Howe: from winternights to summerfinding

At this stage, I realise I’m using this blog in a very different way from how I approached my previous one for Festial. The thing is, it’s helping me to make a start, even though all I’m doing is getting initial thoughts pinned down here rather than in a notebook. This may not make for very entertaining reading, I fear, but I quite like the idea of the project growing in a truly organic fashion this time. For some reason I feel oddly confident that something will emerge, blinking and stretching, if I give it the space to do so.

Yesterday, I started to look closely at Jeremy Harte’s article Hollow Hills, which I quote here more or less verbatim. He stresses that just because a site is referred to as a beorh in an Old English text does not mean that it was a grave mound. We should not even jump to the conclusion that it was the sort of hump or hillock that looks like a gravemound. King Alfred, after all, refers to the Alps as beorgas and he must have had some idea that they were not artificial. The ‘mountains round about Jerusalem’ of Psalm 125 were turned into muntbeorgas in translation. The word comes from Indo-European (IE) *bhergh, ‘height’, and its original sense of ‘high place’ persists in later languages.

Old English (OE) beorh was obsolete in written English by 1500. But the word left four dialect descendants – in the North barf, ‘a low ridge or hill’; in Sussex berry, ‘a hillock’; in Anglo-Cornish burrow, ‘a heap or hillock’ (often of mining waste); and in Wessex barrow, ‘a gravemound’. Ancient tumuli, rather than topography or tin-mining, were a proper object of study for gentlemen; besides, Salisbury Plain was rich in archaeological features that were the subject of fieldwork research by Aubrey; so the Wiltshire word won the day against its competitors.

It might look as if this can’t possibly be leading towards an engaging art project, but I’m liking the sense of shifting meanings and near misses.

OK – why hills? Why did I call this project Howe? How am I going to structure the time and what am I going to make? Will there be any tangible ‘art works’ or will the outcomes consist of reportage of performance/installation/intervention? I do need to think about these things and get something down on paper – or, at least, in this blog. This may take a few days of posting but feels like a very necessary first step.

I’ve just read a very relevant article by Jeremy Harte; Hollow Hills, in the magazine At The Edge . It addresses some of the things about hills that fascinate me, and I think I’ll be plundering it shamelessly for quotes (very much in the way that grave robbers plundered so many Neolithic and Bronze Age barrows, leaving a telltale hole in the top).

I’ve been reading about Barrow Hills on the Chertsey-Egham border. Here, three mounds had appeared as threm burghen in a charter of 672-4, and so they were duly scheduled in the County list as ‘Chertsey nos.1-3’. But ironically, inspection later on showed them to be natural hillocks…

On the other hand, when is a hill not a hill? When it’s a barrow. But in Norfolk (and elsewhere, I’m sure), many places named ‘hill’ (one example is Kettle Hill) turn out to be, not natural features at all, but burial mounds. There doesn’t seem to have been any real separation in the minds of whoever named them.

Who did name them? I guess that the names of hills may sometimes have taken shape organically, through a chinese whispers process, so that an Old English name became something quite different and quite strange in modern English. Some of them may have got their names through folkloric associations. I like the fact that we can’t know this, but, for example, a name like Ladies Hill sets the imagination into overdrive – perhaps there were tales of fairies dancing there, or sightings of ghostly ancestors, or the hill was perceived to have a feminine shape had therefore been thought sacred from time immemorial. What resonates for me is the knowledge that someone, or groups of people over time, named these places.

Crow Hill. Snow Hill. I love the way these hills have been named so simply and evocatively. Of course, as above, these names may not be all that they seem, if they are names that have evolved over time from older words or the languages of those from over the sea who brought their own names and customs.

So, to keep count, that’s really two separate things to focus on. Number one: the ambiguity of whether a hill is actually human-made as a burial mound (with its associations with the dead, with treasure, with the halls of the fairy folk) or a natural feature, which may also be linked with supernatural occurrences and have a human history as a place of ritual, or as a meeting place of any kind – including a gallows site. Number two: the actual names of the hills and what they evoke; their fascination for me stemming from the fact that they would not have names at all if it were not for the people who lived here before. And for me, the relevance of that is overwhelming.

To be continued …

Today I’m continuing to reflect on what led me to the foot of the hill. There’s no doubt that the seed was sown during Festial. One of the positive things about that project’s structure was the need to make spontaneous new work after each of the festivals, in order to fill a thematically-linked 16-page magazine in strange and surprising ways. Through this, I (re)discovered the joys of collage, especially real, physical collage (admittedly partly from necessity – I don’t know how to do many technical tricks but I can cut up prints, stick them together and scan them as well as the next person). For the Michaelmas issue of Kalender I made a text ‘hill’ out of the names of hills from the vicinity of Wood Dalling. For a previous issue of Kalender I had made a slogan from cut-out newspaper letters and loved doing it – very Sex Pistols, I thought. It was in Latin but translated to ‘in the beginning was the word’. I just found that very pleasing on so many counts … I think I’m a text-piece junkie.

