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 …
