Nicholas Hedges

Past and Present Postcard

2012-01-25T00:13:00.000Z

The image below is the last in a series I've made using both an original World War One postcard and a photograph I took in Verdun. All are works in progress.

I've been fascinated with the backdrops in some of these postcards for quite some time now and have been looking at ways of using them in works relating to the Great War and, in particular, the issue of empathy.

The original postcard is of course in black and white (with a greenish tint) and shows a soldier about to head to the Front, standing, leaning on a chair.

Behind him is an idealised image - an idyllic, invented landscape, a far cry from what he was, perhaps, about to encounter, but close in some respects to what we find on battlefields today; where there were trenches, arms, barbed wire and bodies, there are now trees. And amidst the trees, incongruous concrete Pill Boxes stand and watch as the seasons come and go. Everything is slowly reclaimed. The trees in the image at the top of the blog spill to reclaim the past - the interior of the studio - through the gap left by the missing soldier.

I have placed the solider back beyond the gap left by the vague shape of his own body, to remind us that people like the soldiers we see in all these postcards, were once like those of us who have visited the battlefields. They too would have known what it was to stand in a wood. To listen to the wind blowing through the branches.

To stand and do just that, is one way to remember them.

Work in Progress

2012-01-24T21:57:00.001Z

A Flash of Genius at the London Art Fair

2012-01-22T12:32:00.000Z

Yesterday, at the London Art Fair, I found - amongst a plethora of 'not very good' and downright terrible art, an artist whose work - although disturbing -truly impressed me. It's not the sort of work you'd want on your wall perhaps, or which would likely be snapped up by the likes of those idiots who it seemed were happy to shell out 5 grand for a print of one of Damien Hirst's assistant's facile spot paintings (albeit one signed by the Overlord of artistic tat), but its power was striking.

For a number of years I've looked to create work which facilitates an empathetic engagement with anonymous individual victims of past atrocities. This work has variously found its form in paintings, sculpture and mixed media pieces using documentary and archival material such as photographs. Where these photographs have been black and white, I've looked to see how colour might be used to foster that empathetic reaction.

David Birkin's work, 'Untitled I' does everything that I have tried to do. It's a brilliantly conceived work and one which is conceptually perfect. The work, disturbing as it is can be seen below.

The image shows a woman about to be shot by a German soldier. The woman, like so many of the Nazi's victims is anonymous, one more human being to make up the grim toll of 6 million killed in the Holocaust. But where so many names have been forgotten, many of course remain, trapped - like flies in amber - in the meticulous records kept by those who carried out these unimaginable crimes.

The black and white photograph printed on the left of the image has been distorted with fragments of colour, and on the right of the image we find the computer code for the original digital image, into which Birkin has placed the name of one of the countless victims. This 'anomaly' in the code is revealed when the image - with the anomalous name - is reprinted. The distortion is the name as read by the computer.

It is a brilliant concept. The computer code, without the name, is to (most) human eyes, little more that an incomprehensible mass of letters and numbers. It's the equivalent of the vast and grim statistic offered to us by history. Its equivalent image is black and white - a far cry from the reality of a world full of colour - the world we know and which every one of the six million victims knew. And yet when a name - an individual - is inserted, the image is changed (distorted) with a pattern of colours, reminding us that the world of the Holocaust was not black and white, but one full of colour, of summer days and everything which we take for granted today.

The average man, woman and child are not the types of people who normally make up history, unless they are heaped together as victims, masses and mobs. They are often anomalous where history is concerned, but nonetheless vital and full of colour, something which Birkin's work brilliantly portrays.

Geophysics and Henry Taunt

2011-11-16T15:54:00.006Z

Since working on the archaeological dig at Bartlemas Chapel, I've been looking for ways to create work based around my interpretations of the site. A starting point for my research is an image created through a Geophysical survey of the site.

It shows areas of high resistance (pale greys and whites) and areas of less resistance (dark greys and blacks), revealing patterns beneath the surface of the ground caused by the remnants of walls, buildings, ditches etc. Its indistinct aesthetic (vague shapes and outlines) is perhaps a metaphor for the way we perceive the past, which is itself, at best, always the most ill-defined and inexact picture.
Somewhere within this picture however were all the things we found, including the piece of mediaeval pottery below.

The contrast between the black and white of the resistance survey image and that of the red-orange glaze interests me as regards the allusion to what we know of the past as opposed to what actually happened.
This contrast also comes to mind when looking at photographs of Bartlemas Chapel taken by Henry Taunt in 1912.

It's amazing to think that below the black and white surface of the photographs, beneath the ground, the same piece mediaeval of pottery is there, waiting to be discovered, along with the bones of those who were buried there centuries before. Zooming in, as if to get a closer look, the image begins to change, becoming indistinct like the resistance survey images.

New Work (WW1) 2

2011-11-16T10:39:00.001Z

Looking again at the latest work I've done (see previous entry), I decided to make the image of the man less clear. Taking away his face, I found my attention drawn to his hand which in turn reminded me of some work I'd done on hands with regards photographs from World War I.

New Work (WW1)

2011-11-15T18:47:00.000Z

Again using the idea of the lines/patterns of trenches, I've reworked an earlier idea using an old World War One postcard.

Old Sky

2011-10-17T22:57:00.009+01:00

In response to my last blog entry, I remembered a painting by Howard Hodgkin which seemed to echo what I had written. It's called 'Old Sky' and it's a painting which, for me, is about the idea of that continuous cycle of time; of many cycles (single days) embedded in the cycle of years (which in terms of the pottery shard becomes a cycle of centuries).

The painting is an image of the end of a day and the remembered image of hundreds of days lost to memory and beyond. It's about the act of remembering and the way the paint is applied to the frame becomes an attempt to reach beyond the limits of memory, to live again in the world when the memory was first formed. It's almost frantic; an attempt not to forget what will certainly be forgotten. The frame remains intact, an acknowledgement perhaps that to relive a time that's passed is impossible; that all that remains, inevitably, is a fragment of what has been.

As I alluded to in my blog, the relationship between colour and movement interests me a great deal and with this painting we have both colour and movement; movement when the painting was made and the movement of the act of remembering itself. For me, this reflects the idea of the cycle of a day and its relationship to the cycle of centuries; the relationship between the leaf and the pottery shard found during the dig. When I look at the pottery shard (below) I try to picture the world from which it has come. It's as if the edges of the shard are like the edges of the painting, and while we can't return to the world from which the shard has come, we can with the aid of the present attempt to imagine it.

I wrote in my last blog entry how when I dug the shard out of the ground, the colours at once melted back into the world from which they'd been estranged. This idea serves to illustrate that of moving beyond the frame or the edges of the shard in an attempt to re-imagine the past; how the act of remembering is as much to do with the body as the imagination - how it's a fusion of the two; a product of an embodied imagination; one which moves in the world just like those with whom we seek to empathise.

Leaf and Shard

2011-10-17T21:58:00.001+01:00

Out of a small pile of earth, greyish-brown in colour, a piece of brightly glazed pottery appeared as I scraped with my trowel. Although only a few centimetres across it was nonetheless striking given the colours of its glaze; an orangey-yellow and warm reddish-brown, as vivid perhaps as when it was a whole piece of pottery in use however many centuries ago.

Colour, in this example, becomes for me a vehicle for a more empathetic engagement with the past (a theme central to my work). The colour of the sky, the apples on the trees, the trees themselves and the grass were one with the colours of this small fragment of pottery, which until that moment had remained hidden for (perhaps) hundreds of years. It was as if, rather than a shard of pottery, a piece of colour (or colours) from a day hundreds of years ago had lain buried in the soil; colours which at once melted back into the world from which they'd been estranged so long .

Pulling this shard from the almost monochromatic soil, was like looking at an old black and white photograph, where one imagines colour then movement. And looking up at the chapel, at the world moving all around me, I could, in that split second, glimpse the mediaeval past, acknowledging that that distant time was (although very different) just like the world today; there were colours and movement, experienced by individuals just like me and whoever had used whatever the fragment had once been a part of.

A little later as I continued to dig, I found a leaf inside my trench which had blown in from the side. The colours were very similar to that of the pottery (although they have darkened since). And once again this link between the past and present came to the fore. I was thrown back to a mediaeval autumn and imagined autumn in that very spot centuries ago. Like a chain reaction, I imagined the buildings, the road nearby, the walk into town. What was Oxford like at the time as the world moved towards the winter?

This single leaf (pictured above) is pregnant with the passage of time, the unrelenting march of time through another year, towards its end. The colours are like a sunset; the end of a year, the end of a day. But after night comes morning and after winter, the promise of spring. This idea of a continuous cycle seems embodied in both the leaf and the shard. One is young, the other very old - they turn or move in different 'orbits' - but nonetheless, in their colours, they have something in common; something I have in common with the individual who owned the pottery (from which the fragment comes) centuries ago; that is, we are part of the same world.

New Work in Progress (WW1)

2011-10-07T23:48:00.002+01:00

Projections

2011-10-07T07:30:00.002+01:00

Having completed my last stitching project based on trench maps from World War I, I decided to try and superimpose some postcard portraits onto them, of soldiers headed for the Front. In the first (below) I used the photograph of a family which I 'projected' onto the map as shown hanging on a washing line.

What strikes me about this image as a whole, is the contrast between now and then as it exists in the contrast between the black and white of the photograph and the colour of the day. This colour, and the sense of the nowness of the present, helps strengthen my own empathetic feelings towards those long since lost - and all but forgotten - to history.

The fact the map hangs on a line like an item of washing, also reinforces the sense of domesticity which is a theme running through some of the postcard portraits, many of which were taken in the backyards of soldiers (or their parents), where evidence of the everydayness of domestic life is in abundance.

One such photograph shows a young couple who've recently been married. They stand, unsure of what the future brings, both wearing a look full of apprehension, staring into the lens of the camera, as if this 'clock for seeing' as Barthes once referred to them, really could show them the future.

The image onto which their portrait has been projected shows the reverse side of the map, where the threads used to stitch the past together hang like the cut threads of countless lives.

GPS Pot

2011-10-01T17:43:00.000+01:00

Just as I've been working using stitched fragments of canvas (to convey the idea of the past as being a reimagined collection of pieces 'stitched' together in the mind) I've also started using pottery; creating pots and cracking them, using lines based on GPS data.

The vocabulary of the 'find' is what interests me; the fragments of movement (which the shards of pottery reflect) reassembled to create an approximate whole. It's new work and the following images are first attempts (the pieces have yet to be dried and reassembled) using a coil pot built with self-drying clay.

No doubt subsequent pieces will be much more refined, using bigger pots and more detailed GPS data.

Radio Interview at Bartlemas Chapel

2011-10-01T15:55:00.000+01:00

The following interview was recorded with me as part of an outside broadcast at Bartlemas Chapel in East Oxford on 29th September. You can read more about the dig here (Archaeology in East Oxford website) and on my own project pages, Artefact.

Serre Palimpsest (completed)

2011-10-01T13:30:00.000+01:00

I've just completed - after several weeks of stitching - a piece of work called 'Serre Palimpsest' the creation of which I've been documenting on my blog. It became apparent soon after I started this work that this was a piece with two sides which may seem an obvious thing to say, but it seemed to me that the two sides we're saying different things, just as things below the surface say something different to those above, whilst as the same time remaining connected.

The two images below show the completed work. The first, the front:

The second, the reverse:

The lines stitched in black show the roads before the war (the modern day road system is pretty much the same), the blue stitching and red show the British and German trenches respectively - with No Man's Land between, and the green stitching shows the modern day field boundaries.

What was interesting about creating the work was how the threads from the reverse of the piece would emerge into the front, mirroring the way pieces of the past (bits of old shell etc.) find their way to the surface after many years below the ground. The cut lines on the reverse made me think of the paths soldiers would have taken to get there; paths which in many cases were cut in the Somme.

Occasionally, the threads would be tied together on the reverse which again made me think of how our lives today are similar to those who died in that their lives were lived lives too; of course their circumstances couldn't have been more different, but the fact is that the vast statistics of the Somme comprise real individuals.

To take the photographs I hung the piece on the washing line. The weather was unseasonably hot and sunny, much like the weather would have been on the first day of the Battle of the Somme (1st July 1916). As I looked as the work swaying gently in the breeze, I thought about the photographs taken in the back gardens of those who were about to set off for the Front. I was reminded too of the backdrops used in studio-based photographs.

Absent Presence

2011-09-25T12:25:00.003+01:00

See also: Artefact.

At a recent meeting with the East Oxford Archaeology Project we were given a short talk about an upcoming dig at Bartlemas Chapel. A number of things interested me in light of the work I've already done there, one of which was the image of a resistance survey carried out in the grounds of the chapel. At once, a sort of chain reaction of images flicked through my mind, which I've tried to recreate below.

The first image is a Resistance Survey image from Iffley village. The dark patches indicate areas of low resistance while the lighter patches indicate areas of high resistance - such as the remains of buildings, roads, walls etc. I like the fact that images such as these can reveal a footprint of the past, not only in terms of where structures such as these once stood, but where people once walked, following specific paths. What might today be just a large field where one can walk in any direction is revealed through techniques such as these as being a place where people walked along certain lines. The ground is revealed as a palimpsest of movement, where, just as fragments of pottery etc might be found, fragments of movement can also be revealed.

Looking at a Resistance survey image (such as that above) during the meeting, I was reminded of an image from a previous work of mine which I exhibited last year. The image was part of an overall picture of the Belzec Death Camp in Poland, photographed from a plane in 1944. It was a place where in 1942, over half a million people were murdered, but walking there now, one cannot image that many people. Walking around the memorial, following a prescribed path, you find yourself looking in at the space enclosed, contemplating the half a million lines of movement that ended there. Where did these lines stretch back to? Where had they come from?

Thinking this way is one small way to establish empathy with those who died in places such as Belzec and the image below, when coupled with the image above resonates with this idea.

The next image is a detail from a photograph taken of someone in 1903. This person has of course long since disappeared from the world and yet they remain. They aren't of course visible in the places where they lived and worked (for example on Headington Hill where this image was taken) but through light (just as with electricity in the Reistance survey) their trace is revealed. The aesthetic link with the images above strengthens this connection.

During my observation at Bartlemas Chapel last week, I wrote the following:

"The book on the sill is open at a text on St. Bartholomew. The words are silent on the page.
I read the first few words on the saint. I turn the page - again the ice-cream van. The page creaks like the pew I sat on. I can hear the words as I read them in my head, although of course they make no sound. I imagine hundreds and thousands of internal voices of people who have stood inside the chapel."

Looking at the bible in the chapel, I saw the words as being like the fragmenetary image of past movement revealed through a Resistance survey, or the image of someone frozen in a photograph. These are words that in this small space have been heard over the course of hundreds of years; words that have mingled with the thoughts of those listening. Reading the bible within that space, I could hear the words in my mind - just as I could hear my thoughts - and yet everything was silent. (Silence here equates with (apparent) emptiness - the field where once there were buildings and people. Words read silently mirrors the electric current passing into the ground, revealing a pattern of movement beneath - lost movement, lost thoughts).

I tried to imagine the thoughts of those who've listened over countless generations. If they could be written down what would they tell us? After the meeting, I thought about the aesthetic of the Resistance survey and the photographs above, then pictured fragments of words in much the same way - just like the image below.

Bartlemas Chapel Observation

2011-09-21T00:22:00.004+01:00

Taken from Artefact - a website concerning Contemporary Art and Archaeology.

I'm making this initial visit to the chapel a few days before archaeological excavations are due to begin within its grounds. I'm interested in how my initial observations might be tied in with both the archaeology discovered there and the chapel's history. How far is empathy an augmented discourse between bodily experience and knowledge?

As usual, I began by observing the chapel using a Goethean methodology, which - as if often the case - ended up following its own course.

Pre-Observation

Leaving Cowley Road and walking up the track to the chapel was like leaving the modern world behind; not completely for the outside around the chapel and here inside once can still hear the traffic humming like an overhead cable carrying electricity.

The first thing I notice when entering the chapel is the smell; the smell of age, of the past - the smell of the rooms in the church I'd attended as a child. Old books, paper and damp.

The light is slowly beginning to fade being as it is 6pm and the weather grey and raining.

I shall endeavour to carry out the observation without electric light for as long as is possible.

Part 1

The chapel is small comprising two parts divided by a screen. The main door on the chapel's western side is locked and one enters through a small door on the left hand (north) side. (I'm going to carry out my observation inside rather than out - not least because of the rain, but also because I can easily record outside at a later date).

The walls are all whitewashed; they are rough and bumpy beneath revealing the stone. There are five windows, each of which is arched and through which the last light of the day is creeping. Behind me to my left is a large door in front of which are stacked wooden chairs - no doubt for congregations when services are held here, which they still are. Along the left hand wall more chairs are lined up in a row - eight of them. At the end facing me and in front of the screen are two small pews. Running alongside the right hand wall is another row of chairs - nine of them. There is a radiator, an old wooden cupboard on the side of which are electric sockets and a light switch. I'm sitting on a small wooden bench. In the corner to my right is a large red candle holder replete with candle - no doubt for ceremonial purposes.

Ahead, either side of the doorway through the screen are two small stools. Beyond the screen, from my position, I can see a wooden altar with a crucifix and four candles. A stool stands before them on which rests a box. Above the altar is a window and on the left and right hand walls are also windows. In the wall in this half of the building, on the right hand side from where I am sitting is another window upon the sill of which - which is deep - sits a book, open on a small lectern. Another lectern stands next to me on my right with a book containing the names of visitors. I write my name in it now.

I get up and walk. The hum of the traffic is weak like the light. I can hear the wind rustling the trees outside. Outside the window above the book is an apple tree covered with fruit. My footsteps echo.

I measure the first part of the chapel which is approximately 8 paces. The floor in this part of the chapel is parquet. In the part ahead of me it's stone.

The pew creaks as I sit down. There are two small pews divided in two to accommodate two people. There are candle stands with low candles (burned down) on my left, a crucifix on a pole and a blue bottle of gas. On the right hand side is another blue bottle, two more well-used candles, four chairs and a picture of Christ. I see now that the altar is stone. Either side in the corners are two wood burners. The window in the left wall is narrower than the others and has a deep sill. This part of the chapel again measures approximately 8 paces.

On a window sill (right) is the curled body of a dead fly. Outside I see the apple trees and the leaves on the wet grass.

The altar is covered by a cloth - green and another white one beneath.

The bible on what I now see is a folding lectern is open at John. Tomorrow's reading, John 3:13-17.

The ceiling is wooden with numerous coloured shields placed between the beams. The light is fading and it's getting harder to see.

As I stand before the altar my face is drawn up to the window above it and to the sky. I turn to my left and see the old building that stands alongside. The wind stirs again. There is a white iron work chair in the garden outside. No-one is sitting in it of course.

The window above the large door in the western end of the chapel is smaller than all the others. Again I find my eyes drawn up towards it, to the pale grey light of the sky. There is a large hole in the wall on the right hand side (as I look at it) no doubt where a wooden bolt was once used to secure the church.

There are two circles, unwhitewashed either side of the door.

There are four 'arches' supporting the ceiling. The wood appears to be very old. The stone of the floor around the altar is patterned almost as if something has spilled upon it and not quite dried.

The width of the chapel is 7 paces.

I look again at the book full of names and dates - someone from as far away as Australia has visited here. In just a few pages we're back at the start of 2005. I think of what I've done in these few pages - I think of the people I know who have recently passed away.

As the light fades the windows become a stronger presence as they hold what remains of the light outside. I can hear the chimes of an ice-cream van - a sound from my childhood. But although the windows are dominant, I don't find myself looking beyond - just at them.

Echoes and footsteps. Car horns.

Part 2

I allow the cars and the sounds of the modern world to fall away and instead I listen only to the wind blowing through the trees. I look outside at the trees. I imagine the fruit trees across hundreds of seasons, bearing fruit, dropping the fruit, surviving the winter, blooming again in the spring. I imagine how much more important apple trees would have been long ago; a vital source of food rather than something one might idly pick while strolling past. The book on the sill is open at a text on St. Bartholomew. The words are silent on the page.

