Stating/Showing

THE CUMBRIA ENERGY CENTRE

“We’re now exposed to the maintenance tracks. Such observations would be impossible if there were but a break in the clouds in the sky for the sun: now more houses, more settlements and more trees and common land in between are set behind us. And there’s a constant black line that floats beside me on the other side of re-enforced glass – it’s not that comforting though it keeps disappearing above the window frame.”

There’s an age where both Ine and Pie go well together and a new form of energy is created. Right now I am around ten minutes from the border between Scotland and England, heading south east of Dumfries towards the next stop, which is Carlisle. My final destination, after meandering through the hills of Ayrshire down in to the valleys of the Lake District and through to the northern hills of Lancashire, is eventually Manchester.

There was an age when this journey would have been altogether more troublesome and harder to navigate. As the window set to my right dost frame each scene as I occasionally look out, the landscape escaping before my eyes, there’s a hill another hill a town a townhouse a church a paddock a river lake tree forest fence and field. All rolled in to one and relative to us as a travelling hanger of internal sound.

We are not reserved – just quiet

Before all these ‘objects’ of the landscape, the very fabric of a traveller’s horizon would have been North South East and West by way of tree, hill, lake and track – all forayed before each step forward. And none of these tunnels or bridges would ever have existed. Right now I think of the short walk books my father keeps in his trunk at the top of the stairs, behind where the dog used to sleep.

The page says jump (with a smile) It was on a walk through the Peak District that I lost one of these books. He blames me as he entrusted the book in my hands. I was the navigator following the instructions set before me with each turning page.

“Walk three miles east of the pink tree set before you and come to a fence two metres in height. From this fence head down a track through a stile and over a dry stonewall. From here see the tip of a reservoir to your left. Follow its line around North West arriving at a dam. Scale the dam reaching midway between water and stone. Jump off in to the water and swim to the shore on the Eastern side. Once there head north to a second stile…”

And so on. I do this with a smile of course, as I’d rather forget how I left the book, having survived its rigorous instructions, on the top of the car – we set off, the gravel underneath us crunching and expanding space beneath our tyres, the book flew off the roof caught by the Winter’s afternoon sky.

And we are now in England and the accent is altogether different. Carlisle is as grey as Glasgow’s West End on a sunny day and from here the world seems to be not so much as awake as the humdrum of the engine I sit behind. I am facing north west now and there’s not a stile in sight, just more bridges and tunnels that disguise our guise as a linear travelling collective machine.

Len had my laughter

Flash film lens camera axiom action location difference description words and conversation. An autobiographical fiction…

I remember then match sticks making a composition of a house and a lane and a tree in the background and then Len laughs at the revelation of his creation. In the Crux of Sheffield, there’s a hill so steep that your bike would have to be pushed, not ridden, on the return home.

Len held the can of my laughter. Len’s brother was Jack. I wear Jack’s jumper and laugh. And talk in to the camera with the affect of conversation.

What happened?

Sat in this place we face one another with teacups and sauces and crumpets in the middle, and a shiny Mongolian teapot reflecting our convex torsos noses knees and shoulders – knees and toes. We begin to write down every detail of the character in front of us, drawing out physicality on the surface using words that describe our knowledge of one another. At first a tip of the head the brow the cheekbone and mouth and ears connecting the odd smile. Then eyes come with a flash of further description.

Then comes laughter how do you describe this in words without alluding to your history?

The crux of this is the edited character that comes after, the muffled voice and the sound of exultation in between. There’s a place called Crux too. This is important in terms of location, so take note…

“After the written description I take it upon myself to speak directly in to the camera. Little do I know that this camera focuses on my mouth alone: whilst brandishing my characterisation in to the lens, Len’s laughter escapes. A willowing dip in sensibility, a slight whine and then a realisation that gobbles up the sound and swallows only to let it go again – to exasperate – again: such an incantation this is! I let it go again, knowing it’s exacting affect, its altitude in decibels – the intensity of two sources – a logarithm of gut throat and rhyme.”

A climbing hill ends with the next horizon revealing itself – it cackles at you and makes you more aware. So, when speaking in to the camera I will be aware of myself. I will laugh. But then what is the difference between giving you this laughter and describing it? What is fiction thereof and what is empirical evidence of something that has sound?

To edit text you first have to edit film. So – edit the film, re-play the film and decipher the words spoken. Then use these words as a final draft.

