Nicholas Hedges

Art, Writing and Research

Emptiness

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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.

For example, a Roman bottle I bought.

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:

‘Genius is, 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.

Now In The Past Of An Unreal Place

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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.

Backdrops

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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.

Scroll Work

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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.

Scrolls

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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.

Looking at the material used in these, I was reminded of some work I did a while back using fragments of fabric which I then extended onto paper.

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.

As Yet Untitled

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I’ve started a new painting on an 80cm square canvas which takes the concept of shadows cast by trees in the woods by using actual leaves. These are first dipped in black ink to simulate the black ink brushstrokes of my other paintings – for example those I painted in situ at Shotover, then placed on the canvas painted with white oil paint.

I’m not sure where this will lead, but the idea behind the painting is that of re-imagining the past. Taking the idea of the shadow paintings, the shadows are then ‘re-imagined’ as actual leaves, still with the idea of simulating the same calligraphic style. I will now introduce colour into the work as the next phase of the re-imagining process is to imagine the actual leaves, trees and sky etc. How that will look… I don’t know as yet. One artist who does keep popping into my mind however is Cy Twombly.

Holes

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Whilst painting in the woods at the weekend, I also used my shadows notebook, painting some of the shadows which invariably meant the pages stuck together as the ink dried.

I like the effect however and in particular the holes left by the ripping paper as I peeled the pages apart. They called to mind the exhibition I went to see recently at The Courtauld Gallery in London, featuring the charcoal portraits of Frank Auerbach.

These drawings were carried out over long periods of times, during which they were worked and reworked, causing the paper to rip which the artist would then mend. I loved seeing the rips and the mendings and wonder if I could do the same with my own shadow pieces, building up, in the process, a palimpsest of moments.

Walking Meditation 2

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Following on from my first walking meditation, I did another, again around Blenheim Park, the list from which is below.

Pheasants among the stubble
Red kit flies above them and calls above the trees
Lichen pocked trees
Mass covered stump
Vivid moss on the roots of a tree among the dead leaves of last year’s summer
Water trickling down the tarmac path
Steady patter of rain
A distant aeroplane
Birds calling high in the trees
Ducks rooting among the leaves and drinking the water as it runs down the hill
Vague tyre tracks picked out by water
Dogs barking in the distance
Sheep wool on the electric fence
Dozens of mole hills
The distant baa of a sheep
Patches of brighter sky among the otherwise grey
Two children cycle past me
The heavy breath of a jogger as she passes by
‘Private Property’
The sun getting brighter

The sky walks in the puddles beside me
The whole world drips around me
Cascades of branches
The call of a pheasant
Voices behind me
An aeroplane flies above, invisible in the clouds
An empty seat by the daffodils
‘This was her favourite walk’
Beautiful spots of lichen on the branches of a tree
Ripples from the rain upon the lake
The distant toot of the miniature train
A view of the palace between the trees
A family walk towards me
A hole in the moss
Dead branches writhe like Medusa’s head
So many shades of green on the ancient trees
The sun is quiet above the jagged tree
Fringes of stubborn leaves
The sweeping old wall
A breeze wraps itself around my face

Knowing We Are There

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I was reading ‘Landmarks’ by Robert McFarlane last night and was struck by 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.”

This wonderful quote reminds me of many others I have used extensively in my work, some of which you can read in the blog below.

Arrival/Departure

In particular that by Christopher Tilley who, in his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’, 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.”

That moment when a thing, like a tree, functions as ‘other’ is, I think, the same as the moment when, as Lopez puts it, the thing knows we are there. There is a connection, between us and the thing, which is much more than us simply seeing it. It is, in Goethean Observation, akin to the stage of ‘Seeing in Beholding’, characterised by the human gesture of ‘self-disspation’; the effort of holding back of our own activity – a form of receptive attentiveness that offers the phenomenon (the thing) a chance to express its own gesture.”

This is a sketch I made in my notebook when I read Lopez’s quote.