I read the first few words on the saint. I turn the page - again the ice-cream van. The page creaks like the pew I sat on. I can hear the words as I read them in my head, although of course they make no sound. I imagine hundreds and thousands of internal voices of people who have stood inside the chapel.

The shadow cast by my hand is more prominent here before the window.

I pick a spot on the left hand side of the chapel looking towards the altar. I imagine all those who have stood here in my place over the centuries, looking to their right at whatever was outside; up ahead through the window; at the others standing there with them; and I begin to imagine those other people. I begin to try and imagine their presence.

The crows outside help dispel the modern world. I think of the floor - how it would have been. I imagine the city behind me, Oxford as it was a few hundred years ago.

I move around the chapel before the screen and glance behind me to the side and up ahead and where I see the walls and windows I imagine people. Each glance is accompanied with a thought - my thoughts.

I try and get a sense of my body in relation to the chapel.

The shadows grow across the floor, blurring to become the first signs of nightfall. Forms in the chapel, like the legs of the chairs against the walls begin to disappear. Everything becomes a shadow - perhaps even me.

I imagine the large locked door being opened and people filing into the light behind. I picture that light filling the chapel, chasing away the shadows.

I'm aware of my body - how my back is aching - how I'm hungry.

The green of the leaves outside is still very visible. Everything is brown, green and grey.

My shadow is faint on the wall.

I move to stand before the altar. I turn and face the large door. Lines of sight from people long since gone still linger. I turn and face the altar. My eyes are drawn to the window, following these eye lines behind me.

I imagine the candles flickering, casting shadows on the walls as the light continues to fade. These candles which are little more than stubs of wax with short blackened wicks and puddles of wax around them.

The sound of the traffic cannot be stopped. It's always present like interference. The only way to hear the past is with my body.

Part 3

(Rather hard as I can hardly see to write.)

Fleeting, embodied shadows.

I try and think of myself as the chapel. There is, like everything, an outside (exterior) and an inside (interior). I can feel my body - my presence - not so much as me but as something within the chapel.

Contact with the floor, with the furniture means that the chapel and I are one.

NB I have to put on the light - and only then am I aware how dark it is outside. The shift from an external light and interior dark to interior light and external dark is striking. When I turn off the light it's reversed.

I'm aware of my heart as I sit with my eyes closed - of my breathing. My back against the wall - my breathing and heartbeat becomes that of the chapel.

Exterior / interior.
Beyond the chapel and inside.
Beyond my own body and inside.
A reversal of the two.
Interior voice reading / exterior voice listening.

With the lights on, the light beyond the window is blueish above the door. Up ahead, the window above the altar is dark.

Again there is almost a grain in the building - of sight. Looking towards the altar one is aware of the individual; then turning round, of a crowd.

Serre Palimpsest II

2011-08-09T23:44:00.000+01:00

I've just finished the second phase of a piece of work called Serre Palimpsest the results of which can be seen below.

Reverse side

So far I've stitched in the roads around Serre and the British and German trenches from the First World War. Next I'll cut the fabric again to stitch in the modern day field boundaries.

Creativity

2011-07-10T16:06:00.002+01:00

"Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected."
William Plomer

Excavated Charcoal Drawings

2011-06-27T19:21:00.003+01:00

Drawings made with old charcoal excavated from a test-pit, during an archaeological dig in Iffley, Oxford.

Everyday Surveys

2011-06-27T19:15:00.002+01:00

An area in which I'm interested is the idea of the past as having once been the present - an obvious point maybe, but often a more empathetic engagement with the past is made more difficult by the way in which history is packagaed or received - as a story with a beginning, a middle and an end. It's almost as if those whom it concerns are characters in a work of fiction, whose actions are somehow predetermined.

Of course all historic events and the actions comprising them were made as part of an everyday world; that's not to say major events such as war are 'everyday', but that they're set against a backdrop of 'everydayness.'

Having carried out a Plane Table Survey, I wanted to find a way of surveying the everyday diagrammatically. I've made everyday 'surveys' before in the form of lists but the images below are an attempt to articulate the everyday - as I've said - visually.

Archaeological Dig - Roman Coin 2

2011-06-23T00:03:00.000+01:00

Since carrying out the observation of the Roman Coin discovered during a dig on 11th June I've been thinking about the coin in greater detail. One of the things which interests me about it are the vivid colours formed during its time in the ground; in particular those on the reverse side of the head, as can be seen in the image below:

It's easy to think of the coin as having occupied two distinct periods (i.e. the 3rd century and today) and that it's almost two distinct entities; the 'new' coin of some 1700 years ago, and the clipped and rather decayed coin it is now. But of course this coin is a singular entity which has occupied a span of time covering a range of years difficult for us to imagine. To borrow from Bill Viola, this coin has 'lived' this same continuous moment ever since it was 'conceived' - or in this case minted - and for much of its existence, it's been laying out of sight, in silence, underground.

At some point 1700 years ago, the coin (we might assume) was lost and during the dig a week or so ago it was found. I find it easier however, to conceive of the coin's entire existence if I forget these two 'divisions' and think instead of the coin as always existing - not lost or found, just always there - somewhere. Stating that it was first lost and then found creates a kind of void in between, in which the coin just sits - not really existing at all. Of course the coin was in existence for hundreds of years; before the city of Oxford was even established, and throughout the time during which it was made ancient. And in that time, beneath the ground, things were acting upon it, slowly changing its shape and colour; to make the beautiful colours we see today. The colours therefore can be linked to the passing of time - to the coin's continuous existence. There's a correlation between the passing of time and the formation of the various colours.

There is also something rather poetic about this as regards the way we imagine the past. For me, the distant past is often a dark and silent place (in the sense that it's largely unknowable - not that it really was dark and silent) but one in which there was movement and colour - just as with the coin beneath the ground. Although out of sight to us today, we know that that things moved, that things were formed, that entities acted upon or influenced other entities. That there was of course colour.

Thinking about the coin a little more, I realised how else it's changed from the 3rd century AD. Back then it wouldn't have been valued as an object in its own right per se, but rather in regards to what it represented, i.e. a monetary unit. If I have a pound coin in my hand, I don't value the object (the coin) so much as what it represents (a pound sterling). Now of course, the Roman coin's original monetary value has been lost and it's the coin as an object which has become important.

Serre Palimpsest

2011-06-19T23:22:00.000+01:00

Stitched Trench Map - Patterns

2011-06-19T22:38:00.008+01:00

Three patterns will be used for this piece of work: 1) a map of the pre-war road system around Serre, France; 2) a map of the First World War trench system around the same area, and 3) a map of the area's modern day field boundaries.

A single piece of fabric will be cut, firstly according to the pattern of roads.

This same piece will then be re-cut according to the pattern of trenches.

And finally, this will be cut a third time according to modern day field boundaries.

The final stitched piece of fabric might then look something like this:

Looking at the images reminded me of star constellations, and so I inverted two of the images to see how they looked.

See Serre Palimpsest.

Belzec Video: Snow 6

2011-06-18T18:48:00.001+01:00

The image below shows (on the left) an earlier work about Belzec (1 to the power of 500,000) from 2010, and on the right, what would be a video (using the same number of squares) derived from the video filmed at Belzec in 1999.

Belzec Video: Snow 5

2011-06-18T18:30:00.001+01:00

The same idea as before applied to footage of trees at Belzec. The number of squares used is the same as an earlier work.

Belzec Video: Snow 4

2011-06-18T14:10:00.002+01:00

Video version of that described in the previous entry regarding this project.

Belzec Video: Snow 3

2011-06-18T12:02:00.001+01:00

What interests me about the video footage from the archaeological dig at Belzec (1999) is the sense of colour and movement. Often, when one is researching the Holocaust and sites like Belzec, most of the imagery one encounters is black and white and often still (although of course there is a great deal of moving footage as well).

As I've said, it's difficult, given the quality of the footage, to make anything that would resemble a narrative of the investigation carried out there. So taking the idea of colour and movement as something I wanted to work with, I decided to process the video and to use a mosaic filter to reduce the image to pure forms.

When I was an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I produced a series of paintings based on this idea in a work entitled 'A Single Death is a Tragedy, a Million Deaths is a Statistic.' I was looking at the idea of anonymity and the past as anonymous (something which I'm still looking at today) reducing the image of a man, through a series of canvases to a single coloured pixel.

One of the ways of understanding an event as horrific as the Holocaust on an empathetic level (as far as is possible) is through understanding that the past was once the present that what happened in places such as Belzec happened when the past was now. When I sit here now and look out the window, I see the trees move, I see their colours, I see the sky, the clouds drifting and so on. I see movement and colour.

Whenever I look at images of the past, especially those in black and white, I try to imagine the scene as if it was now. I colour it, I imagine what happened immediately after the shutter was released. The smallest details become especially important. When I myself visited Belzec in 2007, I was aware of the world moving all around me, of the trees especially; of the sounds they made and the colour. Putting this together with what I knew had happened there, enabled me in some small way to empathise with those who died.

The stills below are taken from the processed video and even though they reduce the place to pixels (and therefore render it anonymous) there is something about the individual squares of colour which serve somehow to represent both the anonymous individual and the nownes of the present.

Belzec Video: Snow 2

2011-06-18T00:40:00.005+01:00

Edited footage shot in 1999 at the site of the former Belzec Death Camp in Poland. The footage is of very poor quality and as an artist, I'm looking at how it might be used in my own work.

Belzec Video: Snow

2011-06-17T21:32:00.006+01:00

About two years ago I was given recordings of an archaeological investigation at the site of the Belzec Death Camp in Poland (1999). These investigations were carried out prior to the construction of the memorial there and my task was to edit the videos into something that could be seen as a narrative of those events.

The videos however were less than brilliant and any documentary-type video was going to prove impossible. However, I wanted to work with the video in some way or another and in 2010, as part of Holocaust Memorial Day, I exhibited a number of images based in part on the original video.

This year, I want to make a piece based on the video and the stills I exhibited in 2010. The initial idea is to capture all the pieces of 'snow' from the recordings and to arrange them in a sequence. The 'snow' represents the end of something, and it's the idea of something ending which interests me as regards this piece.

Eventually I will develop the video using the colour/documentary footage on the tapes, intercutting them with the 'snow' elements. I will put up extracts of each stage as and when they're complete.

Below is a short extract of the snow sequence.

The Trial of Stephen Hedges 1828 in Morse Code

2011-06-17T14:06:00.001+01:00

Transcript

Berkshire Easter Sessions Newbury 1815. H. Stockwell, J. Harper (not in custody,) and S. Hedges of Abingdon, were indicted for stealing 154 lbs of lead, at Radley, the property of Benjamin Kent and Charles Jones, of Oxford, for receiving the lead, knowing it to be stolen. Stockwell and Hedges pleaded Guilty, but Jones pleaded "Not Guilty". Jones was then put on trial for receiving the lead with a felonious knowledge etc. from the two prisoners who pleaded guilty. Mr. Shepherd said, he appeared on behalf of Mr. Kent, the prosecutor of Jones, under a new statute, (sec. 447, Geo. IV. C.29) which made the offence a felony. By the 54th sec. of the same statute the receiving of property feloniously stolen would constitute a felony. The circumstances of the case were sufficiently strong to satisfy the Jury that the lead was stolen. Mr. Kent examined I live at RadleyHouse about 100 yards from the office is a larder the roof is covered with lead. In January last a considerable quantity of it was stolen. Crossexamined by Mr. Talfourd I am tenant of the house. Sir James Bowyer is the proprietor. I am yearly tenant. James Smith examined I am servant to Mr. Kent the hips of the larder were covered with lead. The lead was stolen in January last I saw it gone on the 29th January. There was a ladder found near to the ditch. There were three hips cleared of lead. Richard Burgess examined I live at Abingdon, I am a sawyer on the 28th of January I went to Oxford, and on the road, having some bones in my cart to sell, I met the three men, Stockwell, Hedges and Harper. Hedges asked me if I were going to Oxford? And would I carry a parcel? I carried a parcel for them. Harper went back for something, for a bag the other two went on with me. Near Sir G. Bowyer's Lodge I was desired to stop. I at first objected, but I did stop about five minutes.

Harper soon afterwards came up with a bag they went into a plantation, near where Mr. Kent lives they were not five minutes away when they brought a bag, which appeared to be very heavy. I never saw what was in the bag. Stockwell carried a piece of lead on his shoulder. This was afterwards put in the bag by Hedges and Stockwell. Shortly after Jones met the prisoners, and they had some conversation together. I went on to Oxford, to Mr. Round's wharf and near the gates I put the parcel of lead down, and delivered the bones to be weighed. Stockwell and Jones came up in about half an hour, and put the bag with the lead into the cart again. I said, where are you to take this? And Jones said "Come on back again follow me." I followed him up the Cityroad and near the Castle met Hedges and Harper. They turned back with us through Butcherrow when Jones called out, "Hold off there here it is," meaning the place where it was to be taken to. The bag was taken out of the cart by Jones and Stockwell, and carried up a passage by Stockwell. They soon after came back, but I did not notice they had the bag. Jones said, "What are you going to give the man for bringing it?" When Stockwell said give him sixpence, and Jones did so. Crossexamined by Mr. Talfourd I am a sawyer I don't collect bones. I don't deal in lead. I did not know what was in the bag I had no suspicion whatever. I was carrying the bones for Mr. Owen of Abingdon. Mr. John King examined I am a glazier, in Oxford. I know Jones on the 28th January I saw him at my house. He came to say he had some lead to sell. I told him I wanted lead and asked him what price he wanted? He said 16s a hundred. I said lead was low in price, and if it was good for any thing I would buy it. He brought me the lead in about half an hour he said he had a hundred and a half.

Three young men came with him, but I should not know them again. I paid Jones for the lead he received 20s. 6d. It was in three pieces, I believe. Some pieces were afterwards cut up by my shopman. It corresponded with the hips from which it had been taken. James Smith produced the lead. The lead was given to me by Mr. Walker, the gaoler. I marked the lead before the Magistrates. Crossexamined. The price I gave was a fair price. I had before dealt with Jones, and have known him three or four years. I had never heard any thing against his character. Mr. D. Godfrey examined. I was present at the examination of Jones what he said I took down myself. This is the signature of Mr. Bowles, the Magistrate. The prisoner declined signing his statement. [It stated that the three prisoners asked him where there was a fence for lead. And then corroborated a good deal of the testimony as adduced by the prosecution.] Mr. Talfourd submitted there was no evidence of receiving to go to the Jury no actual receiving into possession. Mr Shepherd. That will be for the Jury to decide upon. Mr. Talfourd. And that is precisely what I mean to say. Chairman. He receives the lead, and makes a bargain for the sale of it. And if that is not receiving, I am at a loss to know what receiving is. Rev. Mr. Sawbridge. And he pays the carriage of the lead. E. Gardener Esq. Yes, and he helped to carry it up the passage. The prisoner in his defence said, I asked Stockwell how he came by the lead, when he replied Hedges is captain, and got it where he had been at work.

I said I would go to Mr. King, for there I could get a fair price. Stockwell wanted 14s or more for the hundred weight, and I told them all to go to Mr. King if they pleased. At last it was agreed I was to have all above 13s. for the first hundred, and all above 14s for the remainder. I have been left friendless for nine years, and have got the best living I could buying sheepskins, rabbitskins, or anything else, for I was not nice. When the young gentleman are at the University, I make pastry, and carry it about from house to house. I have one friend in court, a Mr. Dyer. Isaac Dyer called. I am brotherinlaw to the prisoner I am a confectioner at Abingdon I have known Jones for twelve years nearly, and always understood him to be an upright and bright character. He has been a youth of a thousand honestyry, and for getting through difficulties by industrysy. The Chairman summed up the case to the Jury. If the Jury were of opinion, that he did not know the lead was stolen that he had not a guilty knowledge, they must acquit him. Verdict Not Guilty. The Chairman cautioned Jones, previous to his discharge, to avoid purchasing lead and other articles, in future he had had a very narrow escape. Jones. I trust in God I shall it shall be a thorough caution. Hedges and Stockwell were ordered to stand at the bar, and were told their offence was not of a trifling nature, for, by a very old statute, it was severely punished and by the present statute the course may pass sentence of transportation. Under all the circumstances the sentence of the court was, that they be transported for seven years. In quitting the bar, Stockwell struck Hedges familiarly on the back, and laughed.

