Journey Sticks - mapping the landscape
The Journey Sticks workshops were born from a a text based visual arts project exploring home, belonging and landscape that was exhibited in 2019, here you can read more about it.
Eight Journey’s Home was a process-based project that explored a longing for home and the celebration of a journey’s end, it culminated in two installation pieces which were exhibited in the Matter Exhibiton at Glynde Place and during Art Wave in 2019.
Securing a long-term tenancy in Glynde offered me a stable home for the first time in years, after a long period of housing insecurity. The journey sticks represent eight walks made from Glynde, the process of making them is a way of binding self to place. Tracing the landscape on foot reinforces a sense of belonging. Found objects and lost words are like collected charms, they capture the forces of nature, weave narratives and hold a certain timeless, magical quality characterised by the local terrain.
Wooden sticks feature in ancient cultures as emblems of power and imagination, they have been used as tools for mapping landscapes and storytelling.
Cyanotype prints (see image below) with their spectral representations of scenes and objects,brought to life by sunlight, suggest stories of place, moments in time, change and loss. I’m interested in the rituals of capturing, collecting and archiving, which offer feelings of comfort and impose a sense of order over nature and events that are often out of our control.
Book onto a Journey Sticks mini retreat in my Workshops page
cyanotype prints on an old door from a local cottage tell a story of home and belonging
Poems and words from walks in Sussex and Devon as part of 8 Journey’s Home:
Sharpham House. Dart Estuary
South Devon
Along west bank of the
River Dart via Ham Reach
& Woodland Glade
July 16th
4 hours
Dranget – a crowd of folks Devon
Oodwail – Green Woodpecker Devon
South West Devon Coast Path,
Berry Head Nature Reserve via
Scabbacombe Sands
July 17th
4.5 hours
Gakeing – daydreaming Devon
Palsh – walking slowly Devon
Dartmoor. Buckfastleigh circular via
Haytor, Hound Tor, Great Tor,
Cairn Circle, old quarry, wooded valley,
over the clapper bridge at Beck a Brook.
July 18th
7 hours
Overclap – clouds over-closing Devon
Twire – movement of shallow water Devon
Gallitrop – fairy ring Devon
Lyme Regis circular via Spittles Wood
and River Lym to the Cobb,
Lyme Regis seafront
July 20th
4 hours
Cockle – ripple on the water caused
by wind West Country
Bit an’ drop – snack, bit of food Dorset
Jurassic Coastal Path Lyme Regis,
dinosaur trail to Charmouth,
back via headland
July 21st
6 hours
Scraunching – withering with heat Devon, Dorset
Dimpsey – getting dark, twilight Dorset, Somerset
Twanketen – melancholy Dorset
Swallows
Swallows at Glynde Pool
Sleep that night was rocky, as if my blood were granular. Details of my circumstances, the ones I do not like pushed through, like old slogans under a peeling billboard. Perhaps it was the surreal disaster movie news before bed. The grief of wasted moments and gifts.
And you, who are far too young to have to question the certainty of anything beyond that distant vanishing point.
Bovine gloomy, we walked to the pool. Help yourself to anything, the morning chimed. Its kindness shamed me.
You hurried ahead of me.
Hedges, trees, fields, clouds.
There were endings everywhere.
The swimming pool was civic blue, deserted and serene. An odd opulence, having it to ourselves, amid this backdrop of cushioned Downs rising. A breeze swept fragrance across the scarp. Earth, beasts, grasses.
The peel of time and echoes, hand painted, long ago, summoned youth and lost voices.
Inch by inch we descended, watching the patina like a line of mercury trembling up our flesh. How the breath quickened in that menthol corset!
At chest depth we felt it, like pressure, like a shift in the barometer, and pausing, waited, letting our breath be our only movement.
Slick as a blink they came, first
a flash of cobalt oxide, then, an invasion
seven sharp boomerangs
Morning suited crimson throated
cleaving space. Elastic
catapulting
for a sip on the wing.
a sip of water’s skin.
Puffs of air fanned our cheekbones and we could trace the silver beads, slipping like oil from wing feathers.
So close -
for a moment the skin fell away and we were carried up and out. Then endings and time and vanishing points were just stories, limited perspectives.
