiet, portable, weighted) and the unrolled scroll (which speaks in the sounds both of it making and its meaning) which is light and different to hold.
There are then two very different states of the scroll and as I coil the braid around it, I feel as if I’m in control, whereas when it’s unrolled, I tread around it very carefully. In its unrolled state it is fragile but large, in contrast to its rolled state.
Having rolled the scroll up and tied the braid, it’s as if I am silencing the scroll for a while, knowing that it will speak again. It certainly feels like it has a life of its own and is waiting to be awakened.
3
Rolled up it’s silent, but is thinking – it has something to say; it’s as if the actions and the thoughts of the calligrapher are contained within; as if the moment of its making is waiting to be sounded with its unwinding. As I loosen the braids the scroll breathes. There is a sense of ceremony, waiting for that moment to be revealed in this moment, as if the moment contained within will become one with the moment in which we, ourselves, are contained.
As I unroll the scroll, it’s as if the scroll is taking a breath, as if the pattern is an intake of breath ready to speak that which is on the paper.
As I continue to unroll, it begins to speak. The painted brushstrokes are words of a language, not only in the sense of one spoken by a particular group of people, but the language of the moment in which it was made, the ambient sounds, the brush work on the paper.
The backing is the breath.
As it remains in its unrolled state, it breathes. It is a thing all of its own. That moment in time delineated by the sound by the fluid brushstrokes and the precision of the material in which it is framed. As long as it’s open, unrolled, the moment of its making plays in the present.
4
The solidity and tightness of the rolled state – the past hidden. The untying. The unrolling and revelation. The fragility and expanse of the unrolled state – the past revealed. Then as now. Delineated. Breathing. Defined. Sounds. The re-rolling and hiding. Quiet. Ceremony and calmness. Past and present as one.
I like it when I make mistakes, or, as in the case of this painting, it wasn’t going the way I thought it would. I’d stuck some inked leaves on the canvas as per a recent painting with the aim of introducing some colour, but having done so, the canvas looked a mess and wasn’t doing what I wanted it to do. So, I took my palette knife and scraped it across the surface of the canvas, removing all the leaves and some of the pain and what was left I really liked.
The leaves reminded me of fossilised feathers which is in keeping with the general theme of my work. The colours too reminded me of classical greek ceramics as in the image below.
As with some other recent paintings, I decided to add some flashes of green to the leaves which also worked really well.
A music work in progress the title of which comes from Mary Oliver:
“What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest. The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.”
After completing a recent painting (see below), I wondered whether to add colour as per the initial idea, but I liked the painting as it was and was concerned about spoiling it. The consensus among friends was to leave it as it was – which I did.
Instead, I decided to create some much small works to see how the addition of colour would work and the following small canvases were the result. I do like the addition of colour as it reflects the idea of the mind trying to animate a relic of the past in order to imagine the object as it was in a time long since passed. Looking at the blackened leaves (representing the shadows of the leaves acquiring form) becoming green with the sky behind, I think this process is well articulated. I will now work these up to larger canvases.
I’m going to be producing some scrolls using the shadow calligraphy I’ve created in the woods and having had a scroll made recently, I’ve been looking at how to take this further, using the whole scroll as an artwork, rather than acting simply as a framing device for the painted character.
To help with this I’ve been looking at buying a scroll and the image below shows three that I found for sale on eBay.
I like the idea of the backing for the painted ‘characters’ incorporating this idea of the fragment which would then extended into the body of the scroll support. This would itself support the idea behind the characters; that they are all that remains of a moment in the woods which we can interpret as a ‘word’, thereby returning, in our minds, to that lost moment in time. The pattern of the fragment in the support might be foliage which which would then be extended across entire support, echoing the idea of the moment being extended in our mind’s eye.
I think this idea would work well both with paper and fabric, so I shall be busy trying these out soon.