Transcript in Morse Code

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.... . / -.-. .- .-. .-. .. .- --. . / --- ..-. / - .... . / .-.. . .- -.. .-.-.- / . .-.-.- / --. .- .-. -.. . -. . .-. / . ... --.- .-.-.- / -.-- . ... --..-- / .- -. -.. / .... . / .... . .-.. .--. . -.. / - --- / -.-. .- .-. .-. -.-- / .. - / ..- .--. / - .... . / .--. .- ... ... .- --. . .-.-.- / - .... . / .--. .-. .. ... --- -. . .-. / .. -. / .... .. ... / -.. . ..-. . -. -.-. . / ... .- .. -.. --..-- / .. / .- ... -.- . -.. / ... - --- -.-. -.- .-- . .-.. .-.. / .... --- .-- / .... . / -.-. .- -- . / -... -.-- / - .... . / .-.. . .- -.. --..-- / .-- .... . -. / .... . / .-. . .--. .-.. .. . -.. / .... . -.. --. . ... / .. ... / -.-. .- .--. - .- .. -. --..-- / .- -. -.. / --. --- - / .. - / .-- .... . .-. . / .... . / .... .- -.. / -... . . -. / .- - / .-- --- .-. -.- .-.-.- / .. / ... .- .. -.. / .. / .-- --- ..- .-.. -.. / --. --- / - --- / -- .-. .-.-.- / -.- .. -. --. --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . .-. . / .. / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. / --. . - / .- / ..-. .- .. .-. / .--. .-. .. -.-. . .-.-.- / ... - --- -.-. -.- .-- . .-.. .-.. / .-- .- -. - . -.. / .---- ....- ... / --- .-. / -- --- .-. . / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / .... ..- -. -.. .-. . -.. / .-- . .. --. .... - --..-- / .- -. -.. / .. / - --- .-.. -.. / - .... . -- / .- .-.. .-.. / - --- / --. --- / - --- / -- .-. .-.-.- / -.- .. -. --. / .. ..-. / - .... . -.-- / .--. .-.. . .- ... . -.. .-.-.- / .- - / .-.. .- ... - / .. - / .-- .- ... / .- --. .-. . . -.. / .. / .-- .- ... / - --- / .... .- ...- . / .- .-.. .-.. / .- -... --- ...- . / .---- ...-- ... .-.-.- / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / ..-. .. .-. ... - / .... ..- -. -.. .-. . -.. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- .-.. .-.. / .- -... --- ...- . / .---- ....- ... / ..-. --- .-. / - .... . / .-. . -- .- .. -. -.. . .-. .-.-.- / .. / .... .- ...- . / -... . . -. / .-.. . ..-. - / ..-. .-. .. . -. -.. .-.. . ... ... / ..-. --- .-. / -. .. -. . / -.-- . .- .-. ... --..-- / .- -. -.. / .... .- ...- . / --. --- - / - .... . / -... . ... - / .-.. .. ...- .. -. --. / .. / -.-. --- ..- .-.. -.. / -... ..- -.-- .. -. --. / ... .... . . .--. ... -.- .. -. ... --..-- / .-. .- -... -... .. - ... -.- .. -. ... --..-- / --- .-. / .- -. -.-- - .... .. -. --. / . .-.. ... . --..-- / ..-. --- .-. / .. / .-- .- ... / -. --- - / -. .. -.-. . .-.-.- / .-- .... . -. / - .... . / -.-- --- ..- -. --. / --. . -. - .-.. . -- .- -. / .- .-. . / .- - / - .... . / ..- -. .. ...- . .-. ... .. - -.-- --..-- / .. / -- .- -.- . / .--. .- ... - .-. -.-- --..-- / .- -. -.. / -.-. .- .-. .-. -.-- / .. - / .- -... --- ..- - / ..-. .-. --- -- / .... --- ..- ... . / - --- / .... --- ..- ... . .-.-.- / .. / .... .- ...- . / --- -. . / ..-. .-. .. . -. -.. / .. -. / -.-. --- ..- .-. - --..-- / .- / -- .-. .-.-.- / -.. -.-- . .-. .-.-.- / .. ... .- .- -.-. / -.. -.-- . .-. / -.-. .- .-.. .-.. . -.. .-.-.- / .. / .- -- / -... .-. --- - .... . .-. .. -. .-.. .- .-- / - --- / - .... . / .--. .-. .. ... --- -. . .-. / .. / .- -- / .- / -.-. --- -. ..-. . -.-. - .. --- -. . .-. / .- - / .- -... .. -. --. -.. --- -. / .. / .... .- ...- . / -.- -. --- .-- -. / .--- --- -. . ... / ..-. --- .-. / - .-- . .-.. ...- . / -.-- . .- .-. ... / -. . .- .-. .-.. -.-- --..-- / .- -. -.. / .- .-.. .-- .- -.-- ... / ..- -. -.. . .-. ... - --- --- -.. / .... .. -- / - --- / -... . / .- -. / ..- .--. .-. .. --. .... - / .- -. -.. / -... .-. .. --. .... - / -.-. .... .- .-. .- -.-. - . .-. .-.-.- / .... . / .... .- ... / -... . . -. / .- / -.-- --- ..- - .... / --- ..-. / .- / - .... --- ..- ... .- -. -.. / .... --- -. . ... - -.-- .-. -.-- --..-- / .- -. -.. / ..-. --- .-. / --. . - - .. -. --. / - .... .-. --- ..- --. .... / -.. .. ..-. ..-. .. -.-. ..- .-.. - .. . ... / -... -.-- / .. -. -.. ..- ... - .-. -.-- ... -.-- .-.-.- / - .... . / -.-. .... .- .. .-. -- .- -. / ... ..- -- -- . -.. / ..- .--. / - .... . / -.-. .- ... . / - --- / - .... . / .--- ..- .-. -.-- .-.-.- / .. ..-. / - .... . / .--- ..- .-. -.-- / .-- . .-. . / --- ..-. / --- .--. .. -. .. --- -. --..-- / - .... .- - / .... . / -.. .. -.. / -. --- - / -.- -. --- .-- / - .... . / .-.. . .- -.. / .-- .- ... / ... - --- .-.. . -. / - .... .- - / .... . / .... .- -.. / -. --- - / .- / --. ..- .. .-.. - -.-- / -.- -. --- .-- .-.. . -.. --. . --..-- / - .... . -.-- / -- ..- ... - / .- -.-. --.- ..- .. - / .... .. -- .-.-.- / ...- . .-. -.. .. -.-. - / -. --- - / --. ..- .. .-.. - -.-- .-.-.- / - .... . / -.-. .... .- .. .-. -- .- -. / -.-. .- ..- - .. --- -. . -.. / .--- --- -. . ... --..-- / .--. .-. . ...- .. --- ..- ... / - --- / .... .. ... / -.. .. ... -.-. .... .- .-. --. . --..-- / - --- / .- ...- --- .. -.. / .--. ..- .-. -.-. .... .- ... .. -. --. / .-.. . .- -.. / .- -. -.. / --- - .... . .-. / .- .-. - .. -.-. .-.. . ... --..-- / .. -. / ..-. ..- - ..- .-. . / .... . / .... .- -.. / .... .- -.. / .- / ...- . .-. -.-- / -. .- .-. .-. --- .-- / . ... -.-. .- .--. . .-.-.- / .--- --- -. . ... .-.-.- / .. / - .-. ..- ... - / .. -. / --. --- -.. / .. / ... .... .- .-.. .-.. / .. - / ... .... .- .-.. .-.. / -... . / .- / - .... --- .-. --- ..- --. .... / -.-. .- ..- - .. --- -. .-.-.- / .... . -.. --. . ... / .- -. -.. / ... - --- -.-. -.- .-- . .-.. .-.. / .-- . .-. . / --- .-. -.. . .-. . -.. / - --- / ... - .- -. -.. / .- - / - .... . / -... .- .-. --..-- / .- -. -.. / .-- . .-. . / - --- .-.. -.. / - .... . .. .-. / --- ..-. ..-. . -. -.-. . / .-- .- ... / -. --- - / --- ..-. / .- / - .-. .. ..-. .-.. .. -. --. / -. .- - ..- .-. . --..-- / ..-. --- .-. --..-- / -... -.-- / .- / ...- . .-. -.-- / --- .-.. -.. / ... - .- - ..- - . --..-- / .. - / .-- .- ... / ... . ...- . .-. . .-.. -.-- / .--. ..- -. .. ... .... . -.. / .- -. -.. / -... -.-- / - .... . / .--. .-. . ... . -. - / ... - .- - ..- - . / - .... . / -.-. --- ..- .-. ... . / -- .- -.-- / .--. .- ... ... / ... . -. - . -. -.-. . / --- ..-. / - .-. .- -. ... .--. --- .-. - .- - .. --- -. .-.-.- / ..- -. -.. . .-. / .- .-.. .-.. / - .... . / -.-. .. .-. -.-. ..- -- ... - .- -. -.-. . ... / - .... . / ... . -. - . -. -.-. . / --- ..-. / - .... . / -.-. --- ..- .-. - / .-- .- ... --..-- / - .... .- - / - .... . -.-- / -... . / - .-. .- -. ... .--. --- .-. - . -.. / ..-. --- .-. / ... . ...- . -. / -.-- . .- .-. ... .-.-.- / .. -. / --.- ..- .. - - .. -. --. / - .... . / -... .- .-. --..-- / ... - --- -.-. -.- .-- . .-.. .-.. / ... - .-. ..- -.-. -.- / .... . -.. --. . ... / ..-. .- -- .. .-.. .. .- .-. .-.. -.-- / --- -. / - .... . / -... .- -.-. -.- --..-- / .- -. -.. / .-.. .- ..- --. .... . -.. .-.-.

Heavy Water Sleep: Pages 14 & 15

2011-06-17T12:19:00.000+01:00

Original Pages

Version 1

Version 2

Archaeological Dig - Roman Coin

2011-06-16T15:09:00.011+01:00

Further to my entry on the archaeological dig in Iffley, Oxford, I have carried out some extra work on the Roman coin we discovered whilst excavating the test-pit. The coin in question, dating from the reign of Emperor Postumus (260-269 AD) can be seen below.

Click here for the text of the observation.

Heavy Water Sleep: Pages 12 & 13

2011-06-14T23:33:00.001+01:00

Original Version

Version 1

Version 2

Archaeological Dig

2011-06-12T21:03:00.001+01:00

For the past day and a half I've been working on the East Oxford Archaeological Project, digging a test-pit in a garden in Iffley Village. Although I've had an interest in archaeology for a long time now, I'd never dug before and so the last two days have been both good fun and very informative.

The weather on the first day was good and digging was fairly easy (save for some roots). As I said, I'd never dug before so it was interesting - even on this small scale - to see the process involved; how everything was observed and recorded.

There were a few finds; miscellaneous bits of pottery (including fragments of flowerpot and a possible Roman rim!), a curious brooch-like item, some bits of clay pipe and the piece-de-la-resistance, a Roman coin from the reign of Emperor Postumus (AD 260-269). The image below shows the position of the coin being recorded with GPS.

Now, most of us in our time have seen a few Roman coins; not least in museums. But finding this one coin (which, I was told, was in suprisingly good condition) was quite remarkable. It's not a rare coin; it isn't worth a great deal of money, but that we were the first to see it and to touch it in over 1700 years was amazing. Indeed, the very fact that in the 3rd century someone had walked nearby and dropped the coin where it lay in the soil until its discovery yesterday astounds me. The 3rd century seems - and in many ways is - a completely alien world, and yet, as the coin reminds us, it was the same world as we inhabit today.

Coins are of course objects of transaction. They are given by one to another in exchange for - amongst other things - goods and services. And behind every coin is a complex network of these transactions of which we, as finders, become a part - as much a part as the person who dropped it over 1700 years ago.

It's also astonishing to think that, within the local context, the coin was lost centuries before Oxford - now regarded as an ancient university, was even established as a town. I couldn't help think, as I stood in the garden, of how the local landscape looked when the coin was lost, and to then make my way within my imagination down to the centre of town, to 'see' what was there.

Heavy Water Sleep: Page 11

2011-06-08T10:56:00.000+01:00

Original Version

Version 1

Version 2

Arthur King Website

2011-05-21T09:41:00.000+01:00

Buy the ebook directly from the website (in PDF) format for just £1.99. Visit www.arthurking.org for more details.

TV celebrity chef Miss La Fay is nothing but a recipe for disaster. Unbeknown to her millions of fans right across the globe, she's really Morgan la Fay and the Arthurian Sorceress is cooking up a plot to take over the world. All that stands in her way is a small boy called Arthur King and all that stands in his - although he means to help - is the hapless wizard of mythical yore, Merlin, Morgan La Fay's erstwhile enemy.

With killer spells like 'cheese and chutney melts' to contend with, Arthur and Merlin journey through time in a bid to thwart Morgan's wicked schemes. Will they succeed, or will the taste of Morgan's spells, prove to be too good?

This brand new comedy eBook for children and pre-teens, serves up a delicious blend of laughter and drama guaranteed to entertain readers of all ages. With ingredients sourced from Arthurian legend, artfully blended with the modern world of TV celebrity chefs, this new eBook is a recipe guaranteed to suit all tastes.

Arthur King available on Smashwords

2011-04-20T09:56:00.000+01:00

As well as the kindle platform, you can now read Arthur King in a wide range of other formats (including PDF) at Smashwords. The first 10% of the book is available as a sample so you can try before you buy.

I've also created a website for the book (www.arthurking.org). A temporary page is available with the full Arthur King experience coming soon!

Arthur King available on Kindle

2011-04-19T08:59:00.002+01:00

Well, I thought I'd give it a go and now my children's novel, Arthur King is available on Kindle, a story in which Arthurian Legend meets with the modern phenomenon of the TV Celebrity Chef.

Miss La Fay was once the richest, most powerful, most successful TV celebrity chef in the world. But then, I’m sure you already know that… don’t you? No? Are you sure? You must remember…

She was tall, beautiful, with long dark hair and a voice like chocolate sauce. She was on TV seven days a week, fifty-two weeks of the year and commanded an audience of millions right across the globe. From Great Britain to China, the U.S.A. to India, everyone knew her name. Cable, Satellite and MissLaFay.com – there was no escaping her recipes.

Other celebrity chefs around at the time met with strange and unexplained accidents, most notorious among them Colin ‘Big Mc’ McKee, found in the world’s biggest haggis, cooked for a Charity Dinner. You don’t remember him? You don't remember the haggis?

What about Guy Blancmange, the Michelin chef with the Michelin stars, now flipping burgers in a motorway service station? Or perhaps Arnaud de Foisgras, found fattened up in a pigsty on a farm in Northern France? You don’t remember any of them? Well, that isn’t surprising and to be honest, I know you won’t remember Miss La Fay at all. It’s only to be expected, and this story is the reason why you have forgotten her. You and everyone else in the world.

But it could have been so very , very different, if not for the bravery of a boy called Arthur King.

Read it now!

Arthur King

2011-04-13T22:21:00.000+01:00

Coming soon to Kindle...

Atlas at the Reina Sofia, Madrid

2011-04-03T21:06:00.000+01:00

The following short piece of text was taken from the Atlas exhibition at the Reina Sofia Gallery in Madrid which I visited last week. I've always loved Rilke's work and it's been of some importance in my research. Reading the following, it's clear to me that that influence will only become even greater as I continue.

'The poet Rainer Maria Rilke said that the "depth of time" was revealed more in human gestures than in archaeological remains or fossilised organisms. The gesture is a "fossil of movement"; it is, at the same time, the very mark of the fleeting present and of desire in which our future is formed.'

Stitched Trench Maps II

2011-03-23T17:23:00.000Z

I completed my first three stitched 'trench maps' today and have popped them in frames ready to be exhibited in Luxembourg. Ideally they wouldn't be in frames at all and would be presented on a much large scale, but as first versions go I'm pleased. Certainly I can see how I would like to progress them, adding more layers to create kinds of palimpsests.

Stitched Trench Maps

2011-03-18T09:33:00.000Z

I've been working on a series of artworks (based on work I began in Australia) which comprise striched pieces of soiled fabric arranged according to patterns of trenches on the Western Front of World War I. By superimposing the trench maps in Google Earth, I drew in the trench systems and exported these tracks to my GPS software: this became my pattern for the stitched artwork as shown below.

A Google Earth view of Serre on the Somme in France.

A trench map of the same place superimposed within Google Earth.

The trench systems traced in Google Earth. Yellow indicates British trenches; red, the German lines.

The lines without the trench map. This information was then exported as GPS data to my Garmin software.

This then formed the basis of my stitched works. Eventually, I want to create large-scale pieces showing the whole scene in one piece. At the moment, I'm working on fragments of the lines as can be seen in the images below:

Reading Roads

2011-03-08T18:26:00.002Z

Introduction

In Wales in 2008 I walked a path along which my great grandfather had walked every day from his home to the mines in which he worked. He died in 1929 (as a consequence of his work) and all I knew of him, before my visit, were what he looked like (from two photographs) and things my grandmother had told me. But on that path I felt I found him on a much deeper level. The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way. It was as if these elements had combined to ‘remember’ him to me.

As a consequence of my walk, the line which linked us on my genealogical chart changed to become instead a path, for when I follow lines in my family tree from one ancestor to the next and find myself at the end, so that path in Wales had led to my being born. That path on which I walked for the very first time, was as much a part of who I was as my great grandfather: “places belong to our bodies and our bodies belong to these places.” [i]
Roads (paths, tracks and traces) have become an important part of my research and it was whilst reading Edward Thomas’ poem Roads that I found connections between what he had written and what I was thinking. I’ve reproduced the poem below, and where necessary added my thoughts.

Roads by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.
Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.
The reference to stars (or a star) in this verse, reminds me of a quote (to which I often refer) from Roland Barthes’ book Camera Lucida, in which he writes:

“From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze - light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed.”

The star shoots its light and is gone and similarly we walk and are gone. But what is left behind is the road, a version of the light left by the disappeared star; a ‘delayed’ ray which allows us to ‘see’ those who went before us. I use the word ‘see’, but we ‘see’ with our bodies. We see the light from the star, but we feel the road. This in turn brings me to the idea of empathy as something which is tactile and kinaesthetic. Roads and paths become ‘a sort of umbilical cord… a carnal medium, a skin I share’ with those who’ve walked that road or path before – precisely what I’d felt in Wales.

On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

In the third verse we might interpret the lines as a description of the difference between the act of walking and the road itself. We walk in the moment – a moment which fades in an instant (‘so soon’) and yet, behind us a record of the sum of all those moments is lined up along the road behind us – one which endures for centuries. It’s the same difference as that between speaking and writing; one is fleeting, the other endures. Christopher Tilley writes that “…if writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.” [ii] Paths and roads ‘record’ our movements, they are texts which we can read with our feet.

The idea of the ‘moment’ is also discussed by artist Bill Viola who writes that:

“We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights. [iii]

This ‘same moment’ is in many respects like the act of walking and the road rolled into one; it fades and yet endures at one and the same time. There is an echo of this idea in Camera Lucida when Barthes writes:

“In the photograph, Time's immobilisation assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged…" [iv]

I described earlier, how the path on which I walked in Wales was as much a part of me as my great grandfather; it was the first time I’d ever walked it and yet I was a part of it long before I was born. There is then a continuous moment running along all paths and roads, and it’s memory and to some extent birth and death that gives the impression of discrete parts. This ‘universal’ moment is the ‘nowness’ of the present and it was this ‘nowness’ which I experienced on that path in Wales and which I’ve since been exploring in my work as regards empathy.

“The feel of the wind, the way the clouds moved, the sound of the trees and the line of the horizon were all things he would have experienced in much the same way.”

The third verse in Thomas’ poem seems to me to allude to the idea of experiencing the moment:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

The ‘we’ in the last line refers to us as individuals, whether ‘we’ were walking that path in 1915 or today in 2011; if ‘we’ weren’t there to see it, it wouldn’t be seen at all.

In the fourth verse we read the following:

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

Before I look at this verse, I want to look at another quote; this time from the catalogue of a Paul Nash exhibition in which David Fraser Jenkins writes how Nash:

“…did not often show people in the landscape, even walking about in his lanes and paths, and as a result his pictures look deserted… Despite this absence, there is in his pictures a remarkable sense of drama, and it is this reaction between things – the trees or the buildings… that these pictures are about." [v]

Looking at the fourth verse above, we can say that the ‘lack of the traveller’ alludes to the passing of that traveller, whether from the immediate scene, or perhaps life itself. Either way, all that’s left of what Sontag called ‘the missing being’ is the trace of the road on which they walked, the text written as they travelled. That traveller is now a dream, dreamt by the road and the elements by which it’s surrounded, a dream which I see expressed by David Fraser Jenkins as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’. The road might be lonely, but it’s never empty; the trees, the buildings, the feel of the wind and the way the clouds move all dream of the traveller – the missing being. There’s also a parallel to be found here in Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies, where in the second elegy we read:

Look - trees exist.

The houses we live in continue to stand. Only we

pass away like air traded for air and everything

conspires to maintain silence about us, perhaps

half out of shame, half out of unspeakable hope. [vi]

This ‘silence’ alludes I think to what Jenkins describes as a ‘remarkable sense of drama’ and what I have called a ‘dream’. But how can we connect with these? In his book The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Christopher Tilley writes:

“The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. [Martin] Dillon comments: “The trees 'see' the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror 'sees' the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible - his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence... The trees and mirror function as Other." [vii]

Just as the trees function as what Dillon calls ‘Other’, so does everything else. It’s as if the shapes of disappeared travellers are somehow retained, like the people-shaped holes in the ash of Pompeii, which when filled with plaster, revealed the presence of people lost for almost 2000 years. Similarly, people-shaped holes exist along every road or path; gaps which can only be filled with our own bodies, by our own presence; by our experience of the nowness of the present.

In a definition of the Metaphysical poets, Georg Lukács described their common trait of ‘looking beyond the palpable’ whilst ‘attempting to erase one's own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here.' [viii] For me, the road is the mirror which Lukács describes, and as I walk along it, I try to look beyond the palpable, to erase my own image so that the road reflects the not-now and not-here. The palpable is the present (as opposed to the nowness of the past); the not-now and not-here is the nowness of that continuous moment in its entirety. To erase one’s image is to imagine one’s own non-existence, to see a part of that continuous moment when one did not exist, when that part was nonetheless now. It is about seeing the presentness of past events.

From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion* tales
Is one of the true gods,

(*In the tale of Lludd and Lleuelys from the Mabinogion, you will find the following text: “Some time after that, Lludd had the island measured in length and breadth; the middle point was found to be in Oxford. There he had the earth dug up, and in that hole he put a vat full of the best mead that could be made, with a silk veil over the surface. He himself stood watch that night.” I discovered this passage whilst researching my Welsh ancestry, and being as I am from Oxford, found it rather appealing.)

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps' press,
As Helen's own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

The line ‘Now all roads lead to France’ reminds us that those who fell and are buried in France (and indeed other countries) were men with lives beyond the theatre of war – that the theatre of war extends well beyond the boundaries of any trench map. To know them and to know the missing, we have to follow the roads from France back to the towns and villages where they lived, just as to know ourselves we should follow the roads and paths from our own hometowns to those of our ancestors. To walk those streets, paths and tracks, is to turn them back into ‘consanguineal lines’; to restore lost connections in forgotten family trees; to remind us that those who fought and died were each part of a family as well as a wider community of friends and acquaintances.

The road brings and takes away and the dead keep us company at every step ‘with their pattering’. Again this could refer to the idea of the moment as being both fleeting and enduring. The moment is like a looped recording which plays and records at the same time, creating a kind of palimpsest, where all that’s gone before is contained in a moment, like light, tens of thousands of years old seen in a single second.

