Howe: from winternights to summerfinding

From Winternights to Summerfinding … and Summerfinding is fast approaching. Well, I don’t think anyone knows for certain what date or exact period was celebrated as Summerfinding in the Viking period, but modern heathens usually take it as May Eve/May Day – which is exactly half a year after Winternights if you take that as being Halloween. Which I do.

Is any of this relevant to Howe, apart from representing a convenient length of time to work within? I think so. Perhaps these festivals were never celebrated in England, but I like to imagine that they were, and that hills and burial mounds might have served as a focus for some of the activities. If nothing else, the evocative words help me to remember that all that ever happened in the landscape – and landscape is every scrap of land under our feet – is potentially still there, and part of who we are now.

At this point I should come clean and admit that Summerfinding will only mark the end of phase one of the project: the next phase will take place between Summerfinding and Winternights … and so on, if I keep getting ideas and they seem worth developing! Self-directed projects have their pros and cons, but it’s a definite plus to be able to decide for yourself what you’re going to do and how long to do it for. The downsides, of course, include the need to stay motivated, the financial constraints and lack of feedback.

We’ve been regular attenders of the monthly Late Shift at Norwich’s SCVA. It’s a lovely buzzy event, the only thing of its kind I’m aware of in Norwich and an opportunity for installation and performance artists to set something up for one night only. Previously, there’s been an unthemed open submission procedure, but last month proposals addressing the question ‘What is a museum?’ were invited. I applied, proposing an enhanced version of the newspaper ‘hill of hills’ that I constructed last summer for the Forge show. Much to my surprise – the proposal had been very last-minute – I was accepted.

In order to maximise the idea of my hill as a ‘museum’ or archive, I planned to place the cut-out newspaper letters spelling out the names of Norfolk hills (cut from the local Norfolk newspaper) in small brown envelopes. Each envelope had the hill name typed on it using an old-fashioned typewriter, and after pasting its contents onto the growing ‘hill’ I planned to file the empty envelopes alphabetically in an open index box.

I began by systematically searching for hills on local large-scale maps. Hills that bear the name of their nearest village were discounted, but anything else was fair game. I was already aware of plenty of bizarre names like ‘Lambpit’, ‘Tumbley’ and ‘Dunfer’, as well as gruesome ones like ‘Gallows’ and ‘Deadman’s’. But the systematic search – which isn’t over yet as I need to acquire more maps! – yielded a huge number of new ones, and my numbered database is now up to well over 300.

For the Late Shift, which lasts from 6 – 9 pm, I guessed that there wouldn’t be time to paste up more than the 120 names that would fit into the number of brown envelopes I’d bought. It was hard to guess just how big the hill might grow in that time. For the Forge installation I’d had a ‘leisurely’ nine days, although that did include finding names on the map and cutting them out piecemeal as I needed them.

In the event, I worked feverishly (OK, with a short coffee break I admit!) but only managed what might be termed a hillock. It was much harder on the knees than I’d imagined. Next time I’ll take a cushion … and I’m really excited to say that there will be a next time. I contacted Alistair the lovely curator at Cromer Museum who I hoped might be interested in giving me a space in the museum for a day so I can make my hill a bit more respectable. Another performance … and he likes the idea and said yes! I’m going to see him to discuss it next week.

It feels like ages since I’ve posted here. I loved it when I was making myself post something every day – structure and a sense of accomplishment, even if the ‘accomplishment’ was really only a making ready, a setting the scene, a beginning. And now it almost feels like beginning again.

Part of the time away from here has also been time away from home. We spent a week away, culminating in a weekend on snowy, icy, beautiful Dartmoor. Now, there’s a landscape so different from Norfolk, but what do they have in common besides heathland? That’s right – hills.

Of course, the Dartmoor hills are dramatic and they’re not cluttered up with views of buildings or agricultural monstrosities. But the basic beauty of a curve against the sky remains constant. And the evocative names, too. The weekend workshop I was attending was meant to include a walk at Bone Hill, but the roads were too icy to attempt it. Still, Bone Hill ….

It’s time to admit to myself that I now have nothing in the way (apart from work and Christmas) of getting this project properly off the ground, so to speak, and this must happen. True, weather conditions here have made it impossible to physically travel to any hills, but as I know I need to create performance pieces there’s nothing to stop me finalising the work and organising props.

One aspect of the folklore surrounding hills I definitely want to focus on is the way that stories remain fundamentally the same despite the vagaries of translation. I’ve searched and searched online for different versions of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Elfin Hill and have only been able to find two different ones. I find the differences between the two quite fascinating, though, as it’s easy to tell they are the same story but certain nuances feel quite different. I thought of translating one of the versions into the Norfolk dialect, referencing the cultural/genetic/intangible influence of the Scandinavian settlers – the Vikings in Norfolk were mainly from what is now Denmark, and Hans Christian Anderson was Danish. I may also try finding a translation programme to turn the story back into Danish, or perhaps Old Norse, and then translate it back into English, and then back to Swedish … but I haven’t looked into the practicalities of this. Perhaps that should be the first task – and one that can be accomplished without needing to brave the icy roads …

I’ve been thinking about leaving a piece of a story at the top of as many hills as the story has pieces … perhaps painted onto fabric and cut into pennants to fly in the wind, the shape of the pennant being pretty much identical to that of the wind vanes on Scandinavian stave churches – and most likely on heathen temples before that. And perhaps on heathen temples here, too. Which does tie in with another property of hills that I hope to explore, as there is debate over whether Anglo-Saxon or Viking temple buildings actually existed in England, as there is so little evidence. There seems to be a fairly general view that both the Celtic people and the Anglo-Saxons saw their deities as immanent in the landscape, so they had no need of temple buildings. They could go to a hill, or a stone, or a body of water, or a tree, and commune with the gods in those places. The pennant shape is also that of the rune Wyn, which has the interpreted meaning of everything being in harmony because you are aligned with the currents around you; a beneficiant rune of comfort and happiness. Why not spread that around – at the top of lots of hills, for example??

