More Than The Blues

I’ve finally lost my marbles.

I’ve thought the same thing a number of times in the past. Every time I do something ambitious or occasionally reckless. But since I’ve still managed to get this far in life afterwards, they were probably false alarms. This time it’s for real. I know that because in a week’s time I start installing an artwork so vast in ts constituent parts that I have no idea even of the scale of it. For a couple of weeks I am creating an artwork based on the 7th Century Lindisfarne Gospels, in the very place they were originally written, using 30,000 jars of liquid colour.

mock-up of the ‘Carpet’ installation

30,000.

I have no real idea how many that is – I’ve never counted something that big before. I’m clearly delusional.

Still, commit to doing I have and it all starts next week.

So how to capture the effect of the colours of the original illuminated manuscript and explore the impact they must have had back then. If the sheer volume of pieces wasn’t enough, my original idea was to use the exact colours the 7th century monks used – a little bit of dark ages authenticity in a contemporary artwork. I was really interested in how the colours were made, where they came from and why they were used, but it’s ended up with me looking at my own relationship with the different colours…

There’s something about the colour blue I have a problem with. It’s not that I don’t like it – it’s a useful colour after all, but there’s something awkward about it. I know where I am with red. I feel very comfortable using it, and in a strange sideways movement yellow is manageable too. But Blue I find tricky.

It’s got all these cultural connotations with it – sadness, lightness, distance – although even here the cultural stuff is confused – different cultures see blue in very different ways. In fact in most of the world blue doesn’t exist. Some places have very different words for light blue ad dark blue, but not a generic blue. In many others, blue and green are one and the same. So it seems I’m not the only one who has problems with blue…

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Sometimes I’m not sure which weather is worse for me – rain, snow or sunshine. I guess in a very English way I’m easily distracted by the weather, whatever the weather. Lately it’s been doing a lot of this: Living on top of a fell in the North Pennines, I don’t get much of that stuff in the best of years, so it seems silly to waste days like that sat at a desk or beavering away in the studio. Instead I’ve been out wandering as much as I can while the weather holds. taking the opportunity to further explore the landscape on my doorstep.

It’s usually a colourful time of year out in the North Pennines with the spring flowers coming into bloom and the trees very verdant with their new leaves. A couple of years back I did a piece for a paper making client of mine down in the woods at the bottom of the fields here – near the secret waterfall.

I think I made a couple of hundred of those paper boxes in all. I remember it took me ages to cut them out and fold them up, and there still didn’t seem to be enough, but the effect worked well. Particularly when the sun peeped out from behind the clouds and I got some dappled light on the ground.

This year, the bluebells have gone crazy. In fact all the spring flowers are far more voluminous than normal. It’s something to do with the colder than average winter and the late spring – a good four weeks later than normal here. I’m not sure the mechanics of increasing the flowers but it’s very noticeable.

The other week, I ventured up to Widdy Bank Fell, overlooking Cow Green Reservoir in Teesdale in search of some very old plants. Spring Gentians are Alpine plants normally found on the higher slopes of the Alps and the Atlas mountains. Tiny, tiny delicate blue flowers which ony open up in the sunshine. Very beautiful and extremely blue. But also unique here in the UK.

Back at the end of the last ice age (well, still this one technically, but let’s not go there for now) Upper Teesdale, like most of the UK was covered in ice, the big glaciers carving out much of the landscape we see today. The climate of upper Teesdale was very much like the upper reaches of the Alps then and alpine plants thrived here. However, as the glaciers melted and the planet warmed up again, those Alpine plants survived on Widdy Bank Fell and are still there today. These spring gentians have been there for well over 20,000 years. These delicate blue flowers are mind-bogglingly ancient. Older even than the landscape. That’s nuts. But cool too.

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But back to the Lindisfarne Gospels.

It had long been presumed that the blue on the manuscripts was made with lapis pigment. There were certainly well established trade routes to Holy Island in the 7th century. At the time the only source for this precious colour was a single mine in Afghanistan. However, the most recent analysis of the colours suggests the blue isn’t mineral but rather organic.

Detail of a ‘carpet page’ from the Lindisfarne Gospels

There are two primary sources of organic blue pigment. The first was from boiling up the mucus of whelks and steeping them in urine for a number of weeks. The resultant blues eventually gathered tend to be on the purple end of the spectrum although richer dark blue and indigo is possible. It’s certainly possible this was done on Holy Island. There’s no shortage of whelks on the shores.

The other likely source was using woad. It was certainly widely used at the time. There are records of Vikings using it to dye cloth at the time and the Roman records of the Picts painting themselves blue was almost certainly a woad product.

I’ve not been able to find a supplier of whelk-based indigo, but I did manage to get a pure woad watercolour paint to use in my designs on paper.

woad blue

The other peculiar property of blue is that so much that we see as blue isn’t actually blue. The sky for instance isn’t really blue – it’s just the way light is refracted through the atmosphere.

The iridescent blue of birds and butterflies isn’t real either – again it’s a trick of refraction through clear cells.