Then comes an installation.
First a photograph that’s relevant
Then the full description written by the other
Then the film that is mixed between an edit and the full version
Then the edited text at the other end
Perhaps unrelated sound

“He lent me his jacket and we took to the outside air to collect light that would otherwise be lost if not for the refracting glass of snow. Snow is soon then ice and all angles of thought are different from before. He sings and slips ahead in to the night. I have his jacket still – I wear it with such memories as below…”

A friend worthwhile for festivities: I was never allowed in his kitchen though for some reason – it was just this one room – one room that soon became two.

The first time I visited his flat was on a darkened icy December evening ridden with more snowfall – his belongings littered the close; you followed them up the stairs to his front door that was usually ajar with paraphernalia. When inside you made your way through curtains draped across collected junk – books piled in corners and framed photographs and drawings from artist friends decadent upon the walls. There was no central heating; only warmth from a small electric heater burning the smell of his floor and drapery, from elegant damp, into the dry comforting crisp of sheep’s rug ash wood and oak recline. There was one curtain in the room that covered just one of two magnificent single glazed windows – the other was simply left bare. After watching the snow fall outside your eyes would follow shelf upon shelf of sheet music making their way to a grand piano crushed in the corner behind the door, through which you walked in. Upon greeting you he disappeared into the kitchen.

I took this absence for my collected observation. A low light dangles from the high ceiling above; reaching the coffee table in the middle of the room, save for a few hitches on the metric scale. The table is cluttered with half made Christmas decorations, glass spherical paperweights, broken ceramic pots and teacups accompanied by an ashtray containing change from the day’s cigarettes.

I was presented with wine complete with a mug decorated with lights and birds and trees. He played the piano as I gazed around the ornaments that danced with every note he delicately placed upon each string.

Preceding the second visit, we met in a second hand bookshop that sold sheet music. A dusty old man who spend most of our visit on the phone to his younger lover – I was listening in – sold us a collection of Bach (1685 – 1750), some Czech composer, a neat bit of Debussy (1862 – 1918), and an almanac on Peruvian interior design.

We arrived back to his flat. Heater on, coffee table set he shuffled again to the piano. Heater pulled closer to my feet, coffee table redressed, I sat on the sofa again, busying myself fixing his broken ceramic objects. One ceramic container had the function of keeping the smaller – yet anything but negligible – pieces that would in the end complete each puzzle. The objects re-formed themselves by way of my fingers as his hands recited the sheet music in front of him. Several compositions later a teapot, a fish ornament, and a few cups and sauces lay in front of me.

I stood up, stretched, turned the low orange light on at the wire and swung it as a pendulum, then crossed to the other side of the coffee table to catch it. There I let the light go again, across the paperweights, dancing its way through each reflection, up in to the air to where I sat before. It was then I noticed a hint of another reflection. On the wall directly behind and above the sofa the light fashioned upon an inch of a mirror behind another large piece of material.

Piano sounding in my ears, notes seemingly louder with each step, I approached. I pulled at the cloth that then fell to the floor. And before me was a great reflective surface unleashed, revealing the room of activity, twice the volume it was before: in the bottom corner towards the frame – to me his back remained – the pianist had stopped.

Upon your departure yellowing the search

For one moment in time, as the colour of each awning matches a different part of another knight’s crest, two definitions coincide.

“Our awning never did fit properly. It was toilsome in construction and collected water to the point of me being assigned with a stick, after every heavy downfall, to gently lift the puddle from underneath and rid the canvas roof from the water’s weight.”

If you’re camping you are generally in a field as green as the next that contains cows, and as yellow as the underbelly of a dragon that buries itself deep under the canvas where you sit. In these fields and amongst these colours, caravans find a double meaning.

First off they’re a tin place to sleep and develop a love for the sound of precipitation: a place to collect water in your stationary state, to drink from and wash in. When still they’re a home delivery of pots and pans with jacks in land. Each has its own size in relation to familial growth. With solar panels attached to oversized extensions: awnings that look more and more like conservatories with each spring, summer and early autumn.

‘CARAVAN’ takes on another form in movement: a caravan of people in displacement, from one place to the next, through histories past in to futures yet to arrive. So whilst you’re sat enjoying that rain in that field so green you hear the sound of ungulata hoof upon hoof – and each dog strapped to the front of each tow bar barks as another horse passes by. Then to you, your dog barks too and another caravan comes your way.

I walked out of the awning into the afternoon sun. The grass was as green as it had ever been drinking from the precipitous rain that rolls every morning off the hills to the west of Rosely: it was then that two points in time travelled in to one. A precession of brightly coloured knights on horses weaved their way through our encampment – dirt and track upon their boots and blood upon their brows. They were to climb again to the east, away from the hills and the rain – backs to the sun and facing the shadows before them.