Festial

It's a strange thing for an artist who feels drawn to performance and intervention to admit, but I do prefer to work in solitude. So imagine my discomfiture when I arrived at St Andrew's last Thursday armed with a carrier bag full of odd plastic bits and pieces and a camera, to find FIVE vehicles in the driveway of this sleepy church in its small scattered village. There seemed to be people everywhere, taking lawnmowers in or out of boots, slamming doors, feeding ducks and goodness knows what else.

I'm afraid I just panicked and drove away!

In all, I made THREE abortive attempts to perform my 'Display of Relics'. As I approached for the third time clutching my tripod, I could see through the open doorway of the church that one of the churchwardens was busily wielding a hoover. I know one should applaud this valiant effort to keep the copious quantities of bat droppings under control but I must admit my heart sank.

Still, patience was rewarded in the end and my Relics have now been duly Displayed.

I haven't found much out about how this would have been achieved in pre-Reformation days, but that's sometimes a good thing I think, as there's less risk of being tempted down a reconstructionist route. All I knew beforehand was that on the Sunday after St Thomas' Day (and observant readers will recall that the last Midsummer Bonfire was on St Thomas Eve …) the relics – usually organic material reputed to be fragments of the physical remains of saints or their garments, but sometimes fantastical artefacts such as a Griffin's Egg – would be displayed or paraded in some way at each parish church. And every church – however small and remote – would expect to have something to display, which makes you wonder whether medieval people ever questioned the authenticity of these treasures.

The idea for my Display came to me when we were visiting the Scottish island of Eigg in the spring. The two beaches close to the cottage where we were staying were both strewn with strangely sea-worn plastic artefacts, some of which seemed to me to resemble otherworldly body parts or broken bits of torture equipment. This worked for me conceptually on several levels and I became quite excited about the possibilities. In fact, I'd been looking forward to this festival since before Festial officially started.

Right now, all I have is a large number of photographs and one painting which I made yesterday at an inspiring workshop led by Nigel Skinner. But when time allows, what a lot of possibilities they seem to hold for future work. I know – it's just a case of being patient again.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

http://www.re-title.com/artists/imogen-bardwell.asp

http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Imogen+Bardwell/41443.html

Last night was St Thomas' Eve: time for the last of the midsummer bonfires. Luckily, like St John's and SS Peter and Paul's Eves, the weather was uncharacteristically summery and I was able to go barefoot which always seems to help for some reason! I hadn't got around to making wet-weather contingency plans, other than going on the next fine evening, but in the event it feels great to have managed to have all three fires on exactly the 'right' dates.

Having said that, I know that I've been so intent on planning the performance/intervention each time – and then carrying it out – that I haven't fully reflected on the fact that it really IS the anniversary of the hundreds and hundreds of times that these fires would have been kindled. Am I feeling anything approaching the same as my medieval ancestors would have? Or their pre-Christian ancestors? Well, maybe a little. But as I suspected at the outset, there are going to be limits. My life is so much more comfortable; I'm not escaping for one evening from hunger – or from the ever-present fear of witnessing or experiencing excruciatingly painful death.

Something else I'm reflecting on now is the context of my work. How does it relate to current practice and debate? I realise there's a need to look critically at my "intentions, processes and outcomes", in the words of an application brief I'm currently addressing. At the same time, the next festival and the next issue of Kalender are always looming.

Perhaps I should be secure enough in the overall concept of Festial to accept what happens as it happens, and the relentless turning of the year is a part of that. I'm trying to put myself in the place of people whose lives and beliefs shaped the world we live in today; the world that all contemporary practice takes place in. I just hope that this means that my investigation is as contemporarily engaged as any other exploration of the links and chasms between different cultures.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

Back to the old path behind Wood Dalling church yesterday evening. It's becoming quite a resonant place for me, and I wonder what is accumulating there with each visit.

This was the second of the three midsummer bonfires, collectively known as 'St John's Fires', but this one was actually for the eve of St Peter and St Paul's Day. The bonfires would have been rowdy social occasions with plenty of drinking and merriment. Mine was more reflective, but I was interested to see the juxtaposition of the primeval excitement of fire with the sombre church walls and (nowadays) peaceful graveyard.

