As I think about the Edinburgh walk I am reflecting on this line from Larry Eigner:
“a poem can be like walking down a street and noticing things, extending itself without obscurity or too much effort”
Larry Eigner’s writing made me reflect on the fact that much of the work that takes place in my studio seems to centre around the walk as a process for researching, reading and making rather than on the poem and the words of the poem. There is a lot of work that is happening ‘without too much effort’ that relates in one way and another to the walk.
This is a drawing I made this week in an effort to try to make connections with the walking process, making knots and drawing.
As those of you who read my blog might be aware on my walks I make ropes by hand in my studio and ask participants who walk with me to make knots in ropes to document the experience.
The drawing is something I want to do more of and it has been reaffirmed by my reading of Confabulations by John Berger.This reading came about as I prepare for another related walk in august with The Walking with The Waste Land group and of course there are cross-overs or maybe,confabulations.
As I read,there is so much that is pertinent in Berger’s writing to what I am engaged with, Berger writes:
“During the last week I’ve been drawing, mostly flowers, motivated by a curiosity which has little to do with either botany or aesthetics…..Is it possible to ‘read’ natural appearances as texts?…It is a gestural exercise, whose aim is to respond to different rhythms and forms of energy, which I like to imagine as texts from a language that has not been given to us to read”
and so, I keep looking carefully at ropes and knots.