It’s this property of blue which has complicated the blue for the installation. Having got a blue liquid that worked well as a mass, when I started testing it outside in the sunlight, strange things started to happen.

up against the light, the liquid is a good vibrant blue…

however, in bright sunlight against the green grass, instead of just looking darker it starts to look distinctly purple and verging on red.

aargh!

The current solution (forgive the pun) is to mix a much diluted colour solution. Individually against the light it appears very light and watery. However, when viewed as a mass it becomes a much richer shade.

Yes, I know it’s not the same hue as the woad pigment samples. THe idea of replicating the original colours just wasn’t working on a piece of this scale and within the landscape. It was too earthy and natural-looking, whereas for the piece to have the impact of colour – which is the whole point behind the piece – the colours all needed to be much richer.

I guess from this I’ve learnt a little more about how blue works and I’m beginning to see how it’s functioning both within the piece and the broader landscape. I think within the jars it’s taking on a more ecclesiastical quality which fits well with the piece. I’m beginning also to understand its unique properties in the way it interacts with light.

Somehow I don’t think this’ll be the last piece I play with blue.

but I hope it’s the last time I do something with 30,000 pieces. What was I thinking?!

Au + Ag

It was another gorgeous day out yesterday, so with it being the weekend and all that I decided to go out exploring again. This time it was a walk along Baldersdale and up Goldsborough – the sister hill to Shacklesborough where I’d been a few weeks ago. It’s not as high as Shacklesborough, but the view from the top is arguably much more dramatic. You get the whole sweep of the Baldersdale reservoirs and right round into Teesdale, over to Barnard Castle, and it being so clear yesterday, beyond to Darlington. The loneliness of Cotherstone moor follows the final sweep round to Shacklesborough again on the horizon. No wonder the bronze-age folk liked it so much they built things up there – stone circles, chambered cairns etc. All long gone now.

The Millstone grits are impressive too. Big hulking chunks of grey with it old-age wrinkles and dramatic overhangs. A climbers dream, and in the late afternoon light they looked good on camera too.

The textures of the rock against the clear sky would look good in black and white I thought. I also wanted to try out a new toy I’d found online for recreating black and white film.

During the week I’d read an interview with Sebastião Salgado -one of the great monochrome reportage photographers. In it he lamented the demise of all the wonderful film, papers and chemistry he used to use to achieve his incredible images. However, he siad he now used the software from DxO labs to recreate the classic Kodak Tri-X look from digital files. Well, if it’s good enough for Salgado, it ought to be worth a try.

Photo © Sebastião Salgado/Amazonas

Back in the late eighties I used to work in a professional photographic lab in central London. It was a specialist black and white lab and at the time it was one of dozens of specialist labs all over the West End and the City. My department was film processing. It became my domain – processing hundreds of rolls of film for London’s advertising and PR photographers. Each type of film had its own process. Most of the film was developed in a big ‘dip’n dunk’ processor in Ilford ID11 developer. Different development and fixing times were given to different types of film, and we could also ‘push’ and ‘pull’ film stock up to 3 stops. On top of that I also used to do bespoke processing in a variety of other developers. There were dozens of film types and dozens of developers. The combinations were almost endless. Each film and developer combination would have their own characteristics. I really loved using Ilford HP5 for my own work, so I tended to keep the main processing set-up for really wide tonal scale and fine grain resolution on that. All monitored daily on a densitometer so that it was consistant from day to day.

my old darkroom in London

This attention to detail was important. These things mattered. Every photographer would have their film of choice and we’d work with them to get a bespoke process which gave them the final look they were after. No professional photographer would just use any old roll of film and expect to get consistant results.

the wetbench and some of the chemistry in my old darkroom

In time I also used to do bespoke printing jobs which needed particular paper and chemistry combinations. While the bulk of the work in the darkrooms was on resin-coated paper and developed in machines for speed and accuracy, I had a wet-bench and got to play with fibre-based paper and all sorts of toning processes. My favourite was split toning Agfa Record Rapid in Selenium toner. With a slightly stronger dilution you could part-tone prints where the selenium would act on the shadows first, and you snatched it out at the right moment to get rich purple mid-tones, deep blacks and cool highlights. It took a lot of skill and know-how to pull off with any certainty. I guess you could call it craftsmanship.

Most of those black and white films have disappeared now. Almost all the paper varieties have gone too, so there’s simply no way to do that stuff anymore. It’s mostly lost knowledge. Digital imaging is pretty ubiquitous now. It’s point and shoot lots, edit later. The forethought and preparation are gone. There’s no film stock to choose – checking all the rolls are the same batch to ensure consistency across the whole shoot. No clip-testing film at the processing stage to tweak the image brightness and contrast. That, along with peeling polaroids is in the past (alongside lunar landings and supersonic passenger flight).

some left over film – basically the stuff I never used very often

Still, the digital workflow is slowly opening up some of that finesse again. The DxO software does a really good job of replicating most of the workhorse film emulsions. It’s a bit like instagram, but with intelligence  I can now make my Pennine landscapes look as if they were shot on Tri-X. The extra contrast and sharp grain is all there, just like the original. Street shots can look like they were done on HP5 – a bit softer both in contrast and grain holding plenty of shadow detail. There’s a richness in the overall tonality which seems to lift it from the standard monochrome transformation. At least on screen they look a lot like film, and as most of the time they’ll only be seen on screen, that’s good enough for me. It’s good to use a bit of that knowledge again. I’m not sure most people could tell the difference – it’s fairly subtle, but to me it’s important.

