A Glossary of Stitches (tethering and wrapping)

My temporary studio in the dining room. My main studio is too damp and cold at the moment.

These drawings I have made in the last two weeks, mainly in the temporary studio. I had a dip in my work after Christmas and found it really hard to reconnect with the work but this last week has been more fruitful thanks in part to a visit to my friends in Brecon who made some pertinent comments about my drawings which helped me find a way forward. This all coincided with the devastating news that the Conservative Government are revisiting the idea of a new airport on land very close to where Estuary Dialogues is partly situated. (please see earlier blog for more details about this).

I have begun to add some embroidered sections to the drawings as a new layer of surface and texture. In preparation for this I looked at a book on embroidery with a glossary of stitches. I chose a very simple cross stitch in the shape of an 'x'. I have always loved this symbol, since I first discovered the work of Tapies. I did not want to get too fixated on it though so I have also tried to do abstract marks by piercing holes randomly in the paper and letting the thread move about these piercings without any preconceived ideas.

Since beginning these new stitched marks, I have been thinking about using rope in some way to make a drawing on a large scale. Living on a boat for eight years, I became fascinated with old canvases, sail cloths and ropes. I am attracted to the tactile nature of these materials and their investment in the functional nature of their purpose. Ropes are so integral to boats, to tethering and wrapping, that I find them to be almost sacred objects.
A recent visit to Tate Britain to see a retrospective of the work of Barry Flanagan began a reintroduction to this humble material.
To quote from the accompanying leaflet on Barry Flanagan; Early Works 1965 -82

Flanagan continued to challenge traditional ideas about sculpture, employing unexpected materials such as hessian and rope. ...... He explored his own response to materials, which he considered the fundamental constituent of sculpture. A length of rope marking space within or between rooms could also be understood as a drawn line.

Airport proposal is devastating

My heart sank when I heard of the proposal for a new airport to serve London in North Kent which Boris Johnson the Mayor of London has persuaded the Conservative Government to consider. The airport would be built on the Isle of Grain which used to house a power station (now decommissioned), runways extending into the estuary.
About two years ago I spent the most magical day in Grain, on that very land which could, if not saved, be forever sunk under swathes of concrete. I took the road from Strood out of the bustling Medway towns that sit one on top of each other with no apparent seams separating them, to the relative isolation of Grain. The further I travelled, the more desolate the landscape became and the more fascinating. Life existed in small pockets of habitiation, a small convenience store, the lifeblood of an otherwise deserted place. Perfect for exploration. I parked the car next to the estuary beaches, unloaded my cameras and tripod and walked along the shore line. The sun was shining and the light was crystal clear. I looked across the estuary and clearly distinguishable was the pier of Southend in Essex. The mud was a physical barrier between Kent and Essex, a dinner table for the numerous species of wetland birds.
I made my way around the coastline, in the direction of the power station and I found archaeological treasures like the second world war pill box with bricks saturated in graffiti. A strange tableaux occurred when I looked through a wire fence obscured with inhospitable hedgerow plants to see a buffalo grazing in front of the power station. I crossed a concrete inlet, an old water pumping station for the power station. Its deep twin troughs sucked in the tidal waters with a sign strictly forbidding any person to swim in these potential watery graves. My footsteps followed the curved shore around to face the Isle of Sheppey. I loved the fact that as I sat there, I was on the edge of the land. Before me sat an island in which nestled the mouth of the Medway. As I looked across to Sheppey, in the centre of the estuary lay an old fort, still intact. I wanted to swim out there, to see its latent treasures. I imagined meeting the artist, Stephen Turner out there and chewing the cud as the tide swept out to sea, swirling around the base of the fort. Over tea, we would discuss his Shivering sands project (Seafort) and our mutual interest in this strange but mesmeric landscape.
I walked on and encountered the site of a redundant car park which had long forsaken its purpose as a place for the employees of the power station to park their vehicles: a very JG Balladian kind of place. The car park had no entrance or exit, a grassy bank provided a barrier of inconvenience for any car left. In the corner a skeleton of a car remained, burnt out, its carcass existing like a swatch of fine venetian lace. Individual components had been carefully lifted out and arranged on the ground like critical samples containing the genetic code for Dagenham. In this patch of rough hard standing lay the hope of nature reclaiming this place. Native plants were emerging through the cracks with bright yellow flowers on architectural stems seemingly thriving where once the repetitive choreographed routines of car tyres had resisted them.
I tracked my way back, past the pill box which had become the HQ of the 'Grain Crew', boldly emblazoned on the damp brick work with reluctance that once I entered my car and drove back to civilisation, this day of vivid experience would fade like a scene from Brigadoon.

http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/is-the-world-ready-for-boris-island-6291617.html?origin=internalSearch

New Drawings and Pilgrimages

These are drawings in progress that I started pre- Christmas and have just begun to attend to again following the holidays. Over Christmas there were many Dickens programmes on both TV and Radio which was interesting although I ended up feeling that it was overload for me and although he is an important influence upon my current work, I felt that I had to distance myself from these programmes a bit. I have been continuing to read Clare Tomlinson's excellent biography and it has given quite an insight into the character of Dickens. My antennae is constantly tuning to his links to Kent and in particular the estuary and so far there is little mention of it in the book. I am looking forward to reading about when he buys Gads Hill near Rochester and Gravesend in Kent and the walks that he used to make out onto the marsh. I guess that I could skip some of the other writing and get straight into that detail but somehow I like to build up a more rounded picture so I am being very dedicated and reading the whole thing.

