Yesterday – another Sunday afternoon bike ride around Wood Dalling, stopping off at the church of course. This is a big village! Not that there are many houses, but they lie in little hamlets: 'Red Pits', 'Foundry Hill', 'Crabgate' and 'Norton Corner'. These are probably very old settlements. What they share is the sight of St Andrew's tower. In fact the parish boundary is like the rim of a wheel, with the church as the hub.
Last Sunday when we were out on the bikes, two seemingly identical black and white horses suddenly came into sight. A man and a woman, both hatless and with flowing hair, were riding bareback side-by-side across a field from the direction of a wood. Somehow an almost otherworldly vision – you felt they might disappear into mist.
Anyway, this week we saw the couple again; the woman was tending a gypsy caravan and they had wood sculpture for sale by the road. Wonder whether they and the other inhabitants of Wood Dalling will be interested in Festial? The church congregation is probably tiny so I'll need to find another way of letting local people know about the project.
festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk
www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html
I decided to wait until next week for the vigil. This feels like a real luxury: to choose a day myself rather than being tied to a medieval feast date!
When first thinking about Festial, I planned to spend a day in Wood Dalling church each month, and of course I would choose a nice sunny day for it (medieval churches don't have central heating!). But now the idea of working with the actual feast dates has evolved it feels good to this rigorous conceptualist (too rigorous for my own good sometimes, believe me!) to have to take each day as it comes, no matter how inclement the weather.
But the vigil is different. The project proper hasn't started yet, and the vigil is just a way of trying to be open to whatever might be present – and I expect it to be a two-way process.
www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html
festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk
I know others have commented that it would be nice if a feedback mechanism could be built into this blogging thing. And I too find myself wondering whether anyone is actually out there apart from the bloggers themselves!
So, I now have an email address specifically for Festial — and I’d be happy to receive comments. Also, there’s now a Festial page on the World Tree website I share with my partner, and this will develop into a full project website when there’s a bit more to fill it with. It will be a means of showing work as it's made and I envisage it as a medium in its own right. My Grants for the Arts funding will enable me to buy a webcam ….
But first — perhaps tomorrow — the vigil.
festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk
http://www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html
It's exactly a week now until my first mentoring session with Katie Walton, artistic programme manager for BCA in Bedford. My Arts Council proposal included a programme of mentoring for the year of my residency to help me shift my practice up a metaphorical gear or two. So Katie will be giving me advice on marketing/promotion and getting the work out there. And Jo Clemence, gallery co-ordinator for the Babylon Gallery in Ely will be giving me critical feedback on work produced during Festial. I'm excited about this and anxious to make the most of the opportunity, but at the same time it's somewhat nerve-wracking, especially the 'critical feedback' bit!
At the moment the whole thing is gloriously fuzzy and abstract and full of potential. I don't need to know what I'm going to make in response to the site: that's the whole idea!! BUT …. what if there's nothing to offer Jo to criticise? What if there is, and she has to gently tell me I'm wasting my time (and worse still, hers)? I don't like the sound of either of these scenarios. But I know that the sort of work I do always involves risks of this kind.
Anyway, more positively, I'm looking ahead to my first date in the medieval calendar. Or make that three dates, as it's Rogationtide — the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Ascension Day. Now, this really was a time of feasting, fun and letting your hair down in medieval times (not to mention sending those pesky demons flying over the boundary into the neighbouring parishes!) In my excellent resource on these matters 'The Stripping of the Altars' by Eamon Duffy, the entry drinkings in the index refers the reader straight back to the information about Rogationtide!! But more on all that later. For now, I'll just say that Trevor and I spent a lovely sunny Easter Sunday afternoon cycling around Wood Dalling investigating some of the places where you cross over the parish boundary …
Oh yes, I've just realised I haven't yet mentioned quite an important feature of the project. I'm going to be keeping medieval time, instead of today's calendar. In pre-Reformation days, the Julian calendar was still in use, but adjustments made in the name of accuracy mean that we are now 13 days ahead. So, for example, St Andrew's Day is 30 November, but to experience it at the same time of year as medieval people did, I will have to keep it on 13 December. Wood Dalling church is called St Andrew's and I've discovered that churches were actually named after saints' days rather than after the saints themselves — a subtle distinction.
John Mirk's Festial is an early fifteenth century collection of sermons for the major saints and festivals of the church year, for use by priests who were not learned or ambitious enough to find sermon materials for themselves. These sermons rely heavily on legends, exempla and popular tales.
Festial was a runaway bestseller and went through multiple editions.
With my project, I'm opening myself up to possibilities. I'm going to be hanging around in the church, fully receptive to interaction with the spirits of medieval people who might have enjoyed these down-to-earth sermons with their somewhat humorous, bawdy and gory dimensions.
In fact, to mark the start of the project (in advance of the celebratory imbibing of ale mentioned in a previous post, that is!) I intend to make a kind of vigil in the church. Just sitting there in meditation, being present to the space, without feeling I should be recording things or taking photographs or making anything. Just seeing what happens: something will.
