I know that this project is about hills. When people ask me, What are you working on at the moment? I say, Nothing really … well, I’m just starting a new project about hills but I haven’t actually really done anything yet.
This has been going on for some time.
I have had ideas, don’t get me wrong. I’ve visited hills, mused on what it is about hills that attracts my attention, even constructed a hill out of newspaper. But it all feels like, well, like standing on the top of a mound knowing you have to jump and knowing you’ll feel better if you just do it but still jigging hesitantly from foot to foot.
Then I had a new idea.
One thing that’s been lacking in my initial musings has been a definite structure; a meaningful timescale for the project. Festial, the first project that the Arts Council funded, was planned from the outset as a year-long residency, focussing on my response to twelve significant medieval festivals (http://www.world-tree.co.uk/festial). The second project, Pace, was designed as an unofficial ‘fringe’ event to span the dates of the biennial event CAN (Contemporary Art Norwich), around six weeks in total (http://www.world-tree.co.uk/pace). This made me very aware of the need to plan performances and interventions at reasonably regular intervals in order to keep up the momentum. Having project websites really helped too, as the need to upload new material pushed me into trying new things and making sure they were recorded.
I realise I haven’t yet talked about the rationale for the new project, or why I’ve decided to call it Howe. I intend to add to this blog every day, so there’ll be plenty of time to get my thoughts straight (well, hopefully!). But for now, it’s enough to say that today, 31 October, suddenly seemed a good date for the first day of the project. It’s Halloween; Samhain if you’re pagan. The Anglo-Saxons and Vikings, who have left their own imprints in the part of England where I live, probably celebrated the evocatively-named ‘Winternights’ or ‘Winterfinding’ at a similar time. Having read that the Scandinavian festival of Summerfinding was roughly the equivalent of May Day, I reckoned that the six months in between would make a conceptually sound time frame for Howe. I’ll need to structure the interior, so to speak. But it’s a start, and I needed a start.