Looking at this image also reminds me of the Buddhist concept of interbeing, the deep interconnection we have with everything else around us, for example, the tree. The same can be true of things which existed centuries ago. Again I have used this example several times – a painting by Yu Jian entitled Mountain Village in Clearing Mist and a piece I wrote about it for a book.

Clearing in the mist by Yu Jian

“This seemingly rapid work transported me to a time long gone. It revealed – much as with the Japanese haiku of Basho – an ancient and vanished moment, not so much through what it showed but how it was depicted. It was almost as if I could see the landscape before the painter himself. I could see the work as a whole (the landscape as a whole), but then, whilst picking through the gestures of the artist, evident enough in the brushstrokes, I could see the landscape as it was revealed. Yu Jian’s painting was not a painting of what was experienced, but rather the experiencing of what was experienced. It was almost as if the painting had become a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It wasn’t the mountain that was made visible on the paper, but the artist himself – his presence at that moment. 800 years after his death, and Yu Jian was as good as sitting next to me. Or to put it another way, 800 years before I was born, I was as good as sitting next to him.“

Again we have the idea of the ‘thing’, in this case the mountain, seeing the artist, but in this instance, this is a moment from 800 years ago. We are not simply seeing the painting by Yu Jian, we are experiencing the moment when the painting ‘knows’ we are there and by proxy, experiencing the moment it was made.

A similar thing happened last week when I went to London and saw the sketches of JMW Turner at Tate Britain. I had walked around the gallery for a while ‘seeing’ the paintings, but on coming across these sketches, it was as if in Lopez’s words, the paintings also saw me.

It was like with the diagram in my notebook, where seeing becomes beholding and the arch rendered quickly with a few quick strokes, becomes something I can walk through.

Reimagining The Past

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This post follows on from one I wrote previously on ‘Rinsho’. Below are two painting I made in woods in my notebook.

With the art of Rinsho, the idea is to practice your calligraphy by copying, from books, that of the old masters. I like to think of the paintings made in the field, so to speak, as like those versions made by old masters and that copying them is like trying to reimagine a past event, where the body is trying to echo, through the gesture of painting, that of the original painter sitting in the woods; trying to imagine the trees, the sky, the sounds etc.

These are some of the copies I made of the characters above.

Walking Meditation 1

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Blenheim Palace Park

I discovered this walk with my children at the weekend and so I returned today to do another walk, incorporating within that a walking meditation.

The idea of a walking meditation is to try and remain fully in the present, taking in everything that you see while not letting your mind wander. When you’re dealing with a difficult issue in your life and it’s one which seems to stop you thinking of anything else, then it’s a good way to let your mind breathe. It’s not a quick fix of course, but bit by bit, it should help reset your thoughts; especially if they are prone to going round and round a question that’s quite impossible to answer.

The list below comprises the things I noticed and chose to write down. There’s no particular reason why I chose these particular observations.

Walking meditation observations made at Blenheim Palace Park

Strong winds
Blue sky peppered with clouds
Ripples on the surface of the lake
The monument standing above the trees
Bright sun
Old dog
Dimpled mud at the edge of the grass
My shadow on the tarmac
The drone of a plane
Leaves blowing across the grass
Geese honking
A bird blows above like litter
Belly fulls of grey in the sky
Lichen on the old bridge
An old pollarded tree
Crows in the trees
A duck quacks
The trees talk
The sun reflected on the water
A bird runs from the bank
The raised roots on the path
Water gushing from a drain
Last year’s leaves still clinging on
Reeds like spears at the lake’s edge
The sun comes out and warms my face
Bright on the lake
The ground rises
Moss covered stump
Old leaves crunch beneath my feet
Beautiful birds then someone shouts up ahead
The sun returns
Shadows on the ground stretch to meet it
Suddenly warm as the wind drops
Gun shot, birds on the lake take flight
Mosquitoes in the sunlight like dust motes
Sun twinkling on the lake’s surface
Tentacled roots of a tree
Squelching underfoot
A helicopter flies past
A small waterfall gabbles as it flows
Graffiti covered tree
Brambles scribble themselves across the water’s edge
Reeds lie like logged trees in the water

