Found in Frankwell – Part 2

The uncertainty I expressed as the first Covid lockdown came to an end has not become any clearer in the world, although with the emerging possibility of a new Democratic US president, some sanity might begin to return. Whilst not becoming immune to the uncertain future, we are learning to live with it, sustaining hope and making plans cautiously, but with plenty of contingency.

And so we return this week to a second lockdown, albeit with slightly more reasonable restrictions. The walking I did during the Spring and Summer (see my last post) was a huge source of creativity. It resulted in a series of books, collaborations with other local artists, collaborative walks, a collage for community consultation and various writings.

Some of the books are on sale with all profits being donated to the Shrewsbury Food Hub. Four of the books were also donated to the artist books archive established by Sarah Bodman at the Centre for Fine Print Research at the University for the West of England in Bristol.

All of this work is discussed in an article I was invited to write for the Living Maps Review (see Walking Territory: In and Out of Lockdown in issue 9 of the Journal) as part of their Mapping the Pandemic projects.

A mapping of all of the walks I did during the first 10 weeks of lockdown

The Walking Territory artist book is a single edition comprising a series of route maps for ten weeks of Covid walks restricted to within 2km of my house and text responses to the choreography of social distancing entangled with the unfolding of Spring. The book is made with paper made from plant materials gathered from my garden and from walks, and using ink made from oak galls from my garden.

Ordinarily, I do not use an automated GPS tracking of my walks, preferring instead the ritual of tracing the route on a map after the event, which helps to fix the walk in my memory. Seeing the shape of the routes, set against mapped topography gave the walks a tangible presence linked to sensory encounters. As I reflected on this, the shape of the walk took on greater importance to me than the scale accuracy. I recorded the shapes of the walks expressively using Chinese calligraphy brushes so that each bend and twist triggered memory links with moments from each walk. Ingold talks about the difference between threads and traces, wayfaring and transport and so it is important that these maps express this as walking through the territory not merely across it.

As I overlaid tracings of my routes, the grain of the town revealed itself with the sinuous loops of the river, first around Frankwell, then the isle of the town centre being a dominating influence on the walked terrain. 

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Walking Territory artist book

With the onset of Winter, another lockdown, and a mix of busyness, personal setbacks and general confusion, my enthusiasm is waning for revisiting these Frankwell walks I now know in such detail. This seems to be reflected in the numbers of people I see trying to carry on, not showing the same fear or wonder I observed first time around. There is no strange awed silence this time. But I never regret a walk … so I will be exploring the darkness, reveling in the contradictory sense of cosy intimacy and separateness one gets, pacing the streets at dusk and dawn.

Whixall to Bettisfield Moss book

In my post last November, I talked about the walk I did with artists from Participate from Whixall Moss to Bettisfield Moss during the Summer.  I had a large collection of photographs from the walk, and various materials gathered from Furber’s scrapyard.  Over Christmas, I began making a series of studies which gradually built up into a book of about 48 pages.  It was a kind of sketchbook journal, initially for generating ideas for larger paintings, but was in itself quite a satisfying artist book documenting my response to the walk.

 

 

The studies include collages, paintings, drawings, monoprints and mixed media pieces combining photographs, tracings, rubbings, transfers, maps, writings and haiku poems.  No one can accuse me of getting stuck in an artistic rut!

As the images illustrate, the Mosses National Nature Reserve is much more than a “natural wilderness”.  There is now a Natural England project to restore it as a raised bog, and to remediate some of the legacy of historical and ongoing human impact.  It is this relationship between human activity and the natural environment on the Moss which interests me.  The images show collisions between natural forms and human made objects and shapes.  The objects I found take on archaeological significance, albeit that they date from the 20th Century, not from some prehistoric time.  The images featuring rusted steel bearing plates, in particular, strike me as some kind of ancient ritualistic artefact.  At some point in the future, objects such as these may be found and analysed in much the same way as Iron Age bracelets, and recorded as dating from the Anthropocene epoch.

There’s quite a lot of interest in the book, and so I’d like to publish a version at some point in the near future.  Here is a selection of images from the book:

 

 

I revisited Whixall Moss last week for another walk with a different group of artists and I’ll write about that in my next post.