The other little bit of digital kit I got recently was a film scanning attachment for my iPhone. It’s a series of stacking boxes with a built-in light-box and a tidy little app which allows you to scan your negs or slides at the touch of the screen. There’s a handful of built-in presets which help manage the colour from popular colour neg film stock. It’s not brilliant quality – you are photographing through a tiny plastic lens onto a teeny sensor, but it’s a great way to evaluate negs, and is OK for web-use.

one of thousands of contact sheets

I have thousands of rolls of negatives filed in a big cabinet. I used to meticulously label every sheet and attach a contact sheet to each page so I knew what was on each. However, a few dozen seem to have slipped through the net and I had rolls of negs which for one reason or another had never been printed, let alone seen as positives. It was great seeing these photos for first time after sitting unseen for years. Although a bit clunky, a bit soft and low-res, the iPhone previews at least give a fair idea of the potential of each frame.

There’s a couple of rolls of the Berlin Wall coming down…

Last bit of wall in the West

boy in East Berlin with his shrapnel collection

…and I’d completely forgotten about the rolls I shot of hand-made signs during the Foot and Mouth outbreak in 2001.

At some point I’ll get to printing these properly – paper and wet chemicals of course.

But the thing that they made me think about, which is why I’m writing this post, is that those two sets bring home the real purpose of photography. That of capturing a moment in time.Those are both historic moments in their own rights, but smaller than that, each image is a minute moment in time of a larger culmulative moment.

My digital files now tell me what that moment in time is. The gritstone pics on Goldsborough were just 1/640th of a second. That’s faster than the bink of an eye. A really really small moment in time in comparison to a day, a lifetime even. In contrast, the gritstones took millions of years to build up. The geology of the landscape is a snapshot lasting epochs. I guess where I’m ending up today is thinking about the relative time of moments and capturing those moments. Can the time of photography say anything about the time of geology?

subterranea

Monday morning and I find myself sat in a coffee shop easing myself into a new week. It’s not my normal thing. I don’t drink that much coffee and I’m normally miles from anything more metropolitan than a tearoom. But I like change. Change is good.

I live in a beautiful corner of the country. The North Pennines is simply stunning. It’s wild and remote with big skies and very few people. However, I seldom get the chance to create work here, let alone the time to really explore it. So, this year I decided to do something about that. Now the harsh winter is a fading memory I’ve been able to get a out and about and explore the gems on my doorstep.

rainbow under Summerhill Force, Upper Teesdale

Shacklesborough above Bowderdale

The most revealing bit about exploring a geopark is how much the landscape becomes as much about what’s underground as the stuff on the top.

Lately I’ve been lucky enough to be working with a bunch of other interesting artists exploring a local geo anomaly known as Gods Bridge. It’s part of a project run by a local arts organisation with mentoring support from Tania Kovats.

Gods Bridge is a natural limestone bridge over the River Greta on the edge of Stainmore Forest and about 2 miles upstream of Bowes. I’ve got a bit of a thing about bridges at the moment and there’s a bunch of projects in development which use some of the engineering forms of bridges.

The project is doubly interesting for me. Not only is it a local thing and a chance to understand the landscape on my doorstep, but the resulting artworks generated by all the participating artists are going to go on a touring gallery show. And that for me is the big challenge. I like challenges. Challenges are good too.

Over the past few years I’ve carved a career based on temporary works which take advantage of the scale of landscape. For me, working outside the gallery environment offers just so many more possibilities than the confines of four gallery walls. For me I’ve come to regard gallery based practice as far too limiting and a compromise for arts true potential.

However, there’s nothing like sleeping with the enemy to keep things exciting, so I’m biting the bullet and going to see if there’s a way my practice can evolve a parallel gallery-based strand. One that won’t compromise my ideas or deviate too far from my true roots, but add a new and valid dimension to it.

What that will be and how that will work, at the moment I have no idea. But that’s exciting.

So back to the river…

littered with artists

The first site visit was good and it was fun to climb all over it with a bunch of other artists, but it was really too unfocused to get any real insight. So last week I went back for another explore.

I remember when I stayed in Suzhou last year the hotel was next to a 2000 year old bridge. That was mind blowing in itself – we don’t have any bridge in the UK close to that kind of antiquity. Let alone one still in daily use.  Gods Bridge though is millions of years old. Made by the gentle erosion of the limestone over millennia by the slightly acidic river water, the natural fissures in the limestone have maintained its sharp lines.

2,000 year old bridge, Suzhou, China.

It’s not a well-known site in the wider sense of things, but thousands of boots trudge across it as part of the Pennine Way. The route from Tan Hill to Middleton-in-Teesdale is one of the lonelier stretches. The only bit of civilisation you get is crossing the busy A66 just beyond Gods Bridge.

