The prompt for this week’s walk arose out of a conversation with an artist and friend in Turkey (Ceyda Oskay) suggesting that she hand-print letters into a book to form our third poetry collage. We began talking about collaboration and books made from fabric, hand-printed or stitched into and taken for a walk. Houses became numbered books on pavement shelves each with its own unfinished story. I am walking along the outside edge of a private library where books can be borrowed by special invitation only. Parted curtains are teaser illustrations. On the flood plain the volumes are suspended above the water table and I walk to the forceful, rhythmic sound of the pile driver, compressing giant concrete blunt needles into the strata of the earth. No library hush here.
I step off the human-made shelf into mud. The straight lines of the catalogued world are replaced by a tangle of shoots, twigs and branches. The shelf is no longer stable and the edge between above and below is blurred. An intricate network of underground communications speaks from the past to the libraries of the future. Words on the screen have done enough for now and I reach for fabric and images from the walk that I printed out and ironed onto interfacing. A sensory tussle ensues, sewing and unpicking the threads, re-sewing, pressing. Stitches reaching to the underside, catching loose threads. Sewing decisions mix with chance in a way that writing does not. The back and forth of walking, sewing and writing begins to feel like a means of balancing different ways of thinking, feeling and travelling, from one side to another.
