Navigating Bempton Cliffs: “plan this step and each new move as you would equate one word upon the next.”
Both Ross Hamilton Frew and myself are drawing in the same place – as we draw the rain hits the tin roof of the studio and the wind shakes the corrugated shelter above our heads. For me these sounds re-surface the memory of joint, even familial, activity – caravan holidays and towed activity routed in walks along the East Coast of Yorkshire. Activities jammed between the sea and the North York Moors.
I then get to thinking about the language of this coast line. I should, by anyone’s reckoning of a taught or learnt process of acquiring a language, be fluent with these edges of the land by now – yet it is so long since I was there. Whenever we were there as a family our path’s were clouded by the sea-mists and we never saw but a puffin in the sky. If only this treaded language, this colloquialism of navigating the land, was the same as getting your ass round a gallery and understanding the walls and the floors and the ceilings. With written or spoken language you learn that one word means the following word should make sense – as should one step lead perfectly to the next along the path in front of you.
Landmass has no grammatical structure, yet if the steps you made all those years ago on those caravan holidays amongst the mist are copied and pasted in to a white-cube, is the language then translatable?
Back to the collective drawing exercise and the conversation in the studio under the rain. I finish one line like I finish a sentence and start another line with another word as I walk from one end of the room to the other.