The line ‘Crowding the solitude,’ echoes what I wrote earlier, that roads might be lonely, but they’re never empty. And finally in the last two lines, Thomas reminds us of our own mortality; where the multitudes that make the towns roar are themselves brief.

i Christopher Tilley, 1994, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Oxford, England, Berg

ii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
iii Bill Viola, 2005, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973-1994, Thames & Hudson

iv Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes, Vintage, 2000

v David Fraser Jenkins, 2010, Paul Nash – The Elements, London, Scala Publishers Ltd.

vi Rainer Maria Rilke, Tr. Martyn Crucefix, 2006, Duino Elegies, London, Enitharmon Press

vii Christopher Tilley, 2004, The Materiality of Stone – Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, Oxford, England, Berg
viii http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaphysical_poets

Roads by Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

2011-03-08T17:46:00.000Z

I love roads:
The goddesses that dwell
Far along invisible
Are my favourite gods.

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

On this earth 'tis sure
We men have not made
Anything that doth fade
So soon, so long endure:

The hill road wet with rain
In the sun would not gleam
Like a winding stream
If we trod it not again.

They are lonely
While we sleep, lonelier
For lack of the traveller
Who is now a dream only.

From dawn's twilight
And all the clouds like sheep
On the mountains of sleep
They wind into the night.

The next turn may reveal
Heaven: upon the crest
The close pine clump, at rest
And black, may Hell conceal.

Often footsore, never
Yet of the road I weary,
Though long and steep and dreary,
As it winds on for ever.

Helen of the roads,
The mountain ways of Wales
And the Mabinogion tales
Is one of the true gods,

Abiding in the trees,
The threes and fours so wise,
The larger companies,
That by the roadside be,

And beneath the rafter
Else uninhabited
Excepting by the dead;
And it is her laughter

At morn and night I hear
When the thrush cock sings
Bright irrelevant things,
And when the chanticleer

Calls back to their own night
Troops that make loneliness
With their light footsteps' press,
As Helen's own are light.

Now all roads lead to France
And heavy is the tread
Of the living; but the dead
Returning lightly dance:

Whatever the road bring
To me or take from me,
They keep me company
With their pattering,

Crowding the solitude
Of the loops over the downs,
Hushing the roar of towns
And their brief multitude.

Two Soldiers

2011-03-08T16:13:00.000Z

I was once given a collection of 200 World War I postcards featuring portraits of soldiers and have always wanted to trace some of those featured. Through research on the National Archives website and through deciphering rather bad handwriting I discovered that the man immediately below is one Walter Henry Chevalier who served in the Army Service Corps and Northumberland Fusiliers. I think, if my research is correct, that he survived the war, dying in 1962 aged 64.

Below, another World War I soldier and another survivor. The rather splendid surname 'Dangerfield' is written on the back and having searched for him and got over 100 Dangerfields I had a closer look at the image. The spurs and the crop suggest of course something to do with horses and the cap badge as far as I can see is that of the Royal Horse Artillery. Having refined my search, I found Edward Paul Dangerfield, Second Lieutenant in the Royal Horse Artillery. Again, if my research is correct, he survived the war and died in 1978.

Fields

2011-03-04T15:52:00.000Z

I've spent a very interesting morning in the archives at Christ Church college, researching as part of the East Oxford Archaeology Project. I had no fixed idea as to what I wanted to look for but was interested to see where the various material on offer would lead me.

I started by looking at a large and beautiful map of 1777 which showed the field system in East Oxford along with the names of fields and some of the individual furlongs. The abundance of units of measurement are quite baffling but nonetheless very poetic: furlongs, perches, chains, rods etc. and the way locations of land are described equally interesting; for example "The field called the Lakes begins next to Drove Acre Meer shooting onto the Marsh."

A meer as far as I've been able to ascertain is a boundary deriving from the Old English world mǣre. Interestingly, Drove Acre still exists today in the form of Drove Acre Road, which joins with Ridgefield Road, so named after the old Ridge Field on which it's built. Before I go into other field names, I want to try and identify the different units of measurement.

A rood is a unit describing an area of land and is equivalent to 1/4 acre. An acre is therefore 4 roods. In terms of length, an acre is a furlong (a furrowlong) which is equivalent to 10 chains or 220 yards. A chain therefore is 22 yards. A rod, pole or perch is 5 1/2 yards. A mile is 8 furlongs.

I also found a unit called a butt, which I believe is where the oxen (ploughing a furlong) turned and rested where one acre butted onto the next creating a small mound of earth.

The names of the main fields in this area - as I discovered in a document of 1814 - are as follows:

Bartholomew Field
Ridge Field
Compass Field
The Lakes
Broad Field
Church Field
Far Field
Wood Field
Open Field Meadow

The name Far Field makes sense in that it's situated some way from town. But The Lakes?

Within these fields, individual furlongs were also given names, such as:

Pressmore Furlong
London Way Furlong
Ridge Furlong
Furlong by the Mead Hedge
Clay Pits Furlong
Furlong Shooting on Breaden Hill
Short Furlong in Catwell
Brook Furlong
Hare Hedge Furlong
Croft Furlong by Bullingdon Green

The word shoot or shooting is used a lot to describe the location of land, such as 'Furlong shooting on Sander's Marsh.' I think this must mean that the furlong joins or abuts the marsh. 'The furlong that shoots on the alms-house,' for example seems to describe land that joins the alms-house which I think describes those in St. Clements.

What interests me is how differently this area of Oxford would have been known to those who lived 200 years ago. It's an obvious point given that much of what were fields are now houses, but it's the names that interest. How did these places acquire these names, and why have some survived and others haven't? (It's probably just as well that no-one lives in Shittern Corner today).

Ridge and Furrow

2011-02-14T22:26:00.002Z

South Park in Oxford is a place which holds many memories for me; from cross-country runs at school, to Fun in the Parks, Firework displays and Radiohead in 2001. A view from South Park features in a Laurel and Hardy film 'Chumps at Oxford' and it's been suggested (probably erroneously) that it's the inspiration behind the Small Faces' 1967 hit 'Itchycoo Park'.What interests me most about the park however are the undulations with which it's covered as shown the image below.

These undulations are landscape features created as a result of mediaeval farming methods known as ridge and furrow. Strips of land owned by individuals would be ploughed in such as way as to cause the ridges and furrows to form. Crops would be planted on the ridges while the furrows would help with drainage, and even today, one finds oneself walking along the ridges as the furrows are often boggy.

I find it amazing that an activity performed by people many centuries ago can still be seen so vividly in the landscape today. One expects to find features such as castle mounds, ditches and defensive (or siege) works, but to see something created as a result of man's interaction with the landscape over the course of time (in the growing of crops) is particularly interesting - not to say poetic. Individuals, long since lost to the past, worked the land so as to feed themselves - or make a living - and so perpetuate their 'line', and in the landscape, centuries later, the line still continues.

The lines continue too whenever we walk the ridges, for as we walk, we're doing something people did hundreds of years ago (albeit without a plough) in exactly the same place. As if the ridges are the grooves of a record, we find ourselves replaying a time when much of the land around the city comprised fields and meadows.

New Marston War Memorial Names

2011-02-14T15:15:00.002Z

At the bottom of my street is a War Memorial such as you find in most towns and villages throughout the country. I've walked past the memorial many, many times and while I've often thought of those who died in both World Wars, I'd never before read its list of people. Therefore, this week I did just that and have spent time researching where they died and where they're now buried.

A couple of details at once stood out : A G Akers, the first on the list, lived in my road and died of wounds on the last day of the war; 11th November 1918. Arthur Gerald Harley was killed in action, aged 21 on 1st July 1916 - the infamous first day of the Battle of the Somme.

I will endeavour to find out as much as I can about some of those who are commemorated on this memorial, in the meantime the following list is what I've so far discovered:

A G Akers

Private 10524

11/11/1918 Died

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

S. II. GG. 20.ST. Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen

Lived in New Marston

Harold John Akers

Lance Corporal G/6709

11/11/1915 Killed in action

Queen's Own (Royal West Kent Regiment)

Panel 45 and 47.Ypres (Menin Gate)

Lived in Folkestone

Hubert Allum

Lance Corporal 202107

10/09/1917 Killed in action

Age 25

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Panel 96 to 98.Tyne Cot Memorial

Lived in New Marston

H Baker

Lance Serjeant 9341

02/08/1916 Died

Age 22

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

XXI. A. 19. Baghdad (North Gate) War Cemetery

Lived in Holton

Frederick Charles Burborough

Lance Corporal 17854

25/09/1915 Killed in action

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Panel 37 and 39. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial

Lived in Tilehurst

Joseph Bailey Cross

Private 285440

05/11/1918 Killed in action

Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars

In South corner. Obies Communal Cemetery

Lived in Oxford

George Herbert Cummings

Private 4706

14/08/1916 Killed in action

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Pier and Face 10 A and 10 D. Thiepval Memorial

Lived in New Marston

Thomas Charles Dearlove

Private 18259

25/09/1915 Killed in action

Age 27

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Panel 37 and 39. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial

Percival James Evans

Private 27723

18/11/1916 Killed in action

Age 24

Gloucestershire Regiment

Pier and Face 5 A and 5 B. Thiepval Memorial

R Faulkner

Private 22865

04/10/1917 Died of wounds

Age 19

King's Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment)

P. III. K. 2A.ST. Sever Cemetery Extension, Rouen

Edward Gough

Private 446123

29/03/1919

Age 44

Royal Army Medical Corps

C. 213. Alexandria (Hadra) War Memorial Cemetery

Frederick Gray

Lance Corporal 10523

20/09/1917 Killed in action

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Panel 96 to 98. Tyne Cot Memorial

Lived in New Marston

Frank Green

Private 5838

07/07/1916 Killed in action

Age 32

Royal Fusiliers

Pier and Face 8 C 9 A and 16 A. Thiepval Memorial

Lived in Oxford

Arthur Gerald Harley

Lance Corporal 10379

01/07/1916 Killed in action

Age 21

Royal Berkshire Regiment

Pier and Face 11 D. Thiepval Memorial

Lived in Oxford

Charles Thomas Hartwell

Stoker 2919T

01/11/1914

Royal Naval Reserve

5. Plymouth Naval Memorial

Lewis Heath

Private 201358

22/08/1917 Killed in action

Age 22

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Panel 96 to 98. Tyne Cot Memorial

Lived in New Marston

Thomas Walter Madden

Private 201697

16/06/1918 Died of wounds

Age 20

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Plot 2. Row D. Grave 3. Montecchio Precalcino Communal Cemetery Extension

Lived in New Marston

Richard David Matthews

Private 31925

31/05/1919

Age 39

King's Shropshire Light Infantry

P. 29. Cairo War Memorial Cemetery

Frederick Newport

Corporal 83648

03/09/1916 Killed in action

Royal Field Artillery

Pier and Face 1 A and 8 A. Thiepval Memorial

Charles Percy Phipps

Lieutenant

19/07/1916

Age 20

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

Panel 83 to 85. Loos Memorial

William John Plumridge

Bombardier 24311

31/12/1915 Died

Age 26

Royal Field Artillery

Plot I. Row C. Grave 12. Corbie Communal Cemetery

Richard Tirrell Shrimpton

Squadron Serjeant Major 285021

09/08/1918 Killed in action

Age 27

Queen's Own Oxfordshire Hussars

I. AA. 1. Caix British Cemetery

Lived in Oxford

EW Shrimpton

Percy James Smith

Private 8068

01/11/1914 Killed in action

Age 26

Royal Berkshire Regiment

Panel 45. Ypres (Menin Gate) Memorial

Lived in New Marston

Charles Tolley

Private 5927

26/08/1916 Died of wounds

Age 32

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

I. A. 30. Varennes Military Cemetery

John Walton

Private 2239

09/04/1916 Died of wounds

Age 21

Oxford and Bucks Light Infantry

D. 31. Beauval Communal Cemetery

Sewn Hammock

2011-01-19T12:56:00.000Z

Below are some photographs taken of some work in progress, showing a broken deckchair sewn up in canvas. The idea has come from maritime history, when dead sailors were sewn into their hammocks before being cast into the sea.

Natural Born Psychogeographer

2011-01-18T11:17:00.006Z

It seems amazing to me that given the way I perceive the world around me - and the way I have since I was a child - and looking the work I've made over the course of the last few years, that I haven't before delved into the world of Psychogeography, for having started to read Merlin Coverley's book Psychogeography I seem to be a natural psychogeographer. I recall that when I studied for my degree back in the early 90s, I was fascinated by the writings of Andre Breton and Louis Aragon ('Nadja' and 'Paris Peasant') which today sit on my bookshelves along with the works of J.-K. Husymans, Blake and Peter Ackroyd, writers who are all discussed in Coverley's book.Why they intrigued me so much I never really understood, until now.

This morning, in Coverley's book, I read the following quote form a 19 year old member of Lettrist International who went by the name of Chtcheglov (his real name was Gilles Ivain, and he was later incarcerated in an asylum...). Within that quote, a few lines in particular interested me. The full quote however is as follows:

All cities are geological; you cannot take three steps without encountering ghosts bearing all the prestige of their legends. We move within a closed landscape whose landmarks constantly draw us to the past. Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary. It must be sought in the magical locales of fairy tales and surreralist writings: castles, endless walls, little forgotten bars, mammoth caves, casino mirrors.

The following line in particular brought me up short: '...Certain shifting angles, certain receding perspectives, allow us to glimpse original conceptions of space, but this vision remains fragmentary...' for this exactly describes how I think when I walk through a city, or in fact any particular place. The remains comprising our present-day landscapes are overlaid with a weave of unremembered lives, narratives and events, which, Coverely explains, can, in a moment be revealed through even the most mundane objects and surroundings. It's as if, whilst walking down the street, one can see something which opens up a 'receding perspective' just as Chtcheglov writes, allowing us for a second to glimpse those 'original conceptions of space.' The vision is fragmentary and lasts just a moment, but everywhere these possibilities exist.

I've often used the idea of mundane (or everyday) objects and surroundings in my work as a means of accessing the past - as revealing the past through the lens of the present, and before beginning my MA in 2006, I wrote about what I called 'memory spaces'; spaces which opened up when looking at old buildings or objects. For me, these spaces, were - or rather are - memories of a particular object or building held by people who lived generations before us. I was trying to find a way of describing how when I look at an old building, it's as if I gain access, in some fragmentary way, to the memories of those who beheld it years before - as if I could then walk from one of their memories to another.

In another piece of writing (What is History?), I tried to find another way of describing how we access these spaces. Instead of perceiving history as a series of horizontal layers, built up one on top of the other, I suggested that it was more accurate to see the past as comprising a vast number of durations, where every object, every building, every part of a building etc., was a duration, extending vertically down the page. (This idea was inspired by the writings of Bill Viola, who wrote how ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, he says, 'and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. Similarly we can say that every object, building or landscape feature has existed in one continuous moment and that it is to some extent the passing generations which gives the impression of the past as being a series of ‘discrete parts, periods or sections.)

As I wrote:

Access to the past therefore comes not via a kind of mental gymnastics where we straddle the horizontal strata of different moments in time, accessing a part [an object] via the whole (the entire epoch of that particular layer e.g. 1900), but through the careful observation of a part in which the whole can be observed. As Henri Bortoft writes in The Wholeness of Nature – Goethe’s Way of Seeing; ‘…thus the whole emerges simultaneously with the accumulation of the parts, not because it is the sum of the parts, but because it is immanent within them’. In other words, from an object [for example, one made in 1900] we can extrapolate its wider context (the ‘epoch of 1900’). Instead of drilling down through many periods [of horizontal] time in order to get from one time to another some distance below (or behind), we simply have to observe an object we know that links the two. In this... model , there are no horizontal barriers, just vertical, navigable channels.

Therefore, when looking at an object in a museum, or glimpsing something whilst walking in the street, angles are shifted as Chtcheglov explains, and receding perspectives revealed, precisely because of the way the present comprises these continuous durations. Of course it doesn't happen all the time, but depends on any number of things, not least the way we perceive that object at the moment of our encounter. History in this sense is kinaesthetic.

Heavy Water Sleep: Pages 10 & 11

2011-01-12T12:28:00.000Z

Original Version

Version 1

Version 2

To see other pages from this project please click here.

John Malchair 1770

2010-12-31T16:29:00.000Z

The following is a drawing made by John Malchair showing the causeway of what is now Abingdon Road. The rather unusual building is Friar Bacon's Study which was demolished in 1779. Beneath the drawing is a photograph showing the same causeway, with two arches, a little bit like the arch which can be seen in the drawing.

Heavy Water Sleep: Pages 8 & 9

2010-12-29T17:22:00.002Z

Original Version

Version 1

Version 2

Heavy Water Sleep: Pages 6 & 7

2010-12-22T20:40:00.000Z

Original Version

Version 1

Version 2

Light and Sound

2010-12-22T20:29:00.001Z

Whilst updating the Family Tree section of my website, I listened again to part of an interview I recorded with my Nana in December 2007. She died just under a year later and the three hours I spent with her that afternoon, talking about her life have come to be amongst the most important I can remember. And whilst the content of our conversations were often moving, listening to it now, two years after her death, I began to think about how the act of listening to her, now that she is no longer with us affected me, comparing it to how I feel, when looking at photographs of those who have died. Does the difference between the two media, between light and sound, change the way we respond to the past? And if so, how?

Connections

2010-12-22T01:21:00.000Z

Two images from two separate projects: Heavy Water Sleep (top) and Fragment (below).

Fragment: GPS to Midi

2010-12-22T00:46:00.000Z

I've been looking for a way of converting GPS data to midi as part of a project based on a fragment of mediaeval pottery which I found in the Museum stores at Standlake in Oxfordshire. The GPS data derives from a walk I made around the area where the pot was discovered during an excavation in 1986 (St. Aldates in Oxford).

Part of the project articulates the idea of the pot's creation (on a potters wheel) by using a turntable on which a vinyl record will play a fragment of an audio piece, the rest being composed of silence (or at least the crackle of the vinyl). The idea for the audio composition was to create something using GPS data. But how could this be turned into midi information?

The image below shows the route recorded on my GPS device.

Originally, I'd coverted the data into midi (via photoshop) as in the image below, but the result was too complicated, and not a little messy.

It was whilst considering how one makes paper snowflakes, that I went from cutting holes in a fragment of paper to the holes of old piano rolls. What I needed was something which was more like this. Instead of trying to copy the line of the walk completely therefore, I have instead blocked in notes where there are points on the GPS map as in the images below.

Firstly, in Photoshop, I combine a screenshot of the map with one of the midi inspector in Cubase.

Then, where there's a circle on the GPS line, I create a note in the nearest 'box'.

The result, when compared with my earlier attempt is now much neater and easier to work with.

Heavy Water Sleep: Pages 4 & 5

2010-12-21T19:43:00.004Z

Original Version

Version 1

Version 2

For more information on this project, please click here.

Heavy Water Sleep (Combined)

2010-12-20T22:56:00.000Z

I have completed two versions of the page; one based on my experience of today, the other (below the original text) inspired by my reading Adam Czerniakow's Diary.

Heavy Water Sleep

2010-12-20T20:57:00.000Z

Continuing from what I was discussing yesterday (see Humument), I decided to make a start on my own 'Humument' by reading the first page of Pilgrms of the Wild by Grey Owl, using the text to describe something about the moment in which I was reading it. Given the snow and the freezing conditions outside, I was surprised at what I came up with, and very pleased with the result. The image below shows the original pages with my amended version below:

It goes to show how this technique can lead to unexpected, and in this case, rather beautiful results. I would never have thought before of describing snow as 'water sleep', but as my eyes scanned the page, the combination of words lept out at me.

My plan is to rework a page a day - not necessarily every day - and to rework the same pages with the Diary of Adam Czerniakow in mind.

A Humument

2010-12-19T15:25:00.000Z

In January this year, I used words from two seemingly unrelated books to create an installation in Shotover Country Park as part of Holocaust Memorial Day. The piece was called The Woods, Breathing, the title coming from an entry in the diary of Adam Czerniakow, who was 'mayor' of the Warsaw Ghetto up until his death in 1942.

