I love Shetland !
I shall be sad to leave………..
Water…I have become mesmerised by the water, maybe since being here in the Booth, surrounded by it, the view is compelling and distracting, but it is not just here, as there is water and sea all around and it is constantly changing colour. Today on a calm day it is amazing, reflecting the sky and everything around it.
Laying out the herring nets to dry, can be about 2 miles of net.
10 days to go, before the residency comes to an end, I have seen the last three months of the year here in Shetland. At the moment my days are fairly repetitive so does not make for very interesting writing or reading! Had a good meeting with Clair, the project manger and had a chance to get some feedback on my ideas so far. I needed to talk through them to decide which 3 to take forward and focus on in order to present to the community advisory group next weekend and the project partners the following Monday. All felt clearer afterwards.
Water on all sides and storms rolling in all day…..You just can’t escape the weather here, and now at night, lightning. Spending a lot of time inside, walked around the other side of the harbour to look at the Swan, herring drifter boat. Caught in a squall again. Spent the day drawing and sorting through images, all the hundreds I have accumulated over the last weeks…….this process is a strange animal, you just have to let it take its course, even in the space of a week ideas have been started and abandoned in a morning, new ones arrived, thrown out, changed and in between are the moments of clarity. Getting it down, deciding if it is worth continuing with, try another way, draw it, make it, wander around, have another view, continue to draw, keep working through it…… Louise Bourgeois talked about her
thought feathers ‘ ideas that I seize in mid flight and put down on paper’……….it is that fleeting, so the place has to be returned to day after day to try and catch them.
On a more robust note this is the Adenia Trawler cut in half during her recent lengthening when a 10m section was inserted in the middle
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We’re back !! and so is the wind, in full force, I have missed writing here everyday, it has been a useful discipline, a way to filter the day and to gain a little distance on it, especially at the moment when I am working through ideas and often getting entrenched, sometimes too much, can’t quite see clearly which way to follow yet, or what is working or not, even though I have just over a week to pull together, it is all there I know, and the fog is starting to clear, it is starting to fall into place. I know what I want, I have a sense of what it is, just how to grasp it, how to organise all those elements, how it get it out and into the world, making sense, existing as a real object, that’s interesting enough !
In the meantime over the last days we have had a lot of this……rain
and this…..sea, all around us
and this…..wrestling with ideas
some of this…..looking at boats
and some of this……hibernation, I know not very professional to put a photo of the dog on but here he is Ravi, in a warm, blurry glow, very asleep.