The bridge itself is a protected structure. It was made a Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) in the late ’80s. The two lime kilns either side of the river are grade 2 listed buildings and have been subject to a preservation order longer than the bridge. Not sure what that says about our attitude to architecture and geology, but still. The SSSI statement covers the bridge and a couple of hundred metres of the river either side. It’s the river course though which is in some respects the most interesting.

Upstream of the bridge, the River Greta is a fairly bog-standard upland river. Just a couple of miles old, it has already got a fair bit of pace in it and a good bit of meandering is going on…

but then, just before it gets to Gods Bridge, it just disappears. It’s as if all the water has just evaporated. Gone.

It’s a bit like that magic trick where you pour a pint of milk into a newspaper cone, then you open up the newspaper and it’s all gone.

A bit of geological magic.

There’s water under the bridge, and beyond it it’s business as usual.

The River Greta takes its name from the Viking ‘Griota’ which means a stony stream. It’s clearly been like this for a long time.

On my revisit I went to see where all the water goes. This time around there was a bit more water around and you could easily see where the water was rejoining the riverbed from a large fissure in the bank on the side.

The Greta emerging #godsbridge vine.co/v/bErgKjVtIAj

— Steve Messam (@rougeit) May 20, 2013

Exploring upstream I managed to find where it mostly disappeared down a parallel subterranean gully.

Greta disappearing #godsbridge vine.co/v/bErgi2vqYw3

— Steve Messam (@rougeit) May 20, 2013

The SSSI statement explains this a little more. The river has found new routes through fissures in the limestone and is still carving them out. Give it a few more millennia and there’ll be a new and bigger bridge. This is an ongoing geological process with the river and shows how even at the really slow pace of geological change, the landscape is constantly changing.

Over the weekend we had some torrential rain with some of the highest river levels for decades. Unfortunately I couldn’t get back to the site right after the rain, but managed to pop over the next day.

Sure enough, the river bed which on the Friday had been a barren rocky path, was once more a shimmering, flowing river. Unfortunately I had missed it in a raging torrent, but the debris line showed just how high the water had been the day before.

note the debris line on the right.

With more water flowing through the bridge I spent a lovely couple of hours floating sticks and moss down the river with my kids and explaining chaos theory to a four year old while I sketched out the paths the sticks took through the bridge.

I’m still not sure where this project is taking me or what will come of it, but getting to know and understand this little bit of limestone is fascinating. At the moment I’m thinking about how Gods Bridge isn’t really a bridge but a tunnel. It’s the underneath bit that’s the most interesting.

Summerhill Force flowing in front of Gibson’s Cave, Upper Teesdale.

It’s this subterranean narrative which transforms SummerHill force into Gibsons Cave through the erosion of sandstone underneath the Whin Sill, and Shacklesborough becomes a glacial island (although the presence of giant boulders from the lake district on the top show it wasn’t always an island, but let’s not get picky).

This is going to be an underground journey I think…

Room to View

So, the snow’s back. Seems it barely went away this year. This latest lot has been a little extreme. I’ve got quite used to being snowed-in. I quite like the forced isolation really. But this little lot has had a good go at burying me. This morning I needed to get more logs for the cooker and had to climb out of a window to get outside!

Last week I had to cancel a presentation I was due to do in Lancashire because I was snowed in. It was a shame I couldn’t get there as I’d been building up to it as a big reveal for a new piece I’d been working on. It was big, bold  and flying. The brief I’d been given just eight weeks before was to come up with something unexpected, ambitious and with a wow factor. I was aching to see if I’d actually got something to provoke a real reaction with the audience.

The project had started at the beginning of February. The start date had been postponed a number of times due to snow and bad weather. I should have taken this as an omen on hindsight. The folks at Mid Pennine Arts had asked me to look at the West Pennine Moors and create an idea for a future piece as a response. So on the very first day we trudged through the snow up to Jubilee Tower above Darwen to see what I was dealing with.

Prior to this I had never heard of the West Pennine Moors, let alone visited them. I was starting from a point of zero information. My landscape works are about uncovering what makes up the landscape and looking at it beyond just  surface. These things are easier in places like the Lake District which has a rich cultural history and people have documented the changes there through art and poetry for 200 years. But every landscape has its stories and narrative,  just need unlocking.

The West Pennine Moors are a collection of moderate sized upland areas in the South Pennines, surrounded by the Lancashire Mill towns of Blackburn, Accrington, Bury, Bolton and Chorley. In a way they are a clearly defined area within Victorian industrial sprawl. However, this part of the south Pennines has several moorland expanses on the outer edges of Manchester, and one of the challenges was to see what made these relatively minor moorlands unique and distinct from its neighbours.

The starting point for the brief was the three towers which mark the corners of the area – Jubilee Tower at Darwen, Peel Tower near Holcombe and Rivington Pike tower above Horwich.

Peel Tower is a tall, angular structure on the edge of Holcombe Moor. Built by public subscription (today we’d call it crowd-funding I guess), it commemorates Sir Robert Peel – a former prime minister and founder of the police force.