In his diary, on January 19th 1940, Czerniakow describes a book he'd read, of which, he wrote: 'The forest, little wild animals - a veritable Eden.' The book was Pilgrims of the Wild by Grey Owl, and his comment is especially poignant given the horrors of the time in which he was living. It's as if in the book, he found the freedom he craved, freedom which vanished as soon as the book was closed. The previous year, a few months after the start of the Nazi Occupation, he wrote how he was 'constantly envying all the heroes of my novels because they lived in different times.' There is a sense then, when he describes Pilgrims of the Wild that he is also envying the author, Grey Owl.

I've always seen Grey Owl's book as a map, as in many respects all books are, maps through fictional landscapes, half conjured up in the minds of the author and his or her readers. Having read Czerniakow's diary, reading Pilgrims of the Wild bought me closer, not only to him but to the time in which he was living, as if reading the book was a shared experience; as if we were walking through the same landscape, emerging at the end in very different places. That is not to say of course that reading the book enabled me to understand what it was like to live in those terrible times - nothing can ever do that. But by reading the words he would have read, it was as if I was following in his footsteps.

Looking up from the page, gazing out the window at the sky made me consider the present, the moment in time in which I was living. The sky was that of the book's landscape, and that which Czerniakow would have seen outside his own window. We must remember, although it seems quite obvious, that the past too was once the present. By understanding this, we can begin to find indviduals lost to the pages of history. We don't know what it's like to experience the horrors of Nazi persecution, but reading the book beomes a shared experience, both mentally and kinaesthetically. It is an everyday activity, which opens up a crack through which we can glimpse the past.

Tom Phillips' 'treated Victorian novel' - A Humument - (a page from which is pictured above) has always interested me; the technique of taking a text and changing it to make something entirely new is appealing for a number of different reasons. Every conversation we have, letter we write or note we take borrows from conversations, letters and notes spoken and written over the course of centuries (depending of course on how long the language has been used). Similarly the way we move, whether walking, sitting, standing or reading, borrows from the ways people have moved, again over the course of many hundreds, if not thousands of years. For me, Tom Phillip's technique as used in The Humument articulates this. It's as if we're in the same landscape created by the original work (A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, first published in 1892) and yet are making our way through it in an entirely different way, as if the words are breadcrumbs on a trail, most of which have long since vanished.

As we walk down streets today, across parks, or through woods, we find ourselves within the same place as those who walked there a hundred, two hundred, maybe three hundred years before. We use the same words, we move the same way, but find ourselves interpretating the place quite differently. But it is the same place.

I want to useTom Phillips' technique and create a new work from Pilgrims of the Wild, a page from which can be seen below; a work that articulates both my time of reading the book and that of Czerniakow's.

Canvas and Trench Map

2010-11-23T01:15:00.000Z

The Geographer

2010-11-21T23:36:00.000Z

A still from some video footage of me in Australia, drawing out a map of one of the walks I did there alongside Vermeer's 'Geographer.' I'm interested in the idea of performance and had something like Vermeer's image in mind whilst I was creating my work.

Thoughts on Australia

2010-10-29T13:46:00.000+01:00

Why are Australian 50 cent pieces the size of dinner plates and 20 cent pieces like saucers? Especially when 2 dollar coins are little bigger than an English penny; I thought I was broke looking at my handful of money until I realised what the little ones were.

The Road to New South Wales

2010-10-08T18:32:00.001+01:00

On Monday 28th January 1828, a sawyer by the name of Richard Burgess was travelling from Abingdon to Oxford with a cartload of bone for sale in town. On the road to Oxford, Burgess met with three men; Stephen Hedges – a young Abingdon man in his late teens, Henry Stockwell, originally from Aberdeen and a few years older than Hedges, and a man called John Harper. Hedges - described later by Stockwell as the ‘captain’ as regards the events about to follow - asked Burgess if he was going to Oxford and whether he’d carry a parcel for them. Burgess agreed, at which point Harper left the group, while Hedges and Stockwell continued on towards Oxford with the cart.

1875 Map of Radley showing Radley House

Radley House as painted by Turner in 1789

On the Oxford Road, near the lodge of what was then Radley House, Burgess was asked to stop. At first Burgess refused, but relented, stopping as he said later for about five minutes. At that time the house was owned by Sir George Bowyer (who in 1815 had been forced to sell its contents to help his struggling finances) and rented from him by a Mr. Benjamin Kent. When Harper arrived back on the scene with a bag, the three men went off into the gardens.

1875 Map of Radley showing the Lodge and Driveway of Radley House

After five minutes the men returned carrying the bag which Burgess described as being very heavy. What was in the bag, Burgess didn’t know, but given that Stockwell was carrying a piece of lead on his shoulder, it must have been obvious.

The road from Abingdon to Oxford. The parked car on the right marks the spot where Burgess stopped the cart.

A path next to the Oxford Road showing the parked car.

On the way into Oxford, the men – still travelling with Burgess - met a Charles Jones whereupon, according to Burgess, they engaged in conversation. Burgess went on into Oxford, to Mr. Round’s wharf and near the gates set down the lead and delivered his cargo of bone for weighing. Half an hour later, Stockwell and Jones reappeared and put the lead back on the cart. Burgess asked him where they were going to take it, to which he was told to follow Jones.

Burgess followed Jones up the ‘City Road’ and near the Castle met with Hedges and Harper. They turned back through Butcher Row to the place where the lead was to be delivered, and here, for his trouble Burgess was paid sixpence.

The next day, on Tuesday 29th January, James Smith, servant to Benjamin Kent, discovered three ‘hips’ of the larder roof had been stripped of their lead. Two weeks later, on Wednesday, 13th February, Stephen Hedges appeared in Abingdon before the mayor T. Knight Esq. on suspicion of stealing lead from an outhouse belonging to B. Morland Esq. (I’m assuming here that B Morland and B. Kent are in fact the same person). He was fully committed to the Bridewell whereas Stockwell and Harper were, at that point, still on the run.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday 16th February 1828

Justice however soon caught up with them, and together with Hedges they were tried at the Berkshire Easter Sessions on Tuesday, 15th April. Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell were found guilty of stealing 154 lbs of lead. The sentence passed was transportation for a period of 7 years. The report in Jackson’s Oxford Journal makes no mention of Harper’s fate. Charles Jones was acquitted.

Jackson’s Oxford Journal, Saturday 19th April 1828

Having been convicted and sentenced, Hedges and Stockwell were taken to Portsmouth, and on Monday 28th April, received aboard the prison hulk York.

The system of prison hulks had been established by an act of Parliament in 1776 (following the declaration of American Independence which meant the loss of penal colonies there) to ease overcrowding in British prisons. Old warships moored on the Thames and those in other ports, were converted into prisons, and despite the terrible conditions suffered by the prisoners within, the system remained in place for another 80 years.

The prison hulk York from an engraving by E.W. Cooke. The National Maritime Museum, London.

The York, in which Hedges and Stockwell were incarcerated, was the eighth ship in the Navy to bear the name and had once been a 74-gun, third rate of 1,743 tons. Launched in 1807, she’d been posted to the West Indies where she was involved in the capture of the island stronghold of Martinique. She continued the war in the Mediterranean Squadron off Toulon and in 1819, returned to Portsmouth to serve as a prison hulk – home to some 500 inmates.

Entering a hulk was demoralising to say the very least. Prisoners were stripped of their clothes, after which cold buckets of water were thrown over them. They received their slops and looked on as their own clothes were thrown into the sea – a baptism of their status as a convict and a ‘ceremonial drowning’ of their lives before that time. Finally, they were led into the darkest, foulest-smelling parts of the ship, to await their transportation – the last stage in the process of being forgotten.

The final column of the York’s Muster reads rather ominously: how disposed of?

And this is just what was being done with all the men and women sentenced in this manner. In this column, next to the names of Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell, are the words: 24 Jun ’28 NSW; NSW being their final destination – New South Wales.

The York’s documentation also tells us something – albeit somewhat succinctly –about Stephen Hedges’ character. Whereas other prisoners are described as being badly connected, not known here, orderly or good in gaol, Hedges is described simply as bad. To be fair to him however, he wasn’t described as being very bad, which was a term applied to a certain John Head, who was being shipped abroad for 7 years for receiving stolen goods.

Conditions aboard the York were appalling, and Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell had to endure them for 2 months before they left for New South Wales, Australia. Finally, on Sunday, 29th June 1828, they left Portsmouth on the convict ship The Marquis of Hastings never to see England, or their families, again.

List of prisoners embarked on the Marquis of Hastings, bound for New South Wales, 27th June 1828

The journey to New South Wales took them 4 months and onboard the ship, travelling with the crew and the prisoners was the ship’s surgeon William Rae, who, as part of his duties, kept a journal of illnesses and treatments suffered throughout the voyage.

The Journal of William Rae at the National Archives, Kew.

Given the length of the voyage, the appalling conditions and the terrible diet the prisoners (and indeed the crew) had to endure, it’s surprising that so few people passed through William Rae’s sick bay. In total, 17 people were in his care during the course of the voyage, of whom 13 were discharged cured and 3 discharged convalescent in Sydney. Only one person died - from Hydrocephalus (water on the brain).

During the voyage, Rae made notes on the weather which, even in brief descriptions of the clouds, paints a vivid picture of the journey. For example: July 24th 1828. The ship was located at Latitude 10.2o N and Longitude 23.50o S. The temperature was 80oF with a light West-South-Westerly breeze. ‘Cloudy with rain’ Rae has added, in the column marked ‘weather for the day’.

We might not know how it feels to be fettered by the ankles and the waist, locked inside a cramped, stinking space with dozens of other criminals, but we all know the weather. When we read about the conditions suffered by the convicts, it always seems - so long ago did it happen - comparable to a fiction. Strong breeze, squally with rain however is just as much a part of now. When we look at a cumulus cloud as Rae had done, we can get a little closer to the plight of the convicts in the hold.

Plotting the coordinates of the voyage allows us to see the journey. The following stills are taken from Google Earth, in which I plotted Rae’s longitude and latitude.

Stephen Hedges would have had no idea what to expect in Australia, and the same could be said for most of those onboard. Australia itself had only recently emerged from the world of myth. It was still little more than an outline, a vast oubliette for the convicts on board.

On maps throughout the 18th century, Australia’s outlines slowly emerged, as various explorers happened upon her shores. It seems inconceivable that so vast a landmass could ever have been missed, but it just goes to show how big the oceans are by which it is surrounded.

The contrast between its (then) vague geography, its being a kind of oubliette and the realities of the present along with its unforgiving landscape, is something which interests me a great deal.

A map showing an as yet, unmapped east coast of Australia.

After four months at sea, bound for New South Wales, the prisoners disembarked at Sydney, on Tuesday, October 28th.

Stephen Hedges was assigned to James Bowman who’d been appointed principal surgeon for New South Wales after arriving on the John Barry in 1819. By 1832, Bowman had established a sheep run on more than 11,000 acres of land at Ravensworth, Patrick Plains. Hedges may well have been used to help construct it.

Detail from NSW 1828 Census, showing Stephen Hedges being assigned as a labourer to James Bowman at Patrick’s Plains.

On 24th December 1838, Stephen Hedges, now a free man, married Elizabeth Carter in Parramatta, New South Wales.

He died in Australia in 1885, at the age of 74.

Stephen Hedges

2010-10-08T13:31:00.000+01:00

On Monday 28^th January 1828, a sawyer by the name of Richard Burgess was travelling from Abingdon to Oxford with a cartload of bone for sale in town. On the road to Oxford, Burgess met with three men; Stephen Hedges – a young Abingdon man in his late teens, Henry Stockwell, originally from Aberdeen and a few years older than Hedges, and a man called John Harper. Hedges - described later by Stockwell as the ‘captain’ as regards the events about to follow - asked Burgess if he was going to Oxford and whether he’d carry a parcel for them. Burgess agreed, at which point Harper left the group, while Hedges and Stockwell continued on towards Oxford with the cart.

Burges followed Jones up the ‘City Road’ and near the Castle met with Hedges and Harper. They turned back through Butcher Row to the place where the lead was to be delivered, and here, for his trouble Burgess was paid sixpence.

The next day, on Tuesday 29^th January, James Smith, servant to Benjamin Kent, discovered three ‘hips’ of the larder roof had been stripped of their lead. Two weeks later, on Wednesday, 13th February, Stephen Hedges appeared in Abingdon before the mayor T. Knight Esq. on suspicion of stealing lead from an outhouse belonging to B. Morland Esq. (I’m assuming here that B Morland and B. Kent are in fact the same person). He was fully committed to the Bridewell whereas Stockwell and Harper were, at that point, still on the run.

Justice however soon caught up with them, and together with Hedges they were tried at the Berkshire Easter Sessions on Tuesday, 15^th April. Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell were found guilty of stealing 154 lbs of lead. The sentence passed was transportation for a period of 7 years. The report in Jackson’s Oxford Journal makes no mention of Harper’s fate. Charles Jones was acquitted.

Having been convicted and sentenced, Hedges and Stockwell were taken to Portsmouth, and on Monday 28^th April, received aboard the prison hulk York. The hulk system had been established by an act of Parliament in 1776 (following the declaration of American Independence which meant the loss of penal colonies there) to ease overcrowding in British prisons. Old warships moored on the Thames and those in other ports, were converted into prisons, and despite the terrible conditions suffered by the prisoners within, the system remained in place for another 80 years.

The York, in which Hedges and Stockwell were incarcerated, was the eighth ship to bear the name and had once been a 74-gun, third rate of 1,743 tons. Launched in 1807, she’d been posted to the West Indies where she was involved in the capture of the island stronghold of Martinique. She continued the war in the Mediterranean Squadron off Toulon and in 1819, returned to Portsmouth to serve as a prison hulk – home to some 500 inmates.

Entering a hulk was demoralising to say the very least. Stripped of their clothes, cold buckets of water were thrown over the prisoners. They received their slops and looked on as their own clothes were thrown into the sea – a baptism of their status as a convict and a ‘ceremonial drowning’ of their lives before that time. Finally, they were led into the darkest, foulest-smelling parts of the ship, to await their transportation – the last stage in the process of being forgotten.

The final column on the York’s Muster reads rather ominously: how disposed of? And this is just what was being done with all the men and women sentenced in this manner. And written in this column, next to the names of Stephen Hedges and Henry Stockwell, are the words: 24 Jun ’28 NSW.

Conditions on the York were appalling but Hedges and Stockwell had to endure them for 2 months, until Sunday, 29^th June 1828, when ‘at last’ they left England aboard The Marquis of Hastings. After four months at sea, bound for New South Wales, the prisoners disembarked at Sydney, on Tuesday, October 28^th.

Stephen Hedges was assigned to James Bowman who’d been appointed principal surgeon for New South Wales after arriving on the John Barry in 1819. By 1832, Bowman had established a sheep run on more than 11,000 acres of land at Ravensworth, Patrick Plains. Hedges may well have been used to help construct it.

On 24^th December 1838, Stephen Hedges, now a free man, married Elizabeth Carter in Parramatta, New South Wales.

He died in Australia in 1885, at the age of 74.

Landscape DNA: The Simultaneity of Stories-So-Far

2010-10-05T12:46:00.005+01:00

The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.

In 2006 I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau and since then have visited camps at Bełżec, Majdanek and Natzweiler-Struthof, as well as the battlefields of Ypres, Verdun and more recently, The Somme. All these sites present the visitor with numbers: 1.1 million dead at Auschwitz-Birkenau, 500,000 at Bełżec, 79,000 in Majdanek. At the start of the Battle of the Somme, on 1st July 1916, British and Commonwealth forces sustained 57,000 casualties, with almost 20,000 men killed in action on that day alone. These are all horrific statistics, but numbers rather than people and over the course of the last few years, I’ve looked for ways of identifying with the individuals behind the grim tolls. The tolls are only estimates, and the individuals to whom they allude have become themselves ‘estimates of existence’. Most have left nothing behind; no name, possessions, or photographs. Photographs, where they exist, are often nameless, names on graves are faceless, so how can we know them at all?

One of the most difficult things about my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau was walking out the gate, performing an action that more than a million people could only ever dream about – if they had the time; most were killed within hours of their arrival. At Bełżec, the memorial to the dead is – in the main - a walk around the perimeter of where the camp once stood. During my visit in 2007, I recorded the walk using a GPS receiver and the fact that I, as an individual, one of several billion people on the planet, could be tracked in this place where half a million people perished, proved particularly resonant. The concept of walking as a means of remembering began to take hold in my work, evolving over time to become a means of empathising – in some small way – with those who’d perished.

In the book Walking, Writing and Performance by Deirdre Heddon, Carl Lavery and Phil Smith, artist Carl Lavery states the following:

“…pedestrian performance is a mode of resistance against the acceleration of the world, a desire, on the part of performance makers, to re-humanise space by encouraging spectators to experience the environment at a properly human pace, the bodily beat of three miles per hour. Implicit in this argument is the belief that walking is conducive to the production of place, a perfect technique for merging landscape, memory and imagination in a dynamic dialogue. Or as Michel de Certeau would have it: 'The act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language...’.”

In the passage quoted above, I was struck by the idea, as Lavery puts it, of “encouraging spectators to experience the environment at a properly human pace.” Merging landscape, memory and imagination (for which purpose, according to Lavery, walking is the perfect technique) has become central to my work. It’s also something I’ve done quite naturally since I was a child. For me, places have always been a conflation of these things, and as such, quite unique to me.

When I visit historic sites, landscape, memory and imagination merge to create something akin to what others have termed post-memories; ‘memories’ of events of which we can have no real recollection - in particular events that happened before we were even born. How this happens is something which has interested me throughout my research. A kinaesthetic engagement with a place, and our sense of the present are, it seems, both important in this regard.

Finally in the paragraph quoted above, I was struck by the words of Michel de Certeau; the idea that ‘the act of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language,’ reminded me very much of what I’ve read before in the work of Christopher Tilley, who in his book The Materiality of Stone - Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology, writes that ‘If writing solidifies or objectifies speech into a material medium, a text which can be read and interpreted, an analogy can be drawn between a pedestrian speech act and its inscription or writing on the ground in the form of the path or track.”

The idea of a path as ‘text’ is something which appeals to me; the notion that as we walk we ‘write’ ourselves in the landscape has a particularly poetic resonance. In his book Lines, a Brief History, Tim Ingold writes that “human beings leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route...”. The Old English word writan he tells us, meant to ‘incise runic letters in stone,’ and a correlation can therefore be drawn between the act of walking and writing; a path is something written over years by many different people, incised into the landscape.

Just as when we speak we re-use the same words spoken over centuries – for example fragments of long forgotten conversations – so when we walk, we re-use fragments of other people’s ‘texts’, ‘written’ into the landscape. In this sense, we speak with our bodies words that other bodies have spoken or written before us. As Ingold notes: “retracing the lines of past lives is how we proceed along our own.”

In 2007, the year before she died, my grandmother told me about her childhood in Wales. The following is an extract from that conversation in which she describes her father, Elias Jones, who died in 1929, aged 47, as a result of working in the mines:

‘I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us…’

On visiting Hafodyrynys, the village where my grandmother grew up, I walked up the ‘mountain’ she’d described and followed the path my great grandfather would have taken to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. On top of the hill I turned and looked back down at the garden, imagining my grandmother and her siblings waving back at me from the past. Further on, I stood and looked at the view, rolled out all around me. A hundred years ago I thought, when I did not exist, he would have seen the very same thing. A hundred years later, long after his death, I found myself - through being in that place - identifying with him: I’d found him on the path - one which would in time lead to my being born.

Elias Jones, through frequent movement along that path had written himself into the landscape. A hundred years later, I was - through articulating my own presence through walking - reading part of that text; speaking with my own body his simultaneous presence and absence. In many ways, I was speaking my own presence and absence too.

During that visit, I realised that as well as being a product of the ‘genetic text’ passed down the generations through a myriad number of genealogical lines, we are as much the consequence of pathways walked by every one of our ancestors. DNA is text – a kind of narrative sequence - and the paths which have led to our individual births are a vast text written across the landscape: self and environment, to borrow from Lavery, are umbilically connected.

People are therefore, in a sense, places, and in his book, Lavery quotes Mike Pearson, a performance maker and theorist who states that: “just as landscapes are constructed out of the imbricated actions and experiences of people, so people are constructed in and dispersed through their habituated landscape: each individual, significantly, has a particular set of possibilities in presenting an account of their own landscape: stories."