Paw prints in the mud
The sky in a puddle
Beautiful colour water
Waves on the lake like a small sea
Two moorhens
Black fungus on a fallen log
A broken fence
A fallen tree on the opposite bank
The surface of the water, calm amongst the reeds, rippled without
A tree stands waiting to embrace
Two ducks with their heads in the water
Immense roots of a tree like the foot of a dinosaur
So quiet
Flies on the sheep dung
A feather in the grass
The winds picks up and blows away the siren
A small branch falls from a tree
A leaf skits across the tarmac
A pheasant runs away
I squint against the sun
Felled logs
Beautiful colours in a gap in a tree
A seat carved from an upended tree
Daffodils signalling Spring is on the way
Tyre tracks on the grass
Otherwordly trees
A fountain splashes water
Trees grow like an excess of time
Trees like creatures from the deep
The rings of an old stump
The sound of a power tool
Old leaves shiver on their branches
Slow rippled wood of the ancient oaks
A lost glove
An old wall follows the slopes
A crow flies with something in its beak
Patch of tarmac like a fossilised footprint
Ducks laugh ad planes drone
My shadow stretches before me
The call of a red kite
Jackdaws take flight

Mindful Walking I

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One of the ways in which I have helped myself during recent low points has been the practice of mindful walking, where instead of walking as the mind spins around thinking on a problem, you try and focus on what you’re experiencing now, in the present. This stops the mind racing and connects you with the moment, allowing any despair and anxiety to take a back seat for a while.

Several years ago, when I was looking at ways of connecting with the ‘nowness’ of the past, I used walking as a method, making lists of things I was experiencing in the moment such as that below.

‘The splash of car tyres on the wet road’ – I can hear the sound in my mind as I read the text; the moment from over 15 years ago suddenly very present.

Reading these lines is a great way of connecting to the past, just as the act of making the lists – of mindful walking – is a great way to reconnect to the present, and to yourself. And by connecting with yourself, to be more embodied, allows you to better empathise with those in the past.

The video below, which I made as part of a Residency in Australia, was filmed in an old lockup. At the time it was meant to represent the idea of recalled everyday moments being a means of reaching from the present in order to reconnect with the past (the present being me, walking around the confines of the cell). Watching it now, I see how it could be interpreted differently, where walking and being mindful of the present, can help one to escape the prison of one’s suffering.

Painting

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I’ve started painting again and have begun my journey using water-based oils which I must say are rather good. The question has been, at the start of this journey – what to paint?

Having worked on my tree shadow paintings using inks, I decided to do the same with the oils, projecting the video onto a canvas and tracing the shadows in black paint.

Having completed a few of these, I knew I wanted to look at the spaces between the shadows, as if to imagine the world in which the shadows were filmed – a world of colour (just like the world of black and white photographs and films). It’s been a while since I painted, so I was also interested in feeling my way with the paints again and getting back into painting onto canvas.

As well as painting again I’ve been reading about painting too, in particular about an artist I’ve admired for a while; Ivon Hitchens. I’ve been looking also at Howard Hodgkin and his attempts to paint memories, something which I’ve been interested in trying myself (see below).

So over the last week or so I’ve continued exploring the paint as a medium and the surface of the canvas, pushing the image and seeing where it leads which has been a very liberating experience.

As well as these, I attempted tis evening to start painting memories. The first attempt was whilst listening to my late mum singing at St. Martin’s in the Fields in London in 1984. I’d expected to find myself painting a version of that night and the interior of the church, but found myself instead painting the garden of my childhood home as it was in my head – at dusk on a summer’s night.