The tower on Rivington Pike is a little more modest. Sitting on top of a natural peak beside Winter Hill. Built as a hunting lodge in the 18th Century, it’s the oldest of the towers on the moors. Although only 6 metres high it still has a commanding presence on the hill and is a prominent landmark from the train between Chorley and Bolton and from the M61.

Darwen Tower is the most visible of the towers and can be seen from almost all the moors in the area. It’s also the only one still open daily to go up. Like Peel Tower, it was paid for by locals to mark Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee (hence the official name), but also, more importantly to mark the opening up of the moors for everyone to access. This was one of the first moors with a public right to roam following protests and mass trespasses which predate those at Kinder Scout by over 30 years.

opening of Darwen Tower (from http://www.cottontown.org)

Of course these towers are all essentially follies. There are plenty more elsewhere in the area, particularly at Rivington:

Moor towers are not unique to the West Pennine Moors. In England there’s a bit of a tradition for building towers on hills for the fun of it. Some were built as lookout posts for hunting (as at Rivington Pike), others as ornaments in the landscape (my favourite type) and even some, bizarrely, built as job creation schemes – something for the locals to do. A kind of 18th century YTS. The tower on Leith Hill in Surrey was built to bring the total height up to 1,000 ft above sea level (small hills down south – bless).

Leith Hill Tower, Surrey – its gothic architecture makes it a lure for dodgy goth bands

Previous to this spate of random tower-building, the tops of hills have been used for centuries as natural vantage points. The tower on Rivington Pike was built using the stone from a previous signalling beacon, which in turn was built on the site of a standing stone. Walking across the moors there are man-made structures on almost every high point

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Great Hill has a wind shelter. Much needed on the day I first went up.

There’s a stone circle on Cheetham Close

While Round Loaf on Anglezarke Moor is a man-made hill of unknown origin, topped by a cairn. Sitting in a bog, the difference in vegetation on the better drained hill is very obvious from satellite pics.

On top of that are the half-dozen triangulation markers (trig points). Built between 1935 and 1960, these were used to map the whole of the UK with an accuracy down to 10 metres. By measuring the angles between one trig point and two others, you got very accurate measurements of the landscape. The same technique is deployed by GPS, only using three satellites rather than lumps of concrete. Trig points have to be on places where they have good all round visibility, so are generally on the highest points around.

Using triangulation calculations between the points you could not only determine distances, but also elevation. It’s a classic example of using elevated points for getting a good idea of where you are.

An Ordnance Survey team working on the retriangulation (from Ordnance Survey blog)

But to use triangulation points, you need the right equipment and lots of know-how and charts and stuff to get your bearings. Without that it’s still very difficult to know where you are without visual reference points. Back up in Cumbria the fells often have very distinct profiles, so when I look out of my window at the fells on the horizon, I can identify a number of places. On a clear day I can see lined up beyond Wild Boar fell, the distant peaks of the Yorkshire Dales – Wernside and Ingleborough. Further west are the Howgill fells, then swinging round to the Lakeland fells and the identifiable twin peaks of Blencathra to the far right.

On the West Pennine Moors, the landscape is less distinct. From a distance one hill looks mostly like any other. The towers then come into their own as giant triangulation points. Rivington Tower is tucked behind Winter Hill for most of the area. However, Winter Hill with its vast communication masts, is arguably the fourth tower of the moors. So  from the top of Darwen Tower, the landscape of the moors begins to have some shape.

Lines of sight between trig points on the West Pennine Moors

Getting out on the top of the moors has always clearly been part of the culture of the surrounding communities. The protests and opening up of Darwen Moor was followed by mass trespasses at Smithills near Bolton. On that occasion the moor road was finally opened to the public in 1996. Getting up the moors part and parcel of our relationship with the land. It gives us a sense of place in the wider world, and a humbling of scale.

In my response to wandering the moors, I wanted to do something which helped people connect with the whole of the moors. Find a way to get a sense of place and overall geography. In other places I could have designed a viewing pavilion with things to see. Only, in the West Pennine Moors, there aren’t things to see. Beyond any of the towers there aren’t any visual reference points. My solution – to create those visual reference points. A more comprehensible system of triangulation points marking every point above 1,o00 ft. So that standing by any one marker you can see and identify every other marker. Even from the bottom of the valleys you would be able to map the peaks of the uplands.

All peaks above 1,000ft (330m). White markers are trig points

The problem was how to make them visible enough to be useable. Towers are big, solid constructions. It’s really, really windy up the top. This in itself is part of the character of the moors. To the west are the plains out to the Lancashire Coast where the prevailing weather rolls in relentlessly without obstruction. Permanent structures big enough to be seen from any other point would be very costly and not appropriate on a rare wilderness landscape. Temporary structures would again be susceptible to weather conditions too much.

The solution? Why battle the elements, when you can use them.

The Flying Towers are a series of flying markers, each equivalent in size to Rivington Pike tower – the first of the moor towers – which fly around 100ft above the ground at each peak across the entire West Pennine Moors for a few days.

It’s only an idea at the moment. An embryonic one. I’m currently wondering if there should be more of them – should they also fly from sites in-between the moors? At present the idea is for 25 of these kites. A hundred would be even more impressive visually.

