On Saturday it was Palm Sunday. Well, Julian calendar style, that is. For a change, I'd had a chance to get some ideas together beforehand, but still on the day wanted to spend some time up at the church alone 'seeing what happened'.
It was a beautiful morning, which made me far too blase about getting up to the church while the sun was still shining. By the time I got up there with my camera it was nearly lunchtime and the sun wasn't quite what it had been a few hours before. Still, I had a wander and a think and took some photographs. It was getting colder by the minute, so I photographed the raucous rooks circling their nests and went home.
Shortly afterwards, I returned to St Andrew's with Trevor who had agreed to act as documentary-maker and camera man. Among other things, we bore with us a video camera on a very long stick. Quick, get round the side of the church before anyone thinks we're doing something weird, I said, before realising that this wasn't exactly in the spirit of inclusive artistic performance.
By now, the wind was pretty strong, and buffeted the camera as I 'processed' three times around the churchyard with it. There was no way of telling what was being captured, but the lack of control was intentional. Then I processed again inside the church with my camera-on-a-stick, covering the nave and aisles in both directions. This time I didn't have the excuse that the wind was nearly blowing me over, but things were still quite wobbly, and again, I didn't know what I was getting. I hoped there would be a closer view of the strange stone creatures, but unfortunately my stick wasn't long enough.
Then, I did a performance, filmed by Trevor, in which I made an equal-armed cross of willow, and wound wool around to make an amulet during three repetitions of a piece of music on a flute of willow wood. It was an incredibly meditative undertaking, and meditative was also the word Trevor used to describe how it felt to video the performance.
What was it all about? It's always difficult to know how much to explain! But it was all based on research into the ways that medieval people may well have marked Palm Sunday in that very space. A meditation on that.
