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.
No Time Like the Present 