It would have been good last week to see what the reaction was when I first unveiled it. I guess that moment is gone – the big reveal more an oozing out now. Still, it’s an idea. It’s a response. Whether it’s the response people were expecting, whether it’ll ever happen, well that’s for another day. A less snowy one hopefully.

Da Capo

It’s afternoon on the first day of a brand new year. The weather is a touch brighter and calmer than it has been of late adding to that sense of a new start. It’s only a day different from last year, but that idea of starting all over makes all the difference.

A clean slate and all that.

As I sit here with the obligatory cup of Yorkshire tea and listening to Mahler’s first symphony, it seems like a good time to catch up on the past 12 months and put it to bed before moving on with the future.

The Mahler seems appropriate as 2012 was the year I fell in love with playing music all over again. Just 12 months ago I was polishing my old East German Lidl and oiling up the valves before blowing some dusty notes through it.

Since then I’ve joined a couple of orchestras and played with a few others and performed live in front of paying audiences. The repetoire has been almost unbelievably vast – from newly commissioned works through chamber pieces, a wonderfularray of Mendelssohn, Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven, my beloved Tchaik 5, a whole day of Wagner overtures (to a horn player that’s like dying and going to Valhalla) and two who Mahler symphonies (including the one I’m listening to).

I got to play on a victorian bandstand at Beamish museum, at the Sage in Gateshead and in Bishop Auckland completely intimidated Joe McElderry who was supposed to sing Nessum Dorma with us but as we weren’t a backing track in his earpiece he couldn’t do it and showed himself to be no more than a vertically challenged karaoke singer. Bless.

In June I played in an emsemble at the opening of the new Tees Barrage and was picked out of the hat to meet the ACTUAL Queen. I have to admit she gave me a bit of a disapproving look – dressed as I was in jeans, un-tucked shirt and a waistcoat I bought to wear to an All About Eve gig at the Royal Albert Hall in 1990, and clearly doesn’t fit anymore, and I think she guessed. Still it was good to feel I’d played a part in the whole Diamond Jubilee thing and have my own memory of it.

I finally got back into writing my own music again too. Still a little tentative although the eagle-eared among you may have spotted a couple of pieces slipping out over the year.

The other big thing of the year – if not the biggest for most – was the Olympics in London. I was lucky to get tickets and had an incredible day there with my kids. Words just cannot explain the roar for the home team in the venues. Just hearing it eminating from the main stadium sent inexpicable shivvers up the spine. Remembering it now has the same effect. Truly an unforgettable experience. Even Kapoor’s Orbit was more interesting in real life than I thought it would be.

On the visual art side, it was another busy year. In the current climate this was something I’m particularly fortunate to have had, I know.

In the spring I went back to China to make a new piece for a Cumbrian Paper Mill. It was part of a series of works I’d been doing for a couple of years now exploring the connections between paper, its raw materials of wood and water, and playing with colour and form in the Cumbrian landscape. They even made a gorgeous limited edition calendar of all my paper pieces (there’s a little booklet about them here).

It was a far from smooth process working in China again this year – you can read about it on an earlier bog post here – but the offset was making the piece in Suzhou – home to some of the most important traditional gardens in China. Working there gave me an extra opportunity to get a better understanding of the importance of art and landscape in Chinese culture and helped make some imporatnt links in my own work. There’ll be another blog post about this no doubt.

At the same time. Let me say that again. At the very same time, I was installing and showing a piece back in the UK. It wasn’t really a new piece, but the first time this piece had been seen in the UK since the first version in Shanghai in 2006. ‘Brockhole Souvenir’ was commissioned by Mid Pennine Arts for the ‘Art of Destination’ conference on art and landscape. Through the miracles of technology I also presented at the conference from a slightly seedy hotel room in downtown Shanghai.

Unfortunately some of the good folk of Preston thought differently about the pieces and were badly vandalised within minutes of them going up. This was the first time any of my pieces had been vandalised, let alone damaged while up. Maybe I’d just been lucky up until now. It was sad to hear of their too swift demise and even sadder too for the folk at MPA and the Brockholes people.

Still, the process threw up some interesting ideas which although couldn’t be realised there at that time of year were too good to let go of. Also, Khan’s visitor centre at Brockholes was criminally omitted from the Stirling Prize shortlist in a year when the Stirling prize became far more interesting than the Turner prize (discuss?).

The ‘Fairhaven Bubbles’ which resulted were one of my favourite pieces so far. A combinatio of a good client, the right budget and an enthusiastic team based at the lake ensured that the piece worked the best it could. The initial teething problems were patiently solved and even the unfortunate attacks on the pieces (what was wrong with you Lancashire?) were handled with a determination to keep the piece looking its best. The most flattering bit came when my artist’s talk at the lakeside cafe was not just standing room only but there were people standing outside who couldn’t get in who still enjoyed the sunset cruise around the piece afterwards.

A determination to finish a piece also resulted in ‘Twisted’ at Cromford Mill – a work that this time last year I was disappointed to not have managed to realise. This time I found all the funding and managed the project myself and the final piece was not only as spectuacular as I’d hoped, but its silent majesty and the way it remained in place for over six months and looked just the same on its final day as it did when it was first completed.

