The Art of Enquiry on the West Dean Estate – walking-with the archive

Archive: Rex Whistler drawing – woman as landscape, body as land.

Other: The Self-delusion by Tom Oliver; Courting the Wild Twin by Dr Martin Shaw.

Location: Arboretum, Westside plantation

The Whistler drawing or etching depicts a naked woman lay on her back looking away from the viewer. Her body creating a hilly place from which three (wise?) men run from the hills towards the viewer on camels. From her mouth steam bellows out into clouds away from her and us. The body is the land. The breath of the body a great sigh of cloud dark in places with pollutant or rain. Men rush on with things to do. The woman regards all and none.

the man-made
the man-aged (ie some trees live to humans age, very few get to live to tree age in this agroforestry)

“Our eyes alert us to the wider situation but it’s our ears that alert us to personal, the particular, the micro, and the macro, this tends to be when the heart is alerted. There is more of the underworld about, it’s tactile, tangible attributes.” and

“It is not relentless self absorption that makes us realise our interior mess is directly mirrored outside ourselves, that’s not vanity, that’s attention, it’s not hubris its horrifying clarity. if you don’t attend to your souls vitality with intent then suppressed it will run you ragged.” – Dr Martin Shaw

on the route are some elders (mature trees), in the liminal space between the gardens and the park, the park and the woods, where they can be seen, and they are glorious.

looking between my working worlds of artistic practice and the organising, planning, doing
– the pace of the planning that makes it happen and visible, every email has a carroty dong pulling me here and there, replying to them, organising that
here i’m in the place of slow nature where we trust the growth of the tree even if we can’t see how much since yesterday, we trust in creativity even if we aren’t drawing it on paper it’s growing in the deep

on my walks, the distance covered is less in the slow, the distance travelled deeper

listening

dip into the liminal, the dream world
through the senses – notice, not judge
record

a dead crow
dead nettles
lost lamb bleating

more dead nettles beside the park, in the space between the park and the woods

how clean and smooth do we keep the edges of things
how we try to police our minds

nature doesn’t ask questions

i get caught between my worlds of reason, logic, judgements on what i encounter instead of noticing, recording, experiencing

notice the liminal spaces within myself in how i experience ‘here’

I look to my right and see a black hand and arm reaching out of a tree. breath in deep and out with relief. today i’m going to draw and walk with the mythic. i’m going to listen. in…out…

i’ve come to the end of the walk, i’m running out of time today. i want to return to one place. walking gives too much pressure to move on but i want to stay in one place, look, listen, more closely. the final gift of an old large tree stump covered with a shaggy mossy coat. on the top it is crowned with a bracket fungus [?] an ever expanding bloom.

in the dying it is not death, something else is beginning and blooming. the tree above may have gone but something else is blooming in its place. this walk is the final one. it is an ending to the research. i’m in young coppice. this bright green plateau with it’s kaleidoscopic bloom i’m reminded that not all endings are as they seem. humanity, my life, destroys things in an out of balance like a bramble rumbling through the woods. the trees may not have all what they need but it’s brambles day. maybe we are a pioneer species that will fall back? perhaps we need to get out of the way of our blame, let us come here, settle in to human, to the gift of it, to enjoy the gift of this place as a place where we can come and for a day, be as slow as nature is, let ourselves come away from the illusion that we are growing by being busy, but our souls, it is a cost of our soulfulness to not sense you, tree, here. in nature we can feel our soulfulness out of time, in another place, where we align with these vertical beings in this forest and for a moment feel this slow pace, notice the nature in nature. to drop the illusions, the self importance.  to just be who we are. there is great freedom in that. my fear is can we trust ourselves? I think the issue is we lost trust in there being enough fish and have been taking more than we need, letting our stores rot. it’s the mindset of relationship that needs healing and art does that, being here does that, even though it is a managed wood.

the settling needed in nature allows us to go bone deep. without the slowness it is too stormy to listen.

Archive: (Collection) Dali lithograph – Eight of swords; EJ letter to Iris Tree

Other: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass; last page of P.Wollheben. Heart of the Forest book on empathy;

Location: Whitedown, Warren Hangar, Highdown

Dali lithograph of tarot displayed in the lower reception area of the main building of the college. Eight of Swords using imagery based on the painting of the penitent Mary Magdalene with blue and gold around the edges. In tarot, this card represents a test.

Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass writes of the ‘honourable harvest’. Peter Wollheben discusses empathy in The Heart of the Forest, that this is needed in order to make change; EJ talks of western inheritance and eastern influences – that the symbolism in the daub of holy water that brings peace is now lost and that animistic symbols in everything have an ego, that he is conscious of his own use of it.

In the story of the heron told by RWK Braiding Sweetgrass – about a fisherman who lives by a lake and learned from the heron how to catch the fish easily, it came with a warning to only take what he needs. He fed and with a full belly was so excited at how easy it was he fished for more, thinking he could store it for the future in his shed. Each day he took more and more until one day there were no more fish to catch. The heron flew past and he saw it look at him with dismay. He felt something was wrong and ran home to find all his store had been taken by the fox. The metaphor of nature knows best how to grow and store than we do, support nature to do its job is better, otherwise its like picking food meant for the next year, next generation, and watching what we have taken from that generation rot. Isn’t this like the waste piles of clothing, plastics? The relationship in the forest is a powerful symbol of balance, a place to learn.

I find metaphors and symbols powerful in how I see nature and internalise it; how I express this in my practice in drawing, painting, recording. The recent cut reveals a red-cloaked woman holding a staff, red riding hood.

The sky is deeply blue and full of energetic visibility – like wearing a new pair of glasses that intensifies the colour, edges, and brightness, makes it move. The ground is not level, the rolling humps like burial mounds to the left of the track and to the right. To one side the mounds are covered with white chalks meaning these have been turned recently. The chalks change colour over time from brilliant white to a dull pastel beige-green, a bit like the colour of the paint on the walls inside the college.

How might we interpret what we encounter in a painting, in nature?

How is empathy with nature, others, self, valuable.

How do we ‘use’ nature and artistic interpretations to further establish belief, reason, to create our world according to our expectations?

What about the ego and how does primordial guilt of becoming through taking, consuming, change our relationship to nature, each other, the world?

What is lost in this process, what balance becomes out of kilter that exacerbates the destruction of that which we depend on to thrive?

Relationship with that from which we nurture and take is like relationship with a parent, an authority, an idea of something other than us – idols and gods. The use of which separates, but in the senses (lose our mind and come to our senses Fritz Perl) idols are lost, there is no room for them. A smell of pine transforms that. How to turn from othering to brothering and sistering?

A podium for…just left lingering at the ridge overlooking the hangar below. A place to proclaim. So I do. What of the rituals imagined here? Or is just a place to rest the gun, orchestrate the beaters?

Further on, I find another pool of feathers – leftovers for the gods. In amongst them, this:

Peter Wohlleben says that trees are more correctly described as heads in the ground and feet in the air because their equivalent thinking structures are in their roots, branches grow in a way that gives balance.

My experience of life is of movement, of moving from one place to another, one country to another, one job to another, but perhaps, like tree, that is an illusion in that I am the same person experiencing all of this change. In the symbolic world, this makes more sense, being connected by what is hidden (beneath the ground like tree). In joining with nature, sensing and imagining, ‘other’ intelligence, ways of knowing, can be found beyond the surface values. In a drawing, you can pair it down to shapes and forms, or notice what it suggests to find facial features – eyes that look back at you.

Maybe the human-ness as in the pareidolia, is a way to invite curiosity, to look, to recognise, to care, to be looked at and cared for. (In psychology that babies look for facial features to recognise a parent)

Archive: Leonor Fini painting (bark and white broken egg shell);
EJ Letter to Iris Tree (talks of time, anthropocene, projection, earth, evolution).
Others: Peter Wohlleben, Heartbeat of Trees, on Deep Time/Human Time (anthropocene).

Location: Buriton Hangar, Phyllis Down Wood, Bushy Piece

Neat.

Felled stumps amongst evenly spaced beech with occasional cypresses.

Ground growing bluebells and wood anemone.

Time as a concept that was industrialised to organise, measure, distance, separate, control.

It has components of scale – seconds, minutes, hours, years, decades, millenia…

We can put all sorts of things into time, away from now.

We can put blame into time – to the past industries and industrialisation of relationships (and relationships to it)

We can put the future into time, away from now and what we do each day that makes it.

The nature of things have their own time.

The question is not what to measure, or how, but what for?

Walking from the chilgrove road down to hooks way, reflecting on time. Time is an-‘other’ a construct, a concept, in terms of the mind there are all the people before who have got us to where we are today, I’m thinking about the economic, climate, and health crises. We are connected to them, to the ancestors, and if you go back far enough in time we all came from the same thing (whether your view is we are spirit or dust). Edward James letter to Iris Tree describes the ‘golden age’ as when there was no sense of the individual. On one level, we are being asked to look across time, beyond the individual through the personal, because it is always through the filters of our own experience, of what we’ve learned before. Walks in nature that consider the science, spirit, and the personal experience, how much of the personal is relevant in/out of time?

Distortions – seeing through the slants of time

The distortion resonates with ideas of perception, of the gap between experience and ‘picture’.

The plantation comes to a sudden hush as the breeze falls. I can hear a road, and a plane. Then a second plane. Nature is constantly changing at a pace too slow for us to notice. Almost. We live so fast, our minds and thoughts like a constant wind rustling up a need for this or lack of that or judgement on another. There is a still-life painting in the EJ collection by Leonor Fini in oil, mostly brown background, of a brown cypress bark that is in decay. It looks like the head, eye and beak of a bird. Standing out beside it is a broken white egg shell. The bark speaks of grief, of death, of parent bird. I think of mum, we say that grief is healed ‘over time’. What about ‘under time’? What happens there?

Lunch is eaten in the conifers, thoughts shake up in jumbles. Just beyond is the hanger, a lime green fringe to the grand stands of red bark and dark green leaves. I’m feeling disappointed with myself, with the world, and invite some exercises to help with this inspired by past experiences and hope.

Exercise One
Sit in nature. Notice how you feel about the nature around you, notice any emotions, thoughts, intensity. Just make some notes or a drawing, key words or expressive marks.

Archive: Edward James description of taking a ‘trip’ in his hotel room in Mexico; Pavel Tchelitchew – Hide and Seek, including studies for, from a tree on EJ estate
Others: Aldous Huxley – Doors of Perception; Rupert Sheldrake – Entangled Life.

Location: Colworth Down, Rabbit Warren, West Dean Woods, Several Beeches

Melting in.
Melting into yourself.
As I go out today, I’ve been absorbing the ideas on psilocybin from Merlin Sheldrake’s book, from the fungi and the mycorrhizal relationship, or bond, with tree. In nature they bloom into mushrooms. They are a link to expanding consciousness and imagination. On this walk, I’m considering the dissolving of the ego, where you lose the sense of your edges; where it is no longer about defending or building yourself into some thing, it is about melting in to what you already are.

Sheldrake writes about the idea that these type of experiences, enhanced by the psychological properties of some fungi, supported leaps in civilisation from expanded consciousness or states of mind. That the imagination and possibilities have influenced the leaps in which humanity has done things in different ways; but significantly an experience of being one, of being community, of being ‘you’ ‘we are the same’.

Young beech, dilapidated pens, old coppice stools, wide tracks, scented undulating pines that raise.

Edward James was looking to find a higher state of consciousness which is evident, you only need take a look at one of his surrealist artist works to see that. He knew Krishnamurti, went to see a Swami Prabhavananda to learn to meditate, was friends with Aldous Huxley who wrote Doors of Perception on his experiences taking mescaline, an hallucinogenic from cacti. James wrote an essay on his own trip when he took a substance in a hotel apartment in Mexico and as he lay on his back waiting, a divine-like apparition opened up above him but was interrupted by his pet bird squawking in the bathroom.

The trees are painted pink. The trees will be interrupted soon.

There is also graffiti.

The light tunnels and raises in pine.

Dazzling dance of curvy chestnut in a clearing of pine. To pine, to long for.

Coppice hazel like the hands in Tchelitchev’s drawings.

Bang into glockenspiels as the wind picks up.

exercise

lay down on the ground. close your eyes. fall into the earth. let the feelings in your body disperse from the falling like spores releasing. open your eyes. what do you notice? what thoughts, what do you see?
close your eyes.
fall again, into the earth, let yourself fall through your body into the earth, let yourself spill out. fall more. surrender.
open your eyes again.
what do you notice?

draw that.

Walking-with: EJ correspondence with Aldous Huxley, Christmas day 1939, on creating an ideology for a future college.
‘The Giantess” – print of painting by Leonora Carrington once owned by EJ

Dr Martin Shaw, mythic storyteller – “we make things holy by the kind of attention we give them”

Fritjof Capra on autopoesis – self-creating system of evolution/living. Santiago Theory of cognition: mind and brain are not the same. Gaia Theory.

Location: Winden Wood / Linchball Wood

‘Winden’ – to wind; to bind; to winch;
collinsdictionary.com:
“to wind itself, to meander, to write, squirm, to try to wriggle out”

Winden from the German word.
To wind – “to cause to have difficulty breathing – if you are winded by something”
winch “lift or lower an object or person using this”

The plant that comes to mind is ivy, but interestingly there was very little found in either wood, especially amongst the Linchball pines.

We are not conscious of our cells, but they are in our body keeping us alive. We are not conscious of the trees, but they are a body on which we survive. We know their function because of what we have been taught, we can see trees around us at a spatial level – over there – they breathe for the earth whether we see it or not in the same way cells in our bodies do. Science itself is phenomenal. A sensory experience is phenomenal giving an awareness of something ‘other’ than what is tangible, visible. That evokes another kind of relationship, another value, beyond industry, but how can both ways of knowing, understanding, sit together? What is lost in the measure of things compared to ‘other’ than ways of knowing through the senses?

What is the language that binds?

What is the language that re-minds?

“I pause for some tea – it’s luke warm. The pear has smashed and the sandwich and nuts are not enough. I’m angry at…a great swathe of forest was felled and not replaced, the land still settling, balancing, and there are so many tracks here it’s hard to step away from the. Two deer skulls in very little distance. A man shouting for a dog in the distance. Occasional gun shot sounds. Crows calling yups. Buzzards. Bright sun… Everything is so near, but I feel lost and I can’t get lost.” I was still grieving the loss of my mum. This painted my sensory vision today. I started collecting bits around me and assembling them. A mandala emerged. A system. I walked it. I lived with the grief walking it round like an organ of the heart, of life.

if we are part of the system we are not in isolation (even if we think we are)

we understand in terms of structure

what about pattern? patterns of emotion, spirit, ancestry, mind and the unconscious, the collective?:

the lie of separation.

Systems of painting and process.

Systems of materiality and material relationships.

Systems of experience.

Systems evolve through relationship.