Another passage in the book which interested me was that regarding the geographer Doreen Massey. Lavery writes how she offers a ‘conception of space that is interrelational, multiple and always under construction. In her book, For Space, she describes it [space] as 'the dimension of multiple trajectories, a simultaneity of stories-so-far'."

I like the idea of space being a ‘simultaneity of stories-so-far’, and it interested me insofar as it rang a bell with some thoughts I’d had previously regarding our own perception of the past. The following is taken from a piece I wrote on the nature of history:

The past is often perceived much like the strata of a rock-face, wherein successive layers of geological time can be seen. We see the past as being built from the ‘ground up’ day upon day, year upon year, century upon century, like bricks in a wall. The problem with this ‘model’ however is that it makes the past difficult to access, the lines dividing each and every moment become like barriers inhibiting our movement between one and the other, particularly where one part is stacked so far below our own in what we perceive as being the present day. Another problem with this way of perceiving the past is that the layers necessarily contain objects, buildings and landscape features which, because of their age, appear in several different layers almost as if they were different things. For example, an object made a 100 years ago, would appear in each of the layers in the diagram below (see Figure 1). It’s rather like someone creating an animation, who draws the same scene a thousand times because it appears in a thousand frames, rather than using the same picture throughout them all.

Figure 1

Whilst thinking about this and while considering the fact that any extant object, building or landscape feature, no matter what its age is always present, I realised that a better model for perceiving the past is one which turns the model above on its side – if not quite its head. Subsequently (see Figure 2), what we have is not a series of horizontal strata representing stacked moments in time (days, months, years, centuries etc.), but concurrent vertical lines, or what I have called ‘durations’ where each duration is an object, building or landscape feature and where the present is our simultaneous perception of those that are extant (of course, in the case of buildings, individual ‘objects’ can also contain many separate durations).

It was Bill Viola who said that ‘we have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights’. Similarly we can say that every object, building or landscape feature has existed in one continuous moment and that it is to some extent the passing generations which gives the impression of the past as being a series of ‘discrete parts, periods or sections, i.e., the perceived layers or strata of our previous – first - model.

Figure 2

These ‘durations’ as I have described them, are indeed ‘stories so far,’ which move, as if they are being told, at the speed of walking - at a ‘properly human pace’ as Lavery puts it.

Returning to the idea of walking as writing, it’s true to say that we don’t always leave a physical trace of our presence when we walk – or at least a visible, physical trace. But, poetically speaking at least, we do leave something behind and this something is often augmented by objects, buildings or landscape features which are contemporaneous with past individuals.

Whenever I visit sites of historic trauma (death camps and the battlefields of World War One), even if they’re empty, I feel as if they’re full; not in a spiritual or pseudo-spiritual sense, but physically, as if they’re full of sculptures. Sculptor Antony Gormley describes his work as ‘confronting existence’ and that, in part, is what we do in places such as Auschwitz; death is, after all, another kind of existence. Walking itself is a means of confronting existence, being as it is a line drawn between absence and presence – just as I’d found in Wales.

“Part of my work,” Gormley writes, is to “give back immanence to both the body and art.” For archaeologist, Colin Renfrew, Gormley is “speaking of the existence of the individual, and the coming into being and self-awareness of the individual as the inhabitant of his or her body.” In reading these quotes, I began to see that the sites of trauma I’d visited, as well as those places relevant to my own family history, were full of what I can only describe as invisible sculptures – sculptures of absence, the physical presence/immanence of all who’ve gone before.

Gormley’s work comprises, in part, casts of his own body which reminds Renfrew of the bodies found in Pompeii; men, women and children frozen at the moment of their death almost 2000 years ago. Buried in ash, the spaces which had once contained their bodies remained after the bodies had decomposed, allowing archaeologists, to use them as moulds by pouring plaster into the cavities.

In light of this, I was reminded of the work of Christopher Tilley, who in his book, ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology’ writes: “The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter… in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible - his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence... The trees and mirror function as Other.”

Just as the trees function as ‘Other’ therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on. And in a sense, what Tilley is describing as Other, which ‘renders visible for him… his carnal presence,’ is a sense of being present in the present-day world.

In the book Walking, Writing and Performance, Lavery writes:

“…during… Mourning Walk I was aware of living more in the past than in the present. However at no time did this immersion in memory result in psychic saturation or disintegration. The natural world - the world of trees and stones - was stubbornly present and insisted on maintaining its autonomy and distance.”

When trying to access the past through walking, an awareness of the present – of being present in the world - is vital, and the natural world – the world of trees and stones – does that for us. Understanding the fact that the past was once the present, helps us in some small way to empathise with those lost to the past.

The present moment is a space, one which lasts only for a second – a space comprising the simultaneity of what Doreen Massey calls ‘stories so far’ or what I have called ‘durations’. And it’s in that space that life happens. Behind us and in front, beyond the physical boundaries of that second we are absent. The text is written, or yet to be written - the present being the moment of writing. Gormley’s sculptures then articulate this line between presence and absence, past and present.

In that space, in which we continue with our existence, we hear the birds, we see the sun, feel the wind and rain. In that space, all our hopes are held, all our fears and regrets. Into the space we carry our past in the form of memories. It’s the space of the everyday - one which we often take for granted. But it’s a space we share with everyone who’s ever gone before us.

Again, in his book, Lines. A Brief History, Tim Ingold tell us that:

‘…from late Antiquity right through to the Renaissance writing was valued above all as an instrument of memory. Its purpose was not to close off the past by providing a complete and objective account of what was said and done, but rather to provide the pathways along which the voices of the past could be retrieved and brought back into the immediacy of present experience, allowing readers to engage directly in dialogue with them and to connect what they have to say to the circumstances of their own lives. In short, writing was read not as a record but as a means of recovery.’

This paragraph has something in common with what I described earlier, the idea that just as when we speak we re-use the same words spoken over centuries – fragments of long forgotten conversations – so when we walk, we re-use fragments of other people’s ‘texts’, ‘written’ into the landscape. Walking becomes a means of recovery, where the past can be retrieved and ‘brought back into the immediacy of present experience’. As on the ‘mountain’ in Hafodyrynys, it’s a means of engaging in a dialogue with those who’ve gone before us, and nowhere is this more keenly felt that in places of historic trauma.

It’s as if when walking through these places, we pick up - at random – the threads of other people’s texts. We tie them together, filling in the gaps with our own story. It’s rather like the film Jurassic Park, where dinosaurs are cloned using DNA extracted from mosquitoes frozen in amber. The gaps in the code are filled with modern frog DNA, creating a ‘modern’ dinosaur. Earlier, I stated that people were as much the product of places, and it figures therefore that places are as much the product of people; that the ‘DNA’ of any place comprises narrative lines laid down by everyone who’s ever been there. When we walk, we create new places based on the present day landscape. Our memory and memories, history and of course our imaginations all have a part to play. Within our imagination, we take with fragmentary strands of the landscape’s own ‘DNA’ (or history) and fill the gaps with our own presence and memory. These constantly created spaces (created then destroyed every second) are unique to us, and yet we share them, in that single moment, with all who’ve gone before us, not as part of a crowd, but as one body and mind.

The ‘stubborn’ presentness which Lavery describes is therefore vital to our empathising with the past, and in many ways the most terrifying thing at Auschwitz was the way the trees moved in Birkenau (Auschwitz II), simply because they would have moved that way during the Holocaust.

The writer Georges Perec once wrote that “the desire to find roots, the determination to work from memories or from the memory, is the will above all to stand out against death, against silence.”

I work from memories and the memory and I’m actively engaged in searching for my roots. Is this then a will to stand out ‘against death, against silence?’

Again, in Walking, Writing and Performance, Lavery writes:

“Is not all writing, all art, a response to a loss of some kind, an imaginative way of dealing with lack? …As I use it, the word recovery has nothing to do with re-experiencing the lost object in its original pristine state; rather, it designates a poetic or an enchanted process in which the subject negotiates the past from the standpoint of the present.”

This act of recovery is just the same as that which Ingold describes, where writing (in ancient times) was read not as a record but as a means of recovery. Walking as a means of ‘reading’ or ‘speaking’ the text of other people’s lives is a way of recovering a moment in the past; an ‘enchanted process’ to borrow from Lavery, where we ‘negotiate the past from the standpoint of the present.’

Empathy with the past therefore and in particular with individuals can be achieved, coming via a kinaesthetic response to the present mediated through memory and our embodied imaginations.

Lead Walk - Photos

2010-10-05T00:11:00.001+01:00

The following photographs were taken during a walk I made along the route as described in the previous entry Lead Walk - Maps.

The road from Abingdon, down which Richard Burgess drove with his cart of bones for delivery in Oxford.

It was near here, where the red car is parked - slightly hidden from view - that Stephen Hedges and his accomplices asked Richard Burgess to stop, before heading off to steal the 154 lbs of lead. From that moment on, Hedges' fate - along with that of Henry Stockwell - was sealed.

The entrance to Radley House where the car is parked on the right hand side.

When there were no cars driving past - which didn't seem very often - I would find myself imagining Stephen Hedges looking around him, just as I was doing. I'd see a bird against the clouds and for a second I was him, walking down the road with the horse and cart. I could almost hear their conversation, muffled as if I had an ear to the ground.

When I did imagine a moment in 1828, for some reason my mind returned to my childhood, to Risinghurst where my Nana lived. I wondered about Stephen's past and his childhood.

I've no idea of course what the clouds were like above the road that fateful day, but with the document I have recording the clouds on the voyage to Australia, the fairweather clouds above seemed ominous.

It wasn't the safest walk I've ever done. Walking has long been forgotten here. But empathising with individuals long since lost to the past can only be done at that speed.

A bin bag. It reminded me of the heavy bag Burgess describes. Little did he know it was full of lead.

A milestone - one you can see if you're going slowly enough.

Bagley Wood. The same shape it seems as it was in 1828.

Lead Walk - Maps

2010-10-04T20:35:00.000+01:00

On the trail of my ancestor Stephen Hedges (my great, great, great, great uncle) I wanted to walk the route I think he would have travelled (along with Henry Stockwell, J Harper and the innocent Abingdon Sawyer, Richard Burgess) with the lead stolen from what was then Radley Hall or House. Below is a screenshot from Google Earth, showing the route as recorded on my GPS.

The following image is another screenshot from Google Earth, this time with a map of 1811 overlaid and the same GPS route placed over the top.

I was quite surprised how well they married up and below are the same two images combined. What is interesting is how the shape of Bagley Wood has hardly changed.

Mapping the Voyage of the Marquis of Hastings

2010-10-04T01:59:00.004+01:00

Below is a screenshot of a transcription I've made from the journal of William Rae, who served aboard the Marquis of Hastings in 1828 in the capacity of Surgeon. A PDF of the transcription is available here.

On August 16th, Rae states that the Island of Trinidad was in sight. But having looked at the route I'd plotted and then at the location of Trinidad I realised I must have made a mistake. However, on zooming in on Google Earth I found that the location plotted for that day was near the Trindade seachannel, and having searched for Trindade, discovered that on August 16th the ship was in fact in sight of Ilha de Trindade (see image below).

Prison Hulk - York

2010-10-03T17:54:00.003+01:00

Following his conviction at the Berkshire Assizes on 15th April 1828, Stephen Hedges was sent to Portsmouth to serve time before his transportation on the prison hulk, York, pictured below.

This HMS York was the eighth ship to bear the name, and was a 74-gun third rate of 1,743 tons. Launched in 1807, she was posted to the West Indies where she was involved in the bold capture of the island stronghold of Martinique. She continued the war in the Mediterranean Squadron off Toulon and in 1819, returned to Portsmouth to serve as a prison hulk. She was broken up in 1854.

Having researched Hulks, I found the following on the Southern Life website:

"Embarking on board the hulks was a very demoralising affair; the convicts had to climb labourously up with their irons still on, stripped of their clothes, had buckets of cold water thrown over them; were issued with slops, saw their own clothes thrown overboard; were re-chained and then sent down into the lowest deck of the hulk - the darkest and most foul-smelling part of the ship."

There's something horribly poetic in the action of throwing the clothes overboard. Roland Barthes, in his book Camera Lucida, said that clothes made a second grave for the loved being. In this case, we could say the grave was that of a drowned man; one made before the man had actually died. Of course in many ways it really did symbolise their deaths.

For a ship with such an illustrious past, there is something pitiful about her condition in the picture above. De-masted and with her sails removed, she has instead the regulation clothes (?) of the inmates to catch the wind. She is very much the outward appearance of those locked away out of view.

The Voyage of The Marquis of Hastings

2010-10-02T20:20:00.004+01:00

After my research in the National Archives, I took the document I'd discovered (the Surgeon's Journal from teh voyage of the Marquis of Hatings' 1828 voyage) and plotted the longitude and latitude references into Google Earth. Given that these measurements were taken in 1828, I wasn't sure what the results would be, but having entered them, I was pleased with what I ended up with.

The voyage began on the 29th June 1828 in Portsmouth. The weather that day is described as 'Dry, Cirrus, Cirrus Cumuli,' and the temperature 74F. In reading these tiny details, the moment is straight away prised from the pages of history, as if a character from a fictional tale has, all of a sudden, become reality. They are small details but manage in their succinctness to paint a bigger picture.

Below is a screenshot from Google Earth showing the start of the voyage and the first 7 days of the journey.

One can only guess at what the prisoners must have felt leaving the country for what they surely knew would be the last time. Given the conditions some (including my ancestor, Stephen Hedges) had suffered on the prison hulks (the York in his case) it might have come as some relief that they were finally moving - not that the conditions would be be much of an improvement during the voyage.

Below are screenshots showing the route of the ship, with each yellow pin representing one day of the voyage.

Having mapped the journey in this way, and having read the descriptions of weather and temperature, the voyage and indeed the ordeal of my ancestor's Transportation suddenly became more real. It was as if beforehand, the world of 1828 was purely a fiction, and that the names of the towns, islands and landmarks - Portsmouth, The Lizard, Tenerife and Sydney for example - just happened to have the same names as those - unconnected - places in the present day. Suddenly, the world of the past and the world of the present had collided.

The image below shows the last leg of the journey.

The last entry by William Rae (the ship's surgeon) is dated the 28th October 1828 and reads: 'nearing the same (Sydney Cove) since the 23rd. Prisoners disembarked.

The National Archives

2010-10-01T18:28:00.000+01:00

I'd never been to the National Archives and had only ever seen it on TV, on Who Do You Think You Are. As I approached the doors, I could almost hear Mark Strong (who narrates the progarmme) say, "Nick is going to the National Archives to find some information on...."

So what information was I looking for? Well, I wanted to find something on the voyage of the Marquis of Hastings, the convict ship which took Stephen Hedges and 177 other felons to Australia in 1828. Having gone through all the first time procedures and having obatined my Reader's Ticket, I consulted the catalogue and found two documents.

I only had time to look at one which was the Surgeon's Journal (above) written during the voyage by William Rae. This sounded particularly helpful, and although my ancestor wasn't one of the patients (fortunately for him of course), the document gives a great insight into the prisoners and their health - not least the conditions they must have endured.

Furthermore, the document contains a daily list of longitiude and latitude, wind direction and weather conditions which, for me, is just the sort of thing I wanted to know from an artistic point of view - especially as regards the weather and cloud formations.

I will transcribe some in due course and return to the Archives soon to look at the other documents.

The Ruined Ruins of Madinat Al-Zahra

2010-09-29T16:46:00.001+01:00

For more than 700 years, from 711 to 1492, there was an Islamic presence in Spain, and for that, in the 21st century, with the legacy of its beautiful architecture, we can only be grateful. After all these years, the stunning buildings with their beautiful interiors still retain the power to beguile, and certainly, the Moorish sights of Andalucía are without doubt, amongst the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.

From the well-preserved ruins of ancient baths in Granada and Ronda, to the strange and somewhat schizophrenic Mezquita in Córdoba, the sights reach their zenith in the awe-inspiring perfection of the Alhambra palace. The craftsmanship of the Islamic artists responsible for its creation are, I believe, quite without equal, and with every step and every space within, the sense of wonder increases, as if playing pass the parcel where you win every turn, unwrapping an increasingly bigger prize.

Built in the 10th century by Abd ar-Rahman III of Córdoba, the city of Medinat al-Zahra existed for less than a century, when in 1010 it was destroyed during a civil war. In 1911, the ruins were discovered buried beneath the earth and since that time 10 per cent of the site has been uncovered.

Given what we’d seen in the rest of Andalucía, we had high hopes for the ruins. Of course we weren’t expecting another Alhambra or Mezquita – far from it – but what we found was, in our minds, a disaster.

We arrived first at the new visitors centre, a low profile, modern building - all crisp lines and angles - in which we got our free ticket, used the loo and bought fridge magnets. There was, as far as I could see, little else on offer, and it seemed to me that apart from the shop and the toilet, it was little more than a glorified bus stop. It maybe that in hindsight, I’m being particularly unkind, but the very shape of it, its very contemporary feel, all found an unwelcome resonance at the top of the hill, in the ruins of the Medinat al-Zahra.

Having arrived on the bus and walked through the gates, we found ourselves with a view of the ruins, and at that moment our hearts sank. Everything was orderly, neat and clean, with far too many straight lines. We walked on, down concrete paths into what remained. The walls had been tidied up and neatened with concrete slabs, so that far from the tumbledown walls peppered with flora which make ruins so special, and which for centuries have delighted artists, writers and philosophers, visitors are presented with a series of modern facsimiles, of, amongst ther things, walls and gates.

Whole parts of the site have been ‘restored’, which is to say destroyed. Ruins of course are by their nature evidence of destruction. What we see in a ruin is the destructive passage of time as well as perhaps evidence of some historic trauma. Of course, the site has to be excavated, and again, by definition, archaeology - to some extent – destroys. But there is a huge difference between excavation and preservation on one hand, and restoration – or rather rebuilding - on the other. What visitors are offered at the site of Medinat al-Zahra isn’t the chance to see with their imaginations what it might have looked like 1000 years ago. Instead we are spoon-fed a vision of what someone else thinks it might have looked like.

On the Andalucía website, the following passage about the ruins speaks volumes:

To visit Madinat al-Zahra today does not mean entering an archaeological site where imagination has to make up for lack of volume. In al-Zahra, the huge amount of fragments found over many years of excavation made the experts seriously consider the question of how to present them. A museum would have meant metres and metres of display cabinets. Finally, it was decided to assemble the pieces of each palace over huge models at a scale of 1:1. This enable today's visitors to perfectly visualise the setting for the tales of chroniclers and poets of the caliphate's time.

It is then a model. Nothing more.

This response to what is a very important arcaheological site is rather like taking the recording of a song on a wax cylinder made in the late 19th century and embellishing it with new voices, new instruments and so on. While following the same melody, the new recording will ultimately drown out the original. Instead of listeners using their imaginations to enter the world of the 19th century room where the recording was made, and to hear how the voices would have sounded by using their experience of sound today – and there by doing become a part of that original moment - we get instead, nothing more than a replica.

Perhaps the most deplorable part of the extract from the Andalucía website is the first line: To visit Madinat al-Zahra today does not mean entering an archaeological site where imagination has to make up for lack of volume. It’s as if using one’s imagination is seen as bad, or at best a chore. You don’t have to do any of that here! We do it for you!

Imagining the ruins in our own minds, as they once might have looked, creates the space for us to imagine ourselves there. We're never going to be able to recreate them as they really were, but that's not the point. It does become a point however when someone tries to imagine them for us. As Christopher Woodward writes in his book 'On Ruins':

"A ruin is a dialogue between an incomplete reality and the imagination of the spectator…"

Furthermore, a city isn’t just a series of streets and buildings, it’s as much about the people who live there, who walk the streets, stand around, looking, chatting, getting on with their everyday lives. With ruins, in particular the ruins of cities, we have not only the fragmentary remains of physical structures, but the fragmentary remains of people – not in terms of their physical remains, i.e. their bones, but their movements.