I was also fortunate to be invited over to Sweden a couple of times last year to do some talks. On the first trip I also got to have a little play in an ancient forest as part of a project looking at how artists can drive sustainable communities. Sometimes the most interesting work comes without a brief.

There were other projects and pieces. Some big, some tiny, and mostly enjoyable. I did lots of talks – the one in Presteigne is now up on the Culture Colony website (link here) if you want to know what they’re like. Another one on working in isolated rural communities was filmed at Li Yuan Chia’s place on Hadrian’s wall for the Museum of Modern Art in Taipei.

On top of this I’ve had yet another year living in the most amazing part of the world, where everyday the light and landscape never cease to inspire me.

….

Well, that was last year.

Twenty thirteen, you’ve got a big act to follow.

But somehow I think you’re going to beat it.

spreading the love

The tree is up in the living room, there’s a fire roaring in the grate and strictly come dancing is on the telly. It must be that time of year again. There’s something reasurring about a big holiday festival this time of year. There’s nothing like it for slowing down and taking stock of the past year (more of that next time). It’s also the time of year I like to give a big thankyou to all those people who have supported me in their various ways throughout the past year, and look forward to forging new partnerships in the coming year.

Every year I do a crimbo card for the select few just for this purpose. Each year I try to do something while not blatantly Christmassy but seasonal, and frequently echoes something I particularly enjoyed doing over the past year. Back in 1997 the Independent ran a 3/4 page article on some of my cards (I remember underneath was a preview of a show by an up-coming artist called Martin Creed – I wonder what became of him?…).

It’s not a new idea and certainly not an original one. I’m not sure where I first got the idea from to do an annual piece, but plenty of artists and designers do their own every year. There was a section in Thomas Heatherwick’s V&A show this year all about his own cards – each a thing of beauty.

Christmas Card by Thomas Heatherwick

For the first dozen or so years’ my cards were hand-printed in the darkroom and either hand-coloured, chemically toned or printed on liquid photographic emulsion on random paper.

this one speaks for itself – again this was done in a wet darkroom and not in photoshop.

More recent images have been more colourful:

The year before was red too – shot just outside my back door one January.

It’s not always snow – this one on a frosty sunbiggin tarn in the Eden Valley

This one a montage in the Yorkshire Dales (again, done the hard way without photoshop).

This year I had been looking forward to doing something large and spectacular for the cards, however as the year moved on I still hadn’t got the technology working how I wanted it to, so that idea will have to wait another year. So at the last minute, after doing some frantic head scratching I figured I could do something white.

We’d had a bit of snow early on in December, but that had largely caught me out and I spent most of it working out how best to get up my track and get work done, than thinking creatively with it. With a change n the weather, there was forecast a couple of freezing nights with some early mist or fog. What I was hoping for was that wonderful thing when the overnight moisture freezes on every surface turning the landscape a cryslaine white. I would then create a piece made from hundreds of white balloons – much like the red piece I’d done earlier in Sweden, and shoot it low with a disappearing perspective in the background – maybe a track or even a sheep path. Something quite still and quiet. Maybe a little surreal, like a Storm Thorgerson album cover type thing.

A quick trip over to Darlington netted a hundred or so balloons – I’m sorry if you were after any that day, but I bought the last from every shop and market stall that had any. As the planned shot would be done at first light, and I’d have to move fast as the frost can melt quickly if the sun comes out, I spent the night before blowing up all the balloons. It wasn’t until the morning that I realised I couldn’t fit them all in the car, so had to make do with a much smaller piece.

However, despite all my planning and preparation, the weather didn’t do what I’d hoped it would, instead there was a light frost up i the hills above an inversion cloud just below. Ordinarily this would be quite stunning, but the cloud was rising fast and the inversion wasn’t stable enough.

My only hope was to get a nice bit of atmospheric moorland disappearing into the murk and cloud so I headed up to the Cumbria / Durham border in Teesdale.

The North Pennines are a severe border. The western side influenced by the wet Atlantic weather fronts, to the east the much drier but colder north sea systems. And so right on top of the border on the Teesdale side, the snow was still lying thick and white over large swathes of wilderness landscape. Where the rain had thawed and washed the snow away in Cumbria days before, the eastern side had remained dry and cold, the snow now frozen solid and the sky as clear as a bell and bright blue.

I must have spent a good couple of hours walking across that frozen wasteland shooting hundreds of pictures. The snow was so solid in parts I could position everything with ease as I left no footprints.

And so, here it is.

A study in white.

stepping outside

Oooh. Look at the colours! It’s Autumn again. My favourite.

