I’ve been enjoying Nicholas Hedges’ blog, A Line Drawn In Water, so I checked out his website, which I’ve been dipping into and finding very rewarding.
http://www.nicholashedges.co.uk
I see some similarities in the ways we work, and I’ve found it valuable to really consider his approaches and compare them with my own. This is from his biography, and it certainly struck a chord:
Walking, both as a means of creating work and being a work in itself (as with artists like Richard Long) has become an increasingly important element in my practice. Phenomenological approaches to archaeology and landscape have enabled me to articulate ways in which we can remember those who’ve left nothing of their existence. Through being in the landscape and researching the ‘nowness’ of the present, I see paths as traces left by ‘place-making’ people, where every path is a story, comprising tens of thousands of others.
Human beings, ‘leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route’. When we consider in light of this, the etymology of the word writing (derived from the Old English term writan – meaning to incise runic letters in stone) we can say that human beings write themselves on (or in the case of my forebears, deep beneath) the landscape – they leave a trace. Henri Bergson wrote that our ‘whole psychical existence is something just like this single sentence… I believe,’ he said, ‘that our whole past still exists:’ the whole past does indeed exist, upon and within these pathways, as sentences, written in the landscape by people over countless centuries.
Across this meshwork of pathways, we record our own stories and play back those of people in the past. History is a dialogue between us….
This is partly how I see Howe – the need to take a phenomenological approach, so that the experience of ‘now’ (with the understanding that some aspects of my experience will be shared with people who lived ‘then’) is the key. Walking may well be important in this. I’ve already undertaken several walks to the tops of named hills, and plan to formalise or structure these in some way. I also plan to carry out certain actions on the tops of hills; actions (or perhaps staged photography with props) that refer to the names of those hills, and thereby make reference to human interaction with the landscape.
‘Our whole past still exists’ – yes, it does, and I hope to find ways to express this. I won’t be working with my own family history, as Nicholas Hedges does so poignantly. But in a way I will, as surely the point is that however hazily distant our Anglo-Saxon or even Neolithic ancestors lie from me, they are very much part of my own family history, and have had a very real input into who I am.