This movement is bound up with what I call sightlines (and sightlines in turn with movement, for when we observe something, we do so as much with our bodies as our eyes). If you can imagine that when you look at something, the light between you and the thing observed remains once you've turned away, then we can imagine that bound up in every fragment within a ruin are hundreds and thousands of these lines.

In Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida, we read:

"From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze - light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed."

When I look at the stones of a ruin, I'm sharing a similar skin with everyone who's seen it.

In his novel Invisible Cities, the writer Italo Calvino writes of a city:

"Something runs among them, an exchange of glances like lines that connect one figure with another and draws arrows, stars, triangles, until all combinations are used up in a moment..."

In another extract:

"...there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns..."

Every place contains remanants of these threads which we can then pick up, and when we pick them up, we become for a moment part of one of these long since vanished patterns.

The picture below shows a reconstructed arch at the site.

The following shows an arch which hasn’t been (completely) rebuilt, part of which still rests on the ground.

When I look at the remains on the ground, I imagine the sightlines associated with them. I imagine the people who would have looked at the arch every day - at those very stones lying on the ground. And by looking up at the gap where it once was, my body in some way mirrors that of the person looking centuries ago. The sightlines, as if they're strings, become taut, and for a split second, a moment in the distant past is recovered. Part of a pattern (as Calvino describes) is restored; the dead light piled on the ground lives again.

A few years ago I described my view of history in terms of the cloning of dinosaurs in the film Jurassic Park. I explained how I took what fragments remained of a particular time or event (for example the old stones of a ruin) and filled the gaps with my embodied imagination. Embodied imagination in this instance, is an imagination anchored in the real world - in the sensory world around us. People in the past knew how it felt to feel the wind on their face; they saw the same sky and the clouds. They knew how it felt to have a body. In other words, it’s not a pure flight of fancy. It is just as Christopher Woodward explained – a dialogue. Not a monologue. We are not being dictated to by the ruins, and we are not dictating to them. Instead we are talking together, and it’s in this conversation that we find an authentic view of the vanished past.

At the Medinat al-Zahra however, what we experience is a monologue, but one which is spoken not by the ruins – but by those who have chosen to rebuild it. The gaps in the 'DNA' are filled not by our imaginations, but by concrete. Imagine a conversation between two people, with a third person - quite unknown to the others - shouting over the top of them. That is what it's like here.

Thoughts about my Nan

2010-09-27T14:10:00.000+01:00

As I stood in the church hall following the service of thanksgiving for my Nan who died on September 16th at the age of 98, I looked towards the stage at the back of the hall, through the door on the left hand side and into the short corridor behind. At that moment, in a split second, a number of memories crashed down around me, as if the way I was standing – the shape of my body – had unlocked the door behind which they’d been piled. The Christmas Bazaar, when I was a child was one of them, in particular the lucky dip box filled with sawdust and prizes. That was the first. It had stood there, just before the stage near the steps. I can still smell the sawdust; I can feel it on my hands as I search, in my mind, for a prize. Father Christmas had always made an appearance and would hand out gifts in his grotto. It was, in many ways when Christmas began, even though it was always held in the last week of November. It was at the Christmas Bazaar that I bought Nan a hideous ornament – china flowers in a china pot; gaudy coloured and chipped.

When I heard my Nan had died (I was on holiday in Spain at the time) my mind, for some reason, took me into the room which once ran the width of the church behind the large cross at the front. It was once an open gallery (you can see it in a photo of my aunt and uncle’s wedding), but had long since been blocked off from the church. Back then, when I was a child, it was always full of junk. It was where Father Christmas has his Grotto, and whatever the time of year, there was something of Grotto about it, with or without the old man in the red suit.

Back in the hall on the day of my Nan’s funeral, I could see the stage in my mind’s eye complete with the box at the front, one which ran the length of the stage, which when it was opened revealed a long line of lightbulbs. When I was a child, most of the bulbs were missing. You could see the sockets and the wires, but they hadn’t been used for years. There was a lighting box on the left hand side – just before the door through which I was looking – in which the old switches and levers had become grown over with time. In the single wooden panel, dividing it from the stage, was a hole through which you could see what was going on. My cousin and I had operated a tape player in there, some time in the mid 1980s for the performance of a pantomime whose name for the moment escapes me.

Inevitably, as I write, my thoughts are going to wander, as one memory leads to another, but back on the day of my Nan’s funeral, I thought about what I’d just remembered; the lucky dip, the Christmas Bazaar and the lightbulbs underneath the box. These were not isolated memories, they didn’t come to me like pictures in a gallery, one after the other. Instead they were physical and part of a web of memories, the threads of which seemed to vibrate with all that I had felt and experienced before. For a moment, when I moved, I could almost feel them again, I could hear the hubbub of the bazaar, see the stalls piled with jumble and the Christmas decorations hanging above. I was in the company of people who’d long since gone.

The photo below is of my Aunt and Uncle’s wedding reception, which took place in the hall. Very little has changed, apart from all the people.

Back to the day my Nan died – it’s interesting that my first thought was of the room immediately behind the church, but hardly surprising when you consider, that along with my Grandad, she’d lived in a house just opposite the hall. The house and the church were linked by Sundays, on which day we would cross the road to the house to select our sweets from the sweet-tin. Bon-bons, lemon sherbets, candied peanuts, mint imperials… we could choose 5, 6 or 7; the number changed from week to week. I can see the tin now – a round biscuit tin, I can hear the sweets rattle as the lid is prised off.

Below is a photograph taken in 1975 (from the Oxfordshire County Council archive) showing my Nan and Grandad’s house; the one with the white porch, built by my Grandad.

Whenever we slept at Nan’s, my brother and I would find paper bags beneath our pillows in the morning, with a few sweets inside. Before bed, we’d have Ritz biscuits and grated cheese whilst watching TV. The television was one that had to warm up before the picture was fully revealed. I’m always reminded of Boxing Day when I think of the front room. That and the Two Ronnies – and in particular the Phantom Raspberry Blower. Seaside Summer Special too. I can feel the texture of the chairs and the sofa. It’s the afternoon on Boxing Day as I think of it now, and while some have gone to the football, everyone else stays in the warm, getting things ready for tea; cold meats, pickles etc.

I remember once, when I was 5 or 6, when my brother and I slept over at my Nan’s. It was in the summer, late at night. The night was warm and a storm was brewing. We couldn’t sleep and at about 11 or 12 o’clock, my Nan came upstairs and asked if we wanted to run around in the garden. Of course we did, and so out we went, into the garden with Nan as the storm approached. It was a simple thing, but in many ways a magical one. Back then, as can be seen from the photograph above, there was a large apple tree in the garden which I remember vividly that night. It’s gone now. A house has been built on top.

In the 1980s, the church was remodelled, with the space between the church and the church hall - which until then had been open to the elements - covered over. Many of the rooms were also remodelled. It was necessary, and no doubt it made the church more comfortable, but of course something was inevitably lost as a result, just as it was when the church itself was changed several years before. The corridor down which I’d looked from the front of the church hall, had once been part of a single room in which we had our Sunday school classes. I remember the tiny chairs and the out-of-tune piano in the corner. Leaving this room, you’d find yourself outside. A door straight ahead led to the toilet (always cold and full of spiders) and one to the left into the gallery room – or Santa’s Grotto. To the left, after the door to the Gallery Room and the just before the loo, a flight of metal steps led down to the church. A green gate blocked the way to the street, while the steps themselves were hazardous by today’s standards, especially in winter. I can still hear the sound they made as you walked down. At the bottom, you turned left and in front of you was another room (The Fellowship Room) and another toilet opposite (even colder and with even more spiders). In my mind it’s always damp here. I can always see puddles outside, and in the Fellowship Room there is the smell of old clothes; costumes which were always kept in a walk-in cupboard (blankets for Shepherds in the Nativity).

Convict Trail III

2010-09-26T13:27:00.001+01:00

Having written to Radley College about my project, I received some very helpful information for which I'm very grateful. I was interested to know the location of Sir G.Bowyer's lodge, next to which Richard Burgess was asked to stop by Stephen Hedges and his co-conspirators. Below is a map from 1875 showing St. Peter's College, of which Radley Hall or House is a part. The house is circled in yellow. To the far left, is the lodge circled in green, at the end of a drive which leads out to the Oxford Road.

Below are two details taken from the map; first the lodge...

and then the house...

I think therefore we can assume that Richard Burgess was taking the route I suggested from Abingdon to Oxford. He stopped outside the Lodge whereupon Stephen Hedges, Stockwell and Harper left him to steal the lead from the 'larder.' The location of the larder is perhaps a little more difficult to ascertain. Benjamin Kent, who was renting the property from Sir George Bowyer, stated that the larder was about 100 yards from the 'office'. In the painting of Radley Hall below, made by Turner in 1789 when he was just 14 years old, there is a collection a outbuildings on the left hand side, near to which, perhaps, the larder stood. Having stopped at the Lodge, Hedges and his accomplices left with a bag and returned five minutes later with the lead. If the larder was near the house, they must have worked very quickly to get to the larder, strip the roof, and return to the cart, suggesting perhaps they were well practiced in their 'art'.

Convict Trail II

2010-09-24T19:35:00.001+01:00

This afternoon I visited the library and found a map of Radley and its surrounds dating from 1811; 17 years before Stephen Hedges stole the lead from Radley Hall. On the map, Radley Hall (or House) is shown, along with a road - or drive - leading up, which, I think, corresponds to the satellite view I posted previously.

First the satellite view again:

And next, the 1811 map:

This map is aligned a little differently, but Radley Hall is circled in yellow and the drive indicated by the yellow arrow corresponds to that shown by the white arrow on the left hand side in the picture above. I'm not sure if the Lodge was located here, but the drive extends from the Oxford Road and would (I assume) have been the route taken by Richard Burgess on his way from Abingdon to Oxford. A little more research will be needed.

Having stolen the lead, I again assume that they would have travelled into the city via the Oxford Road through Bagley Wood, down Hinksey Hill and up the Abingdon Road. Once in the city, they made their way to the castle precincts and turned back up Butcher Row (modern day Queen Street) as indicated by the newspaper report. Of course I cannot be sure that this is how they travelled, but it seems much more likely compared with what I'd thought earlier.

Convict Trail

2010-09-24T14:22:00.000+01:00

Prior to my residency in Australia, I want to trace - as far as I can - the route my ancestor, Stephen Hedges, took with the lead stolen from Radley Hall. Radley Hall is now part of Radley College and in the newspaper article regarding the trial, the name of Sir G.Bowyer is given as the proprieter. Having Googled him, I was led to Wikipedia, where I discovered that he - George - was a Baronet and MP for Abingdon. In 1815, financial difficulties forced him to sell the contents of Radley Hall and by 1828, the house was being rented to Mr. Benjamin Kent. The article states that Richard Burgess - a sawyer - who was on his way from Abingdon to Oxford with a cart, met the defendents - Stockwell, Hedges and Harper - who asked if he could carry a parcel for them. He was asked to stop later on next to 'Sir G. Bowyer's Lodge', after which the defendents went into a 'plantation' and returned with a heavy bag (full of lead).

Discovering the location of the Lodge will be important in helping me establish the route taken and looking at Google Maps, I have spotted a couple of possible locations for the old driveway. On the map below, the 18th century mansion is indicated with a yellow arrow, and the possible driveways with white arrows.

To be sure, I'll need to try and find a map of the area as near to 1828 as I can, which means a trip to the library.

The Marquis of Hastings

2010-09-05T17:17:00.000+01:00

Prior to my residency in Australia, I've been researching my four-times great uncle Stephen Hedges (1811-1885) who was transported there in 1828 aboard the convict ship, the Marquis of Hastings (3). I wanted to find out more about the voyage which took 104 days between 30th June and 12th October 1828. In total, 178 convicts were transported, all of whom survived the journey, which, given the conditions in which they were kept is quite surprising. The following is a list of the men who were transported with my ancestor, with sentences of 7 years, 14 years and life.

John Birch
Thomas Smith
Charles Mason
William Smith
William Burgess
Charles Shearman
Stephen Hedges
Henry Stockwell
William Duncombe
William Edwards
Jake White
John Wright
Daniel Murrell
James Matthews
John Richardson
Joseph Dorman
Abraham Storr Junior
James Sewell
Robert Popple
James Goodey
Thomas Cherry
James Wilkinson
George Henley
David Rowland
Jas Briton
Thomas Inman
Samuel Le Count
James Unsworth
Thomas Wells
Abraham Scholfield
William Kinley
Henry Hammond Fleming
Jonathan Collis
James Dixon
Richard Grace
Matthew Green
John Mitchell
John Jones
Jonathan Knowles
William Watt
Roger Worthington
William Ford
John Marsden
Thomas Briant
John Marsh
William Finch
John Burrows
Isaac Jacobs
Thomas Booth
James Mackay
John Bywater
Michael Russell
Richard Hart
Francis Hayes
Henry Dignum
Thomas Hewitt
James Cobson
James Featherston
James Const
Steven Dace
Thomas Knight
William Longman
John Booty
William Orson
James Haines
Thomas Reynolds
John Hitchcock
William Keeven
William Baker
John Levy
William Hawkins
Robert Williams
James Herring
Michael Ryan
Bigley Hermitage
Richard Richardson
John Cavanah
Daniel McCarthy
William Allkin
George Newman
Jeremiah Crawley
Samuel Smith
Anthony Bernard
Martin Blaney
William Godfrey
John Kilminster
Thomas Floodgate
George Glover
Henry Nicholls
John Foot
Richard Jones
John Wilkie
William Mitchell
Andrew Keating
Thomas Holmes
William Cardinell
William Woodwill
James McCarthy
John Phipps
Nicholas Binken
Charles Brewhouse
James Pascoe
Thomas Willis
Joseph Griffiths
William Thompson
Thomas King
Thomas Northam
John Maxfield
Daniel Meney
Thomas Jones
John Kennedy
John McGinnis
James Moss
John Jarvis
William Reynolds
James Wiseman
Thomas Taylor
John Wade
John Jones
Philip Riches
Charles Sandy
Charles Westbury
James Pye
Thomas Burton
William Goodyer
Robert Stafford
Joseph Ockenden
William Nobes Junior
William Ockenden
William Burton
James Gumbrell
James Burraston
John Newberry
Charles Briggs
John Hockley
Offord Russ
Thomas Catley
Edward Leader
William Jones
John Smith
George Munday
Thomas Thompson
Henry Brown
Samuel Freestone
Joseph Callow
Henry Cox
Francis Barr
William Bavin
George Britton
William Jollan
Stephen Burnett
George Martin
James Millen
John Head
Martin Hall
James Bristow
Thomas Dennison
Thomas Montague
James Chambers
Edward Schofield
George Shot
James Walkins
James Binns
Joseph Smith
John Serjeantson
Thomas Winterburn
John Ledgard
William Field
George Spencer
Matthew Spencer
John Field
James Woodhead
James Lister
Joseph Quiby
Joseph Owen
Thomas Vickers
John Wild
Henry Fowler

Emma Stevens (1835-1873)

2010-08-27T18:02:00.000+01:00

Following on from my last blog entry, I ordered a copy of Emma Stevens' death certificate to ascertain how she died and whether she was indeed the Emma Stevens (nee Fisher) to who I am, albeit indirectly, related. Sure enough, the death certificate showed that she was married at the time of her death to John Stevens, a tailor, who at the time was incarcerated in Moulsford Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1888. Emma's age at death is given as 38, meaning she was actually born in 1835.

When her husband John was incarcerated in 1871, Emma and her two youngest children went to the Reading Union Workhouse. With no income coming from her husband it seems she had little choice. Two years later, on 12th August 1873, in what must have been extremely grim conditions, Emma died of cancer in the workhouse. The story of John Stevens' epilepsy was sad enough, but through the lives of his wife and his children, we can see just how it affected the rest of the family.

The two young girls who went with their mother into the workhouse later married. Martha Stevens, who was 2 when she went in, married George Amor in 1888 and had 6 children. Her sister, Kate, who was 4 at the time she entered the workhouse, married Charles Plested in 1892. Together they had two children. Kate died in 1943 at the age of 73. Martha died 7 years later in 1950 at the age of 81.

Cornelius Squelch

2010-08-20T16:44:00.000+01:00

I've recently returned to my family tree and have been following up the story of my four-times-great-uncle John Stevens (1837-1888) who died in the Moulsford Asylum having suffered for many years with epilepsy. He had married Emma Fisher in 1857 and was incarcerated in the asylum in 1871. In the census for 1881, two of John and Emma's sons (Henry and John) are listed as living with their uncle, Samuel Stevens - a tailor, whilst a daughter, Mary, is listed as living with her aunt, Rosetta Hunt. The couple's youngest children, Martha and Kate are recorded, sadly, as being inmates at the Reading and Wokingham District school, which was in effect a workhouse.

I've wondered why the children had been left to such a fate? Was their mother unable to look after them? Or perhaps their relatives? Whilst looking for an answer, I discovered an Emma Stevens who died in Reading in 1873, and am assuming that this is Emma Fisher. I've ordered a copy of her death certificate to see, but if it is, then it marks another tragic episode in this family's life, coming just two years after the incarceration of John in 1871.

If Emma Stevens died in 1873, aged just 36, then her two young daughters would have been just 4 and 2 respectively. Could they have entered the school/workhouse at that age? And what happened to them afterwards? Why could none of their aunts or uncles take them in? After all, there were 7 altogether. Given the conditions at the school/workhouse , it is quite hard to understand how they could have ended up there. More research is needed of course but I hope their stories are, eventually, happier ones.

As an aside, whilst looking at the list of inmates for the school/workhouse in 1881, one name stuck out above all others.The boy in question was there with his sister Emily. She was just 12 years old and he was 4 years younger. His name, like something from a children's book was Cornelius Squelch. He has a story to tell, and I'd like to be the one to write it.

The Expiration

2010-07-25T00:03:00.000+01:00

SO, so, break off this last lamenting kiss,
Which sucks two souls, and vapours both away;
Turn thou ghost that way, and let me turn this,
And let ourselves benight our happiest day;
We ask none leave to love; nor will we owe
Any, so cheap a death as saying, Go.

Go; and if that word have not quite killed thee,
Ease me with death, by bidding me go too.
Oh, if it have, let my word work on me,
And a just office on a murderer do.
Except it be too late, to kill me so,
Being double dead, going, and bidding, go.

John Donne

2010-07-24T23:43:00.000+01:00

Be thine own palace, or
the world's thy jail.

Quote from Simon Schama

2010-06-25T17:06:00.000+01:00

"...to write history without the play of imagination is to dig in an intellectual graveyard..."
Preface to Citizens

Annotations (Deadman's Walk)

2010-06-23T23:04:00.000+01:00

The same bastion today.

New Work

2010-06-22T11:59:00.000+01:00

A sneak preview of new work for the forthcoming year.

Sculpture

2010-06-02T23:45:00.002+01:00

I am not, at least as far as I’m aware, a sculptor, but I think that what I’m striving to articulate in my work has perhaps more to do with sculpture than anything else. The following statements, from the book ‘Figuring it Out,’ by archaeologist Colin Renfrew were made by the sculptor Antony Gormley.

“I want to confront existence. It is obviously going to mean more if I use my own body… I turn to the body in an attempt to find a language that will transcend the limitations of race, creed and language, but which will be about the rootedness of identity… The body is a moving sensor. I want the body to be a sensing mechanism, so your response to the work does not have to be pre-informed and does not necessarily encourage discourse… If my subject is being, somehow I have to manage to engage the whole being of the viewer.”

“My body contains all possibilities. What I am working towards is a total identification of all existence with my point of contact with the material world: my body… Part of my work is to give back immanence both to the body and art.”

The last sentence particularly resonates with me, for part of the purpose of my work is I think to give back immanence to the past and to history, something which I have come to realise can only come about through the immanence of the body – the ‘moving sensor,’ which I have otherwise described as being like the recording/playback head of a tape player.

We are all familiar with the body-casts of Pompeii; men, women and children frozen at the moment of their death almost 2000 years ago. Buried in ash, the spaces which had once contained their bodies remained after the bodies had decomposed, allowing archaeologists, to use them as moulds by pouring plaster into the cavities. It was whilst reading about the casts in Colin Renfrew’s book ‘Figuring it Out’ that I began to think of the process of casting in terms of what I’ve been researching these past few years.