So, this is how my vision of a newspaper hill was born … and was realised as a prototype for Four Friends at the Forge. But I knew there were so many more names out there – so many more clues, so many more expressions of belief, humour, fear, plain creepy horror (there are several Gallows Hills and Deadman’s Hills) … all I needed were larger-scale maps, and more of them. I dreamed of filling a whole shop window with a hill; the letters for each word pre-cut by me and indexed, maybe even alphabetically (she said, salivating), but pasted up ‘live’ during the course of a single day, as a performance. I need to investigate how this can happen.

So far, I am just thinking about the background to where I am now. But I know I need to look outside that as soon as I understand my starting point. Now I’m blogging again I’m beginning to look closely at other people’s blogs again, and to reflect on the diversity of art practice and the validity of my place within it. It’s early days in that area; I’d closed myself off from thinking of myself as an artist, despite the fact that Fine Art is what my BA (first class hons) and MA are in. I don’t need to do art, I’ve been telling myself, it only leads to hours of frantic application-making, followed by disappointment. There’s so much else calling out for attention. And that’s all true – except, if I’m honest, the art is a part of what I need to do, like it or not.

On my hill I wait for wind

And on my hill I wait for wind

And on my hill I wait for wind

And on my hill I wait for wind ….

(Fountain, from the album Dry by P. J. Harvey)

Yeah, well, I’ve been on my hill waiting for wind for ages now. And I think I can detect the first gentle currents.

I think it might help to get things moving if I try to remember how it all started. My work has been pretty quiet since last year’s self-funded Pace project (http://www.world-tree.co.uk/pace). This year, I’ve participated in a four-person show, and had a piece of work from my previous project Festial (blogged about here and documented at http://www.world-tree.co.uk/festial) selected for a major exhibition at Norwich Castle Museum, The Art of Faith. The four-artist show was fun to do, and I had the opportunity to develop some new site-specific work for the old forge building and quirky garden where the exhibition was set. Some pieces were old work reinterpreted for a new setting, and I know that, with so much imagery left over from my year’s residency in the medieval church at Wood Dalling, that approach is still an underexploited option.

One of the new pieces was called I dance with dwarves. Strips of cotton fabric were rubberstamped letter by letter with alliterative slogans in the vein of, ‘I try to trick trolls’, ‘I wait for water-elves’, ‘I speak with sea-elves’, ‘I hobnob with hobgoblins’ and so on. These were tied onto various features around the garden, some obvious, some less so. I wanted to put myself, now, in the present tense, into a situation where an audience are lured into believing I really ‘do’ interact with the beings that would have been a part of the *real world* in the minds of the Anglo-Saxon and Viking incomers who settled, not only here in Norfolk, but in so much of this land. So many of us must have their blood in us. And, perhaps, with their blood, their sense of what the landscape contains and comprises; their gods, landwights, dragons and cosmology; their ‘northern-ness’. So much of what was entwined in their lives resonates here and now, and that’s what I want to make art about. What I want, and I don’t know at all whether I can actually do it, is for people who see the work to realise (perhaps with a jolt) that this is not about something separate from our contemporary concerns but about something that is in us NOW and has as much bearing on our passions, on our yearnings, on our fears, as art that addresses 21st century urban decay, consumer culture, alienation or celebrity.

Not too much to hope for, is it??

The other new work for the Four Friends at the Forge show was a performance – during the nine days of the show I made a collage directly onto one of the walls of the forge building. I had maps of Norfolk in front of me, and wallpaper paste, and scissors, and copies of the local newspaper, the Eastern Daily Press. I had always been struck by the names of hills in Norfolk, and not only because of the long-standing misconception that Norfolk doesn’t actually have any. Leaving aside hill-names that reflect the name of the nearest village, I looked for the strangest ones I could find, and there were plenty. I cut out newspaper letters and the hill grew and became stranger by the day. Now I dream of making a bigger one – far bigger – but I need to find somewhere to do it.

The hills themselves, admittedly, aren’t always that distinct. Some of them are really burial mounds but are called ‘hill’ anyway. But the thing is, someone called them something. Someone found them to have a special character or quality that inspired a particular name. Hidden in plain sight, the experiences and imaginings of humans are there. All we have to do is squint at a map. Better, we go and search it out for ourselves …