It was strange because on a couple of the programmes about Dickens on TV there were scenes from the marshes in Kent where I am working. I felt rather annoyed and upset, almost as though these people were trespassing on sacred land for a fleeting moment. Boris Johnson wants to plough through this land to make a new airport for London and my only hope was that he saw these programmes and will rethink it. I doubt it though, it is all short term gain. It is probably seen as a dirty, lonely, charmless place which is ripe for development. These are the very reasons that I love it though. It teeters on the edge of definition, defys it even. I suppose that I really do feel like a pilgrim when I go there. Every visit is similar to an equivalent of going to Mecca or Lourdes for me. I know that sounds rather dramatic but I really do feel very moved by the place.

daily mades: paper clips

daily mades: paper clips

Have a look at Shane Waltener's work. I like the way he is using materials in a conceptual way.

Guy Begbie & Lawrence Upton

http://www.bookarts.uwe.ac.uk/gbegbie11.htm

Follow the link to see an interesting book arts collaboration between Guy Begbie and Lawrence Upton.
About their collaboration they say;

The collaboration has continued beyond the Dundee commission and has produced both a range of realised and planned works; and, also, a colloquial meditation upon what it means to collaborate which declares itself through the works.

It involves considerations of conscious and unconscious decision-making, the integration of differing skills and the reconciliation of aesthetic assumptions in order to achieve empathy, which, they suggest, takes them beyond mere cooperation as they seek to merge what is, clumsily, called individual creativity to achieve what might seem to be, in effect, the work of one mind, what Burroughs and Gysin termed “a third mind”.

Their work, however, does not seek to remove, disguise or smooth over different physicalities; it retains its gestural origins.

Hulks

The drawings are developing particularly with the Dickens' text. I've been given a copy of the new biography of Dickens which I've just started reading. It's quite helpful to understand the construction of such wonderful images through words that Dickens created. My last post was called Devastating me to the Hulks. This was in fact, a misappropriation of his phrase 'devoting me to the hulks. It was only when I showed a drawing to Rick which was based on this phrase, did it come to light that I had made this error. When I looked at the drawing, I had mutated between the two phrases. I have found that repeatedly writing one phrase is actually quite hard because my mind wanders in the process and it becomes quite an hypnotic action. I am usually listening to the radio when I am drawing and I find that words from the radio leak into the drawing and I have to then make sure that I reconnect with the Dickens phrase.

I have just completed the longest drawing in time in this series so far. I have worked the phrase 'devoting me to the hulks' into an A1 drawing on tracing paper. This one was more sensitive to gradations of pencil and I worked a lot in 2H & 5H. Part way through I began to ponder on the existence of prison hulks that lay out in the estuary during Dickens's lifetime and what an eerie and strange sight they must have been. Years ago, when I lived in Rochester, I visited the Guildhall Museum which had an scene from the prison hulks with fake prisoners laying in hammocks and a sound of creaking and groaning in the background. My elder daughter used to love this part of the museum and was hungry for the drama of it. So I decided to consider incorporating the hulks in to my latest drawing and have used the same repetitive writing technique to create subtle silhouettes of the hulks as though they were strung out on the estuary on a flat river with no movement. I can imagine the fog and peppery mist clinging to them and oozing into their planks.

I have taken the hulks and begun applying the image to some previous small drawings on Japanese papers. I've used graphite for these which has given a smudged inky quality. I am quite pleased with the way the paper has absorbed the powder.

devastating me to the hulks

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I've been doing a series of drawings in response to text from Great Expectations by Dickens and Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. They are based on repetitions of selected words and phrases from the books, which are continually written and rewritten to create a drawing. I started the first ones on tracing paper which is a material that I love. As the surface builds up the pencil marks become more and more shiny and glossy. The words that I kept coming back to were mostly from Dickens's G.E. ; marsh mist is so thick and devastating me to the hulks. I was also working with a phrase from Conrad's novella; i lived in an infernal mess of rust, filings, nuts, bolts, spanners, hammers, ratchet - drills- things I abominate, because I don't get on with them..
It's really fascinating to work with a minimal amount of the text in a continuous way. You begin to lose it's context and it is hard to keep track of the correct pattern of words after having written it for the thousandth time. Even thought the text is being obliterated and becoming illegible through the drawing, I still had to hold onto the correct phrase and way of writing it, trying to keep a continuity going.
It becomes mesmeric.