If we stand in a place, for example a wood, we can try to imagine those who’ve been there before us. By being aware of the moment of our own experience, of the wind, the light, the sound of the trees and so on, we can try to see the past through the immanent lens of the present. In a previous entry ‘An Archaeology of the Moment,’ I mentioned the writing of Christopher Tilley and the concept of Other and whilst reading Colin Renfrew’s book I realised how the process of creating the casts in Pompeii shared something with what I’ve been researching, albeit metaphorically.

If we stand in a place, we are defined not only by the shape of our bodies (our physiognomy), but by everything around us. To recap, as Tilley writes: “The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter… in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror ‘sees’ the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible - his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence... The trees and mirror function as Other.”

Just as the trees function as ‘Other’ therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on.

Imagine that all these things, in the place where once someone stood are – metaphorically speaking - like the ash of Pompeii, in that the shape of the person’s body is somehow sculpted by them. Of course this shape is fleeting, but imagine again that it remains, delineated by the world around it. In order to ‘see’ the shape, we must learn to fill it, not, of course, with plaster but with our own bodies or rather our presence.

At any given moment, we are sculpted by the world around us. We are both looking for and filling in the gaps left by others. We are therefore artists, artwork and viewer simultaneously.

Imagine these two situations: One, you are standing in a gallery in front of a landscape painting, a picture of a wood with no-one in it. Two, you are standing on a path in a wood that is empty and in this wood, the trees and the wind blowing through the branches, the feel of your feet upon the ground, the sound of the birds, the dappled light and shadows all act as ‘Other’ rendering your outside – your presence - visible. The gallery too is empty, but like the wood, you are far from alone, for just as the painting also acts as ‘Other’ in terms of rendering your presence visible, so the spaces left by those ‘rendered’ before are made visible again by your presence; not least the space left by the artist. And after the artist come the spaces left by everyone who’s seen the painting before you, and in the woods the same is true; although there maybe no-one else on the path, the spaces left by everyone who’s ever walked upon it are filled with your presence; the present fills the spaces of the past.

Having found Antony Gormley’s words so interesting, I read the transcript of an interview between himself (AG) and Ernst Gombrich (EG). The following are sections which I found to be particularly pertinent.

AG I want to start where language ends.
EG But you want in a sense to make me feel what you feel.
AG But I also want you to feel what you feel. I want the works to be reflexive. So it isn’t simply an embodiment of a feeling I once had.
EG It’s not the communication.
AG I think it is a communication, but it is a meeting of two lives.

In many respects this conversation above reflects precisely what I am trying to do: to feel the way people felt in the past by feeling what I myself am feeling. It is the meeting of two lives.

AG I would be interested to know whether you feel that it is possible to convey a notion of embodiment without mimesis, without having to describe , for instance, movement or exact physiognomy?
EG I have no doubt that not only is it possible but it happens in our response to mountains, for example, we lend them our bodies.

-

AG I can’t be inside anyone else’s body so it’s very important that I use my own. And each piece comes from a unique moment in time. The process is simply the vehicle by which the event is captured, but it is very important to me that it’s my body.

-

AG I am interested in something that one could call the collective subjective. I really like the idea that if something is intensely felt by one individual that intensity can be felt, even if the precise cause of the intensity is not recognised. I think that is to do with the equation I am trying to make between an individual, highly personal experience and the very objective thing – a thing in the world amongst other things.

-

AG Then I go into the second stage which is making a journey from this very particularised moment to a more universal one.

-

As I’ve written before: In a famous definition of the Metaphysical poets (a group of 17th century British poets including John Donne), Georg Lukács, philosopher and literary critic, described their common trait of ‘looking beyond the palpable’ whilst ‘attempting to erase one's own image from the mirror in front so that it should reflect the not-now and not-here.’ Thinking in terms of the metaphor I have described above (the trees and mirror function as Other), we could say that this erasing of one’s image is an attempt to see the space left behind us. I have also written in the past how history necessitates the consideration of our own non-existence; this space also reflects that state.

Useful Quote for Future Work

2010-05-21T13:20:00.000+01:00

"It's as if the Photograph always carries its referent with itself, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse... two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both: the window-pane and the landscape..."

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

An Archaeology of the Moment

2010-05-18T20:43:00.000+01:00

I’m currently reading an excellent book by Colin Renfrew, Senior Fellow of the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, entitled ‘Figuring it Out’, in which the author examines what he describes as ‘the parallel visions of artists and archaeologists,’ with an emphasis on contemporary art practice. As an artist with a deep interest in archaeology, I had to buy the book, and I’m very glad I did, for it’s helped me pull together numerous strands of thinking which have emerged from my research over the course of the last four years; in particular, the idea of the physical or ‘sensed’ present as a lens through which to ‘see’ the past. Professor Renfrew writes: “The past reality too was made up of a complex of experiences and feelings, and it also was experienced by human beings similar in some ways to ourselves.” The way we experience the present then, tells us a great deal about how people experienced the past when it too was the present.

I’ve written before how one of the problems we have in considering past events is the temporal distance which separates us. Reading a history book, although we know its content is‘ factual’, is nonetheless an interpretation of events; an outline at best no matter how well researched and well written it is. There may be a structure, just as in a novel, with a beginning, a middle and an end. But of course reality isn’t really like that – the boundaries are much more fluid. Necessarily therefore, a history of any event will be full of holes and it’s these holes which interest me.

In October 2006, I stood on the Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau and my experience there is something with which I’ve been working ever since, even whilst researching different places - whether other camps such as Bełżec or the battlefields of World War One – it’s that particular moment which I have been researching, peeling back the layers comprising the moment, much as an archaeologist digs through layers of stratified soil to uncover a whole range of times.

History is, in some respects, like fiction. What is known and written about can only be surmised from surviving evidence and what we ‘see’ as receivers of that knowledge, can only be imagined. What’s always missing is a sense of the present, as if what happened in the past always followed a script, one in which the main protagonists took their cues and delivered their lines accordingly. Hindsight, which one can hardly escape, joins all the dots, but leaves many gaps between the lines.

In the foreword to Peter Weiss’ book The Aesthetics of Resistance, Frederic Jameson writes how for the critic Georges Lukács, the world historical individual should never be the novel’s main protagonist, but rather seen from afar by the average or mediocre witness. We could say the same for history; that events described in history books are ‘best’ when seen through the eyes of those ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witnesses; people which history labels as ‘the mob’ or the ‘masses’; who are often buried beneath unimaginable numbers - mass graves within which, their names and individual identities are forgotten.

I’ve produced numerous works which examine this idea of the anonymous individual in history, but there’s another element I try to show, and that’s the ‘everydayness’ of any historic event. This is, I believe, key to our understanding of the past, for not only is history best seen by the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witness, but - for me at least – when the main event is glimpsed as a backdrop to an individual’s own life experience. That’s not to say the event should always be viewed through the eyes of someone far away from the scene, but that it should always be seen behind the individual, rather than the individual being buried somewhere beneath.

In the time after my visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, I wanted to find a way of identifying with those who died there. That’s not to say that I can identify with what they went through, no-one who wasn’t there can ever claim to understand what it was like to suffer, but we can seek to separate the individual from the grim statistics and site the camp in the landscape of the everyday world. Again, that’s not to say that Auschwitz-Birkenau was an everyday place, but what’s important for me, in understanding the past, in filling in the gaps which history inevitably leaves behind, is an understanding that the everyday world was happening at the time. Whatever event in whatever period we’re researching, the world was happening around it. The wind blew in the trees; the birds sang and the rain fell. The sun rose in the morning; the sky was just as blue or grey as it is today. There were clouds with their shadows, and during the night, the moon might be reflected in small pools of water, like that described by Auschwitz survivor, Filip Muller - in a pit soon to be filled with bodies. The events like the place were not everyday, but they took place regardless in an everyday world and understanding this ‘everydayness’ can help us understand and picture much more clearly events of the past.

For example, we can read hundreds of titles about the Holocaust and World War One, but when we read in the Diary of Adam Czerniakow – the ‘mayor’ of the Warsaw Ghetto – what the weather was like on a particular day, suddenly, in words like ‘beautiful weather,’ the full horror of the Holocaust is revealed, because, with these words at least, we can identify and – albeit in a very small way – empathise with someone who suffered; the past in effect becomes very much present.

In Birkenau, it wasn’t so much the sight of the gas chambers which was so horrific, or even the gaze of the infamous gatetower, but rather the way the trees moved, just as they’ve always moved, right throughout history.

Similarly, on the battlefields of the Somme, just as we cannot comprehend the horrors faced by the soldiers – the incessant shelling and machine gun fire – we can nonetheless see and feel the ground beneath our feet; we can see the sun in the sky, and feel the wind on our faces, and it’s these everyday details which take us, albeit just a little, into the midst of a battle. Of course we still need history to draw in the outlines, but it’s these other details which prevent history being a script. Events in history were not preordained, people made choices and choices can only be made and acted upon in a moment – in the present. Understanding the present therefore - that space wherein reside all our hopes and fears, our dreams and ambitions, and into which we bring our memories – is key to our understanding of the past.

In a passage written by Tadeusz Borowski, another Auschwitz survivor, we read the following: “do you really think,” he asks, that without hope such a world is possible, that the rights of man will be restored again, we could stand the concentration camp even for a day? It is that very hope that makes people go without a murmur to the gas chambers, keeps them from risking a revolt, paralyses them into numb inactivity.” People often ask why, when faced with certain death people didn’t revolt or even attempt to escape? If we read history as a script we might well feel obliged to ask that question, but when one’s alive in a moment, that in which we continue to exist, we will do anything to maintain that existence, and second by second that was achieved by doing nothing, right up to the end, for up to the end there was always the hope that something would change. Again, it’s through understanding what it means to live in the present that we can understand the past a little better.

In his book ‘The Materiality of Stone, Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology,’ Christopher Tilley writes: ‘The painter sees the tree and the trees see the painter, not because the trees have eyes, but because the trees affect, move the painter, become part of the painting that would be impossible without their presence. In this sense the trees have agency and are not merely passive objects. Dillon comments: “The trees 'see' the painter in a manner comparable to that in which the mirror 'sees' the painter: that is, the trees, like the mirror, let him become visible: they define a point of view on him which renders visible for him something that otherwise would remain invisible - his outside, his physiognomy, his carnal presence... The trees and mirror function as Other.”’ Just as the trees function as Other therefore, so must the sun, the stars, the clouds, hills, mountains, the sea, rivers, the wind, the rain and so on. Objects too, excavated during digs or on display in museums, act in much the same way.

Through archaeology, we excavate moments. We might come to better understand epochs and eras, but revealing a stone beneath a field which once belonged to part of a road reveals the movement of individuals and thereby an individual. And as we in the present stand on that stone and sense the world around us, we can bridge the gap between the past and present, even if that gap is one, two or three thousands years. If we walk along the line of the road, what we know of any relevant history becomes animated. With the aid of the ‘everydayness’ of the world we can position ourselves within an event – even if that event took place many miles away. We can become the ‘average’ or ‘mediocre’ witness, and rather than seeing a past event as one sandwiched between two pasts (those more and those less distant) we can instead bring to that past, the concept of the present and consequently the unknown future.

At the beginning of his book, ‘Figuring it Out’, Professor Renfrew looks at Paul Gauguin’s painting ‘Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going to?’ (1897) a title, and a question, which many artists and archaeologists alike have tried to answer. The questions posed in the title of are of course about the past, the present and the future and in reading this book I could see how these questions have always been there behind my work. After visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau and in an attempt to find anonymous individuals in history to whom I was related I began to investigate my own family tree, and, over the course of the last few years I’ve found several hundred ancestors going back on some lines as far as 1550. A year before she died, my grandmother told me about her childhood in Wales and in particular about my great grandfather who died in 1929 after years working in the mines. The following is an extract from that conversation:

‘I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us, and if we went out to play, our Mam would say, ‘you can go up the mountain to play…’ but every now and then our Mam would come out in the garden and we had to wave to her to know that we were alright you know… always remember going up the mountain…’

On visiting Hafodyrynys, the small town where my grandmother grew up, I walked up the ‘mountain’ she’d described and followed the path my great grandfather would have taken to work in the mines at Llanhilleth. On top of the hill I stood and looked at the view. One hundred years ago, when I did not exist, he would have seen the very same thing. One hundred years later, long after his death, I found myself - through being in that place - identifying with him, not because I know what it was like to work in the mines (of course I don’t), but because I saw the same horizon, felt the same wind, saw the same sun and so on. I’d found him there on the path (one which would in time lead to my being born).

I realised too in Hafodyrynys, that I’m not only who I am because of the genes passed down by my ancestors, but because of the things they did throughout their lives, not least because of the roads and paths they travelled, such as that upon the ‘mountain’. Anything different, no matter how seemingly irrelevant and I would not be here, and in a sense, that which I described earlier in relation to my standing on the Ramp at Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the way the trees moved seemed pregnant with the horrors of the Holocaust, is relevant here, albeit for different reasons; the everyday, insignificant details which make up a moment, are key to our existences. Until the time of our conceptions, we were always one step away (many times over) from never existing and again this refers back to what I described at the beginning of this piece; the idea of my own non-existence in relation to past events.

For the catalogue to the third in my series of exhibitions entitled ‘Mine the Mountain’ I wrote the following, in an attempt to summarise my thinking: ‘The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.’

The last line resonates when considered alongside what I described earlier regarding hope – that emotion which Borowski describes as ‘paralysing’ those who died in the camp.

I wrote earlier too, that through archaeology we excavate moments, that although we might come to better understand epochs and eras, revealing a stone beneath a field which once belonged to part of a road reveals the movement of individuals and thereby an individual, one continuing his or her existence for a second along the way. Artist Bill Viola wrote: ‘We have been living this same moment ever since we were conceived. It is memory, and to some extent sleep, that gives the impression of a life of discrete parts, periods or sections, of certain times or highlights.’ If we take what he says regarding this ‘same moment’ – that which we’ve been living continuously – along with what I’ve written above regarding pathways taken by our ancestors, we can see that that ‘same moment’ extends beyond the limits of our own existence and that moments and epochs are in the end, one and the same thing. The gap between the past and present - however big or small the temporal divide – is removed.

To conclude…

An ancient road, uncovered beneath a field, may be thousands of years old but nonetheless it will have been ‘written’ in terms of moments, where one individual amongst many others has carried his or her existence from one moment to the next. And as we walk ahead towards the future, along the line of the road, carrying our own existence with us; as we feel the ground beneath our feet and watch the wind blowing through the trees. As we listen to the birds and smell the scent of the grass, we’ll find ourselves in empathy with every individual who’s gone that way before us. Somewhere, beyond the horizon, Stonehenge is being built; the Romans have landed in England and the Mary Rose is sinking beneath the waves.

Waving Goodbye

2010-05-11T22:52:00.000+01:00

When I interviewed my Nana, a year before she died, she told me a story about her father who she remembered walking over what she called the mountain on his way to work. She said:

"I can see him now because he went up our garden over the road and the mountain started from there up… and he’d go so far up and he’d turn back and wave to us..."

That image of my great grandfather has stayed with me ever since, an image which seem to crystallise when I followed in his footsteps, walking from the back of my Nana's old house in Hafodyrynys and up the slope of the 'mountain' as she used to call it.

It was whilst reading The Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke, that I came upon the following passage:

"Who has twisted us this way round,
so no matter what we do we are always
in the position of one leaving? Just as,
on the last possible hill from which he can
glimpse his whole valley one final time,
he turns, stops there, he lingers -
so we live on, forever bidding goodbye."

The image of my great grandfather, that which my Nana left me with, is almost exactly what Rilke has described in his poem. It isn't just the image of him waving goodbye to his children, it's also that of him saying goodbye to the world.

In his book, 'The Past is a Foreign Country,' David Lowenthal writes:

"'Recognition does not always give us back the warmth of the past,' writes Simone de Beauvoir; 'we lived it in the present;... and all that is left is a skeleton.' A long-ago scene recalled is 'like a butterfly pinned in a glass case: the characters no longer move in any direction. Their relationships are numbed, paralysed.' Her decaying 'past is not a peaceful landscape lying there behind me, a country in which I can stroll wherever I please, and which will gradually show me all its secret hills and dales. As I was moving forward , so it was crumbling.' Time's erosion grievously afflicts what memories remain: 'Most of the wreckage that can still be seen is colourless, distorted, frozen; its meaning escapes me."

Trench Panoramas

2010-05-08T17:37:00.002+01:00

There is something aesthetically beautiful about photographs taken of the Western Front during World War One. It might sound a strange thing to say, but it's not unlike the view I have of those photographs taken by the Czechoslovak Secret Police in Prague. Although taken in very different circumstances, they are nonetheless about observation - secret observation of a perceived or definite enemy.

The photograph below is one of those panoramas, taken in Serre during the First World War. (I do not have permission to reproduce the image so have shown it below in no great detail.)

The fact I find these images so aesthetically pleasing is perhaps a reminder of the distance between myself and the subject. These images, it goes without saying, were not taken for their aesthetic appeal. These were images designed to better enable armies to deliver death to the enemy.

I wanted somehow to use this look in creating panormas of fake landscapes based on places to which I've been and the work I've made as part of my Mine the Mountain series, in particular, The Past is a Foreign Country which is shown below.

Alongside this work, I will, at the next Mine the Mountain exhibition, show a series of landscape photographs taken on trips around Europe, such as the two below.

I wanted to show that although the past as we perceive it is in some respects a fiction (in that it can only be imagined) it was nonetheless real - that what happened did so in what was then the present. Taking the aesthetic of the panorama above therefore, I've created an amalgma of the landscapes, making a single panorama. It's not a finished piece by any means, but the start of a new line of work.

Beaumont Hamel

2010-05-07T23:31:00.002+01:00

Battle of the Somme - Serre

2010-05-07T20:48:00.001+01:00

First image is a detail from a Trench Map (1916) showing Serre, the German Front Line and trenches (red) with the British Front line in blue. The photograph below shows Mark Copse, from where the 11th Battalion East Lancashire Regiment went over the top on 1st July 1916 suffering horrendous casualties as a result.

Postcard From Corfe Castle - 1978

2010-05-07T17:40:00.001+01:00

The Past is Time without a ticking clock. A place whose paths and roads are measured in years. The Present is where the clock ticks but always only for a second; where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.

My first encounter with history, as far as I can recall, came when I was 7 years old. During a family holiday in Dorset, we visited Corfe Castle, a picture-postcard ruin which towers over the small village of Corfe below. I have two particular memories of that visit. The first is of a postcard which, in my mind’s eye I can still recall quite vividly and which I’ve since found for sale on the web (and purchased).

Most of its design comprises text commemorating the assassination of Edward the Martyr (reigned 975-978) a millennium before. There are two dates at the top (978-1978) and I can remember clearly looking at the year 978 and trying to conceive of a date which didn’t begin with a ‘1’.

The very idea of a 1000 years ago fuelled my imagination; the very fact the place in which I was standing witnessed such an event a 1000 years before I was even born set in motion a chain of thought which has remained to this day. Even though I was only 7, I remember considering my own non-existence, albeit in ways a 7 year old might imagine such a thing. Three years before in 1975, my great-grandmother (born in 1878) became the first person I knew to die. It was shortly after her death, that the very idea of death began to trouble me and in some ways I think the thought of a 1000 years ago presented itself to me as death in reverse. Again, this way of thinking about the past has remained with me ever since, which might go some way to explaining why I tend to visit places synonymous with trauma and death.

It was in the small museum in Corfe Village that I remember staring at a cannonball fired during the English Civil War. I can recall trying to see it as it was hundreds of years before I was born. This wasn’t just an object sitting on display; it had once been handled by people, it had flown through the air and had played a part in the castle’s destruction. I wasn’t just looking at the cannonball, I was trying to imagine its flight.

So in this postcard and the castle at Corfe my passion for history began, and this short text is the opening paragraph of a very long story which I've been reading ever since.