These past coupleof weeks I’ve had some stunning drives through the Welsh Borders, The Derbyshire Peaks, the Lakes and glorious Teesdale. Each resplendent in its golden attire. There’s a nip in the air too, and with the nights drawing in again it’s good to light a fire in the evening and catch up with some reading. Last week I read a quite brief article in the Guardian on the potential fate of the Merz Barn in the Lake District. You can read the article here. A little historic background first though:

the Merz Barn at Elterwater today

Kurt Schwitters was a German artist of the first half of the 20th century. Although not as well known as many of his contemporaries, he was a key player in the Dada movement and is often regarded as the father of collage – creating abstract works from found objects. A process he called ‘Merz‘ after a fragment of newspaper in an early work mentioning Commerz und Privitbank. In the 1930′s the Nazi’s had a problem with abstract art and Schwitters fled to Norway. When the Germans arrived there he fled again to Scotland and ended up in London. In 1944 he moved to Ambleside in the Lake District – ostensibly to ‘get away from it all’ as is the case for many. He was an odd fit in 40′s Cumbria. He was a tall man – over 6ft – and spoke with a very heavy German accent. He would have stood out like a sore thumb in the village. Still, he did his best to fit in. He took on an allotment next to what is now the Armitt Museum, and made ends meet by paintng reasonably accomplished portraits for local people. He enetered the art competitions in the local agricultural shows and even became a member of the local artists society. Yet no-one knew his past or the imporatance his abstract work had on an international level.

‘A Shed for a Head’ – an instalation by Russell Mills and Ian Walton on the site of Schwitter’s allotment as part of FRED 2006

In 1947 the Museum of Modern Art in New York sent him a grant to recreate one of his merzbau destroyed by the Nazis in Norway. Unbeknownst to them at the time, he spent the money on a derelict barn at Elterwater and immersed himself in turning it into his largest and most ambitious projects. He called it his ‘Merzbarn‘. He died a year later having only completed one wall and bits of another.

The surviving piece of the Merz Barn before it was taken to the Hatton Gallery

The completed wall was removed in the 60′s and is now at the Hatton Gallery in Newcastle. What remains is the derelict barn Schwitters first bought. The farmer, when he discovered Schwitters was famous after his death, built a tearoom on the end in the hope of selling tea and cakes to visitors he hoped would flock to see the work. Only they didn’t.

Last year, local builders constructed a very convincing replica of the empty barn outside the Royal Academy in London for the Britsh Sculpture show. I was a little disappointed they weren’t selling cakes out of the little bay window, but oh well.

Also last week, as part of a programme of artists talks in Presteigne, I got the chance to see Sophie Fiennes’ ‘Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow‘ – a documentary about Anselm Keifer’s time at Barjac in France. In 1992 the painter moved bought a disused silk factory on the outskirts of Barjac and over the following decade or so transformed the 35 acre site into a complex of installations, landscaped sculptures, studio spaces and underground passageways.

Anselm Keifer at Barjac

In 2008 he just upped and left for an industrial unit outside Paris (although local farmers complaining about the speed he drove his sports cars may have something to do with it). The immense work at Barjac has just been left, abandonned. It was gifted to the people of France, but as yet there is no plan to open it to the public. A non resident caretaker looks after the perimeter fence while the work is left to nature. Sophie Fiennes’ mesmerising film is probably the only chance most will ever get to experice what he created there. Although, coincidently, two of the giant concrete towers he populated the site with, were also recreated outside the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2007.

view of Kiefer’s site at Barjac on Panoramio

There are lots of similarities in these projects. There’s even a bit of the ‘outsider art‘ about them, though not strictly Art Brut, as they were made by artists as art. But as an artist I’m really drawn to the idea of just being able to shut yourself away for years and just create. In many ways it’s the ultimate artistic act. It’s not working for a commission, or even creating something to sell to collectors. It can’t even be snapped up by enthusiastic curators. There’s no health and safety. No planning restrictions. It’s art at its purest. It’s not just Schwitters and Keifer who have sought the freedom of isolation in the coutryside to make personal works. There’s dozens of others. Just over the border from here is Charles Jencks’ ‘Garden of Cosmic Speculation‘ – a sculpted landscape exploring the ideas of quantum physics.

Up the road from there is Ian Hamilton Finlay’s ‘Little Sparta‘.

Little Sparta on Visit Scotland

Italy has Niki de Saint Phalle’s final masterpiece ‘Giardino dei Tarocchi‘

Niki de Saint Phalle’s Tarot Garden

while France has a chunk of them, including Jean Tinguely’s ‘Le Cyclop‘

Le Cyclop by Jean Tinguely (image from Bertrand’s blog)

and the grand-daddy of them all, the incredible ‘Palais Ideal‘ by Ferdinand Cheval.

early photo of the Palais Ideal

and while Keifer has bought another disused industrial site – a former nuclear power station no less – James Turrell continues to turn an entire mountain into a work of art:

Part of James Turrell’s Roden Crater project

Despite the obvious location aspect, there’s something very rural about all these. At their heart is the need to free the mind from outside influences. A need for non-conformism. While ‘Outsider artists’ may find this easy, it’s no so for established artists whose every work is scrutinised and critiqued by a very fixed set of artworld values. I can only speculate how liberating Schwitters found Ambleside in the ’40′s, when he was no longer a revolutionary artist, but just a tall German. Whether it’s a career-defining masterpiece, or just a diversionary side project, to have that space and freedom to just create at will is a fascinating space in itself.

So, all I need now is an empty barn or some-such and a bit of time to create my own little world….