Now I’m not saying in anyway these are (even though they are not finished) successful images, but I just found it interesting to see what came out on the canvas. I did the same with a specific memory, again set in a garden, but this time that of my Nan and Grandad’s house when my brother and I were staying there. One summer’s night we couldn’t sleep, so my Nan came to our room and took us out in the garden to watch the storm. It’s one of my most vivid memories and again it was interesting to see what turned up on the canvas.

Rinsho

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After my last post I watched a video by calligrapher Tomoko Kawao in which she mentions the practice of Rinsho, where the calligrapher copies the work of ancient masters in order to enhance their own skills.

From what I have gleaned, Rinsho is not about crating the exact copy of given masterpiece but rather, it’s about the energy, spirit, dynamics, writing style, proportions, line characteristics, and so on. Rinsho is about copying the emotions, the mental state, the attitude, and the mood, that a given masterpiece comprises (see: http://www.ryuurui.com/blog/the-proper-way-to-study-chinese-japanese-calligraphy).

This interests me as regards the works I have made recently, such as the image below:

Having made this original image (and many others like it) at a particular moment in time, I’d been wondering whether I could do more with it. The practice of Rinsho gave me the answer.

Much of my work is about reimagining a past moment by trying to see that moment as it was when it was ‘now’. We can never know of course what a past moment was really like, but by understanding what makes the present moment for us ‘present’ we can use that knowledge to find our way back in time, at least just a little.

Copying the images I made – in the style of a calligrapher copying the work of an ancient master – seems to me to reflect this idea. As it says above, it’s not abut making a faithful copy (we can never go back in time) but using our experience to see something of the ‘energy, spirit, dynamics, writing style, proportions, line characteristics, and so on’. It’s about ‘copying’ the emotions, the mental state, the attitude, and the mood.

I have therefore started to use these original sketches as texts and to copy them, not to produce an exact copy, but to get a sense of that moment when they were first made.

Shadow Calligraphy

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On Saturday, whilst at Shotover with the kids, I took some time – whilst they were climbing trees – to paint some of the shadows cast by the trees. I started working with shadows like these back in 2017 and have recently started exploring this idea again. Below are some examples from my sketchbook made on Saturday.

The Gone Forest

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Two years ago I shot some video at Shotover Country Park (see ‘Writing Shadows’) and finally, this weekend, I had the chance to edit the clips together to make a piece entitled ‘The Gone Forest’. The piece is something viewers can dip in and out of rather than sit through from beginning to end, and while it is a finished piece, there are lots of other ways I want to explore using these clips.

For now, here is the video:

Tokens and Shadows

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A while ago I made some sketches at Shotover Wood, tracing shadows with ink.

Thinking back to these and with regards the work I’m currently making, I looked again at these sketches and applied the idea of the quick, gestural painting to the patterns. The shadow paintings, like the related video work, were themselves about absence, of time passing, something being there (the woods at a specific time) and now being absent (revealed only through their shadows). This seemed to chime with the idea of the fabric tokens as also being about absence.

Writing Shadows

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On Tuesday I made my way to Shotover to work on a piece I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. The piece, about absent-presence, will, eventually, comprise videos of shadows in a wood, a few stills from which can be seen below.

But why woods?

Woods

Since I was a child, the image of the forest or wood has been an important one. From when I was 7 or 8, the past seemed like another place – a ‘foreign county’ – rather than another ‘dimension’ of the place in which I lived, and that place, when imagined, was always thickly forested. I’m not sure why exactly, but I can remember being enthralled by the oft quoted ‘fact’ that in the past, a squirrel could travel the length of England without touching the ground. (See: Postcard from Corfe Castle 1978)

As an older child in the 1980s, when the tension of the cold war was still a part of everyday life, the thickly wooded past became a place of retreat, a world to which I could escape the threat of nuclear war. It was also around this time I started reading role-playing books (like Fighting Fantasy) whilst developing an interest in magic and adventure (if not quite Dungeons and Dragons). I began to create maps of imagined lands which, again, were often thickly wooded. These too were places to which I could escape and were in many ways a conflation of the past and my imagination. (See: Maps for Escaping)

Of course, as I became an adult, my imagined landscape changed. The past was no longer a place, in parts indistinguishable from worlds of monsters and magic, but indeed a different dimension of the place in which I lived. And yet, despite this difference, the symbol of the forest/wood remained a backdrop to my work (See: A Backdrop to Eternity). To imagine the past was, for me, to imagine a wood, vast and untouched, and in some respects, it would be true to say that my interest in the Environment developed as much as a means of preserving and accessing the past as safeguarding the future. The fact that many of these forests have vanished or been so depleted means their absence in the present – a stark difference between now and then – has become a metaphor for absence itself.

