Having collected some data and recordings of the landscape both from the beach and the woodland I could begin to process the data and play with some of the digital toys at the colony. The day was spent working with digital files so I escaped in the afternoon to go back and draw in the woods. There was something network like about the trees, how they stood as connections drawn up from the ground and opening out over the landscape. I felt connected in the woods, both literally as I’ve never had phone signal that good but also spiritually speaking the space was calm and I could have spent the whole week walking around the woods both losing and finding myself.
I returned to my room and studio and began to work on larger drawings analysing data from the woods before an evening talk from Rimantas Plunge on culture, nature, science and art. The talk raised some interesting points that took my back to my days as a media student and it seemed to tie up some thoughts I’d had on networks from working in the woods. The mention of Marshall McLuhan reminded me of my project The Experimental Village I’d worked on whilst on a residency earlier in the year at Cyprus School of Art and the evening was fairly revelatory in tying together my practice and connecting my work and thoughts to media theory.
Having spent the day mostly in doors working behind a screen it was refreshing to go out for the evening and venture over to the sundial, which although its main function was lost in the night it was still an intriguing structure. Cutting through the creepy woodlands with fellow UCS student Louise Todd and alumni Hannah Maynard opened out to the beach with a cracking view of the harbour to the left and a rather sinister view of the Russian border. The pulsating light represented more than just a division between two countries so I set about recording the light with a view to using this data later on.
24/09/2015
