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.