Even when I have sought to connect with those in the past, who lived through the most horrific events, the image of the wood returns as a means of reaching out to them.

A quote to which I’ve often referred from Paul Fussell:

…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.

(See: Proposing Moments of Patsoral

I discovered this quote whilst making work about World War I and it tied in with what I had been thinking, how it was impossible (and indeed unethical) to make work about these events directly (i.e. as though one were there), but possible to make work about the difference between now and then – about the attempt to empathise with people in the past, especially those who have lived through such traumatic events.

(See: Somewhere Between Writing and Trees)

The Woods, Breathing

This brings me onto Adam Czerniakow, another figure I have discussed extensively in relation to my work. (See: The Woods, Breathing)

As I wrote in that blog: For almost three years, Adam Czerniakow was ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto. One of the inspirations for this work is a line taken from his diary, which he kept whilst living in Warsaw in occupied Poland from 1939 to his death in 1942. On September 14th 1941 he wrote:

In Otwock. The air, the woods, breathing.

On occasion, Czerniakow was allowed to leave the ghetto to visit the Jewish Sanatorium at Otwock just outside Warsaw. It was one place he could find some respite from the horror and torment he endured in the ghetto.

For Czerniakow, the woods were a place in which he could escape the horrors of life under Nazi occupation. He would also seek escape in books, and one night, on January 19th 1940, he  wrote in his dairy:

…During the night I read a novel, ‘Pilgrims of the Wild’ – Grey Owl… The forest, little wild animals – a veritable Eden.

Paul Fussell’s quote is worth repeating here:

…if the opposite of war is peace, the opposite of experiencing moments of war is proposing moments of pastoral.

This brings me back to what I wrote earlier, how it’s impossible for me to make work about the experience of war.

What I can do however is allude to war through its opposite – to borrow from Fussell – in “proposing of moments of pastoral”. This opposition between war and pastoral is there in the line about Otwock. It’s there too in Czerniakow’s reading of Grey Owl’s book set in the wilds of Canada. The question is, how can proposing moments of pastoral, enable us to bridge the divide between now and then, between those who suffered the horrors of Wold War I and the Holocaust and those of us who read about them?

In many respects, we can empathise with them not as victims but as people who lived lives before the war or whatever trauma they were faced with.

Shadow Writing

Before I get onto the ‘shadow paintings’ I made at Shotover, I want to remind myself about a blog I wrote on Chinese painting (See: Chinese Landscape Painting)

It contains a quote I have come back to time and time again from Christopher Tilley:

The painter sees the trees and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects… The trees ‘see’ the painter in a manner comparable to how a 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 for him something that would otherwise remain invisible – his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence… the trees and mirror function as other.

And my final paragraph discussing the work of Yu Jian:

Like the trees, the mountains [Yu Jian painted] share that agency; they too ‘see’ the painter’ and it’s almost as if the painting becomes a painting, not of Yu Jian looking at the mountains, but of the mountain ‘seeing’ Yu Jian. It’s not the mountain that is made visible on the paper, but the artist’s outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence.

I wanted these paintings to be images, not of shadows per se, but of a moment in time. They are as much about the rapidly painted strokes delineating that moment as the shadows they are tracing. I also like the way they resemble Chinese or Japanese calligraphy and could almost be a language whose meaning is lost; the language of a moment that has been lost.

 

© Nicholas Hedges 2024