HOGCHESTER ARTS

Started by reading. About deep time. About how to measure earth, contain it, weight it, value it, store it, archive it. I felt in touch with the huge elemental cycles cemented in colour- colour as a human experience. Even though it is not practical to sit (wet and dank), I find myself compelled to be in the greens, the silver grass and the black, blue mud, the itchy burnt yellows. 

Walking, I imagine I am carrying the little fish, Ichthyosaurus anningae with me, all up in my throat, the ancient fish of history buried, swallowed, and carried within like some calcic current.

The freedom to slip time, work outside for hours and to walk to all the shifts of the day.

Lying down in the shadow of myself; a mock photo shoot with a tree, its bark fallen underneath made me want to slip between it and the trunk. The hollowed branches sticking out as arms reaching, the gnarly joining points like the scapula of a swimmer’s back (Kate Winslet in the film Ammonite). I go with the instinct to connect, slot in, try on ‘nature’ – moss hair, bark skin, rock teeth. Unfolding as a way of holding something lightly. Sharpening my teeth on the landscape.

Being in and looking at a landscape at a time of war (multiples) summons Grant Wood, Paul Nash and the British Surrealists before Joan Semmel pops in mind bringing sex and shadows. Fragmented landscape, plus the geometry of its seams plus the romantic element.The landscape is a meeting place. Time travel is airless. The landscape is under pressure. Why sometimes is gravity heavier than others? 

After drawing the geometry of the lily pads and the bodybuilder chickens and the goat legs like oak banisters I become interested in the structures around the trees, some contained, held up or protected against predators (deer) with one or two appearing to be postural correction devices. 

Features of this landscape are named after body parts, grannies’ teeth, or lady fingers, coined by tourists finding human form in the landscape. Decay, digestion and regeneration are central here, from the dead animals fossilised underfoot, to the cliffs sliding into the sea in great slabs, the rubbish of the skittles churned up with prehistory and the stories set in Lyme Regis, where the gentry used to come to cure their gout, which is a type of calcification of the joints. Some stones on the beach seem to wear their organs on the outside as if they might breath better that way, others are crisscrossed with fine lines like a hand-made drawing laid on them, communicating something or leaving directions. Inscriptions, impressions, and reverbs in rocks as patterns, fragments, and organising system. I note the veins on rocks, a secondary sheet like material deposit that forms within a pre-existing rock, calcite, or quartz, bands or stripes, also called cleavage. History is sending us messages we can’t read.

I buy some devil toes at the shop. The fossilised poo is overrated. How do I even know it’s real fossil and not just old poo? I also buy runes, even though I don’t really know what they are or how to use them. I like the idea of having another language to hand and eye. 

I get back late and miss the pigs, they only appear to be fed around 4pm. I walk through blue clay and night soil, a concealed collaboration in the strict wildness. At dusk it is harmonious disarray, unity and diversity displayed in repetition with variation.

At night I hear an owl over the studio. Slapstick and camouflage are interchangeable in this landscape. 

I fall asleep thinking about gryphaea and iron earths.