HOGCHESTER ARTS

Reflecting on Charmouth, the idea of ‘thin places’ comes to mind. Jennifer Higgie describes the thin place as one that ‘occupies the threshold between the physical world and the one that hosts spirits, dreams, the afterlife—a place where the distance between earth and heaven narrows.’ Blurring sea and sky, past and present, the chimeric quality of this place and period buried in books, beads and the beach continues to echo. 

 

Through winter I was researching for my solo exhibition ‘All Words Are Written in Water’ at Anat Ebgi Gallery in Los Angeles. At the time I was looking at pretty much everything through the lens of symbols and found such an interesting language in the shells, stones and fossils across the beaches. Remarkably preserved spirals, fragmented imprints reminiscent of eyelashes, stones etched with fine lines, some sort of calligraphic trace lost to time. In ‘Step Towards a Small Theory of the Visible’, John Berger states ‘In this realm of the visible, all epochs coexist and are fraternal, whether separated by centuries or millenia’; an echo of Astrida Neimanis’ ideas on ‘aqueously extending through both time and space’ that connects us to ‘all the strange bodies of water that flow into us across epochs and generations.’ 

 

Walking across the beach with Emma and Hannah, we would notice the veins created by clay slippages across the damp sand, these molten tongues reaching to lick the shoreline. The shocks of terracotta modernity emerging amidst the grey, white and green eternal. The layers of the cliff sediment, the foundations pre-human, disturbed by the slippages from January’s rain, the surface of the present collapsing into the sea, our planetary archive. In this thin place, the past insists on presence. An earthy sort of time travel. These symbols continue to echo as the months pass, ammonite spirals forming structures, staircases, invitations through. 

I worked with author Vanessa Onwuemezi on the text for this show – an original piece of fiction titled The Third Fold. The idea of folding feels apt to this place: clay revealing, the sea concealing, the inherent layering of the landscape mutable, shifting and slippery. I recognise much of Charmouth, my memories and her associations, combining in the text:

 

‘The first fold took in the old cogs, the bolts

and shells in their spiral their bold it was

necessary to swallow the whole earth

and somehow spit

invert it anew the shells

the bolts, the old spiralled in their round

“sound” it was all words

all words sounded and written.

 

The first fold compressed the warp and weft

of the centuries to the density

of the hard sea bed, pressured

by memories descended from the surface

come to rest in the cold sunken flows.

 

The deep flows share their rhythm

with the dark pool, whose ripples tremble

shifting with slow almost dense as oil

near stagnant green, half-opaque

like the flesh webbed along the spines of the ancestor fish

fin grips the current

a silken web ebbing with the night –

the flows of night.’