St John's Wort was the herb I cast into the fire this time to make 'magical' smoke – as would have been done in the medieval period. I'd spotted lots of it flowering along the old railway track close to our home and planned to stop off to pick some on the way to the church. We just turned the car around to park on the distinctly unpastoral road close to the start of the walk – and I was surprised to find some St John's Wort right next to the car door!

No visible owl babies this time, but plenty of noise issued from the unglazed window where we saw them last week. Bird books describe the sound that barn owls make as 'hissing or snoring' and I'd put this into the former category … nice to have some company, even if the Fire wasn't going to be quite the communal event that it would have been 600 years ago and more.

After last week's Fire, I'd had a few ideas I wanted to try out with the filming, including circling the fire and jumping over it. This was great fun and I was definitely starting to feel that something was happening.

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After a few hairy moments with the Corpus Christi mag – including a worried phone call from the printers saying that their machine was chewing up paper of all colours except for white and did I mind Kalender having a white cover – it's here! Because it was printed on a different machine, the print quality is different from the Rogationtide issue. It's rougher, more 70s fanzine-like. The detail is far less obvious than it is on a computer screen, but I think it's OK for what it is and what I always said I was aiming at: a spontaneous, low-cost publication as a giveaway multiple.

I have to say I'm glad that Kalender is also up on the website as a downloadable pdf, as some of the photographs really are 'enigmatic' in its printed form!

I've worked in a completely different way this time: making images for Kalender and working out relationships on the page has triggered new ideas to take forward that weren't there before. Ideas arose from putting together the Rogationtide issue too, but the looming slash07 exhibition forced me to make something more tangible before I started. So I was able to select from work that already existed and organise it into something resembling a magazine. I've learned a lot from both approaches, but the difference here is that the new festival – the Midsummer Bonfires and Display of Relics – is already upon me and without the spur of the exhibition I haven't managed to physically make anything except for Kalender in between.

As it is, the first Bonfire has happened – last Friday – and here I am, still stuffing cellophane bags with sweet woodruff as the Corpus Christi free gift and working on a late-night rubber-stamping production line with Trevor while listening to 15th century music on CD. Madness!

More on the Bonfires as they happen, but here's evidence of the first one on St John's Eve – Midsummer Eve itself. I threw camomile on and the pungent smoke rose as it would have done 600 years ago. On the way round the church we saw a fantastic sight: a clutch of barn owl chicks, all different sizes, performing for us through an open window in the top room of the blocked off porch. Did their ancestors do the same 600 years ago? Trevor has read that where barn owls make their homes, the pellets pile up for hundreds of years, so it seems quite possible. After the brief performance and much shoving and squawking the chicks retreated and we didn't see them again while we were at the church. But later, we saw the pale ghostly flapping of a parent owl. It followed the line of the graveyard wall, but didn't swoop in. I don't suppose it sees many humans around at that time, or not live ones anyway.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial

It's scary to acknowledge how many hours I've spent producing the Corpus Christi issue of Kalender. And it would have taken far longer if I hadn't had the assistance of a computer genius! To think that when my mentor Jo visited and I hadn't any idea how I was going to put Kalender together, I was wondering whether I should ditch it to retain my sanity. Jo did suggest that I trim down the project workload in order to do fewer things well rather than rushing around making work like a whirlwind. She was right, though, in her conviction that Kalender was non-negotiable.

For one thing, I've flagged it up rather publicly. For another, I love doing it! When I had the initial idea I was excited at the thought of the publication as a limited-edition multiple that I would leave in random places for people to pick up if they were curious. But now I realise that it can be distributed more widely than my immediate locality – in virtual form anyway – by making it downloadable from the website, and that means it will potentially reach a much wider audience, which is great.

Preparing the images and text is, itself, 'making work' that can be developed in other ways, and I'm finding that further ideas are springing up all the time. The trick will be to record those ideas but not to try to develop them all right now.

After all, I've been rash enough to schedule four different dates to constitute one of my twelve festivals – The Midsummer Bonfires and Display of Relics – and the first Bon(e)fire for St John's Eve is coming up VERY soon …

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial