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.