Also, of course, it may not be a coincidence that the shape is reminiscent of the flags that are sold in beach kiosks to adorn the top of sand castles (or should that be sand barrows?).

I enjoyed The Late Shift yesterday evening, and it’s given me a lot to think about. Watching performance – I like it, I realise, and what I respond to is the sheer ephemerality of it as a medium. As someone who has never been very good at picking up plotlines, I sometimes struggle to get to grips with what I’m actually seeing, but once I get it (or someone gives me a clue) I can find it the most evocative and haunting of mediums; something to mull over and hold in the shifting container of memory; maybe for just a while but maybe, if something resonates, for ever. Documentary photos can help to keep the memory going, or can stand up in their own right, but I’m not sure how far they can reconstruct the experience if you weren’t there.

For me as an artist, there’s a complexity here in that I tend to prefer private performance which would I suppose be better described as intervention. And yes, the ephemeral nature of that appeals to me greatly, too. Also the idea that people *might* notice what I’m doing or find the things that I leave for them to find, but it’s all quite subtle. At this stage I know this approach partly stems from my own shyness – I can’t imagine having the guts to ask people to sit or stand around and watch me doing something. But at the same time I’m trying not to beat myself up about it even though I’m aware of my limitations and how they affect the way I plan my work. I do actually like making subtle interventions, and they are, I think, appropriate to the subjects I explore.

It won’t, therefore, come as a surprise when I say that I didn’t actually hand my Howe flyers to anyone yesterday. However, I did leave them on tables, on sofas and at the reception desk, and I was happy enough that I was able to do that. I can tell myself that it’s consistent with my practice anyway!

Today, I’ve been revisiting the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale, The Elfin Hill. Just two translations seem to be readily available, but some of the differences between those translations are interesting in themselves. I think of the way tales change subtlely as they are repeated backwards and forwards over time – perhaps back and forth across the North Sea. It reminds me, too, of the way hill names may have changed as word of mouth turned tricky Scandinavian words into something more homely. Potato Hill, anyone?

Just time for a quick post today as we’re off out to The Late Shift at SCVA in Norwich. This is a fantastic free event, giving performance and installation artists an opportunity to put something on ‘for one night only’. Not only that, but the current exhibitions are open, and free, and the cafe/bar stays open for the evening. It’s a monthly event, but I’ve heard rumours that it may have fallen victim to recent cuts, in which case it’s likely to be scheduled less frequently – what a shame.

http://www.scva.org.uk/whatson/late_wednesdays/?id…

I’ve just been printing out little A6 flyers about Howe to leave on tables and perhaps even feel brave enough to hand out to anyone who looks friendly. When I say ‘about Howe’ there’s actually no information at all, other than the address of this blog. But that’s as far as I’ve got, and once there’s a project website I’ll be linking it from here anyway. So I think it’s worth the small effort of making flyers, especially so if the rumours are correct and there’s to be a longer gap between Late Shifts after this month.

I’ve been enjoying Nicholas Hedges’ blog, A Line Drawn In Water, so I checked out his website, which I’ve been dipping into and finding very rewarding.

http://www.nicholashedges.co.uk

I see some similarities in the ways we work, and I’ve found it valuable to really consider his approaches and compare them with my own. This is from his biography, and it certainly struck a chord:

Walking, both as a means of creating work and being a work in itself (as with artists like Richard Long) has become an increasingly important element in my practice. Phenomenological approaches to archaeology and landscape have enabled me to articulate ways in which we can remember those who’ve left nothing of their existence. Through being in the landscape and researching the ‘nowness’ of the present, I see paths as traces left by ‘place-making’ people, where every path is a story, comprising tens of thousands of others.

Human beings, ‘leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route’. When we consider in light of this, the etymology of the word writing (derived from the Old English term writan – meaning to incise runic letters in stone) we can say that human beings write themselves on (or in the case of my forebears, deep beneath) the landscape – they leave a trace. Henri Bergson wrote that our ‘whole psychical existence is something just like this single sentence… I believe,’ he said, ‘that our whole past still exists:’ the whole past does indeed exist, upon and within these pathways, as sentences, written in the landscape by people over countless centuries.

Across this meshwork of pathways, we record our own stories and play back those of people in the past. History is a dialogue between us….

This is partly how I see Howe – the need to take a phenomenological approach, so that the experience of ‘now’ (with the understanding that some aspects of my experience will be shared with people who lived ‘then’) is the key. Walking may well be important in this. I’ve already undertaken several walks to the tops of named hills, and plan to formalise or structure these in some way. I also plan to carry out certain actions on the tops of hills; actions (or perhaps staged photography with props) that refer to the names of those hills, and thereby make reference to human interaction with the landscape.

‘Our whole past still exists’ – yes, it does, and I hope to find ways to express this. I won’t be working with my own family history, as Nicholas Hedges does so poignantly. But in a way I will, as surely the point is that however hazily distant our Anglo-Saxon or even Neolithic ancestors lie from me, they are very much part of my own family history, and have had a very real input into who I am.