Pathways

People to Place

Pathways

Yesterday I ventured out and walked somewhere new. The sky was overcast, threatening rain but the wild wind kept it away whilst we walked. We were exploring Victory Woods, just inland from Whitstable, a very young, newly planted wood which reminded me of the scrubby Darland Banks in Medway that I used to visit in my childhood.

Victory Wood, an infant wood, scrubby and open.

There is something in this scrubby wildness which I love. It is mainly a feeling of safety that comes from being able to see far with an enjoyment of the wide-reaching vistas that this provides. But I recognised yesterday something that is now obvious. It is the pathways that I love too. This land is visibly crisscrossed with tracks, some are animal made which create a sense of awareness that we aren’t the only visitors to this place and we have a choice of which human made pathways we will follow. Having not been to this area before, it was with a small sense of adventure that we stopped at each junction and chose a new path to follow.

Following the well trod path.

The wind was blowing and the longer grasses on each side of the path made a noisy, billowing accompaniment to our passage. The path we trod was through a deeper green swathe of clover. The narrower area on which we walked was lower in height and vegetation, but when we looked it seemed to have even more grasses, clover and other species than the taller section of the path, but the abundance was in miniature. The well trod area had adapted to the conditions. The more you looked the more you saw.

Scale

This wonder of Scale is something I have always had. As a child I used to play with the idea of scale and ‘get lost’ in the texture of tree bark, imaging myself to be tiny and exploring its mountainous ridges. Digging for mud pies in the garden was often interrupted by me following an ant or other mini-beast through the grass to see where they were going, gaining an awareness for the miniature world that they lived in.

 

Scale/Space installation 2010.

In 2010 I participated in the Whitstable Biennale, creating a satellite project- a spatial installation based on scale and space. Here I worked closely with a local school, encouraging the pupils to see the world as I do, creating a wonder of scale and a playfulness that allowed them to use their imagination and produce some wonderful work. For one class, the project was to create a bark rubbing which was then transformed into a relief map of an imaginary island. They did wonders with the project, naming features on their maps, creating imaginary worlds which were quite believable!

 

Pupils busy making imaginary worlds.

When reading ‘The Wild Places’ by Robert Macfarlane earlier this year, I was pleased to see that even he, a worldwide adventurer of ‘big’ places, recognised the wild in miniature form. In The Burren in Ireland he discovers, along with Roger Deakin, a recess in the limestone pavement.

‘This, Roger suddenly said as we lay there looking down into it, is a wild place. It is as beautiful and complex, perhaps more so, than any glen or bay or peak. Miniature, yes, but fabulously wild.’

The Street

I have written about ‘The Street’ before. It is a natural feature that projects into the sea from Whitstable beach. In common with Whitstable Castle, it is often prefixed with Tankerton, instead of Whitstable, creating confusion for visitors and inhabitants alike who do not understand where the territorial edges of a place are.

 

The Street, Tankerton Bay.

An Ordnance Survey map of 1921 has it positioned in Tankerton Bay, calling it just Street Stones, which is neutral, so perhaps I shall refer to it as that too. As part of my MA I created a performance piece on the Street, which was part of the Whitstable Biennale, Satellite projects 2012. It has always fascinated me. It is a path out to sea, a wide path, like a pier, but on ground/sea level, with the human scale of a street.

 

Near the end of the Street.

There are many legends about why it is there. An established one tells the tale of an ancient town called Graystown which used to be at the end of the street. In heavy weather you can still apparently hear the church bells ring from under the water… A new tale created by Annie Taylor, an artist in Whitstable tells of how a local boy fell in love with a mermaid and built the street so that they could be together, I like that idea. For the Whitstable Biennale, also in 2010, she dressed up as the mermaid and told her tale on the end of The Street.

The place creates curiosity and intrigue in locals and visitors alike. When the tide is low and the Street is exposed, people will always walk out to the end, whatever the weather, whatever the season. It is as if the tide receding creates a regular attraction to the site, akin to theatre curtains opening after an interval. Whatever the attraction, it is there. When the tide is out enough to see the walkway, then people will venture onto it. For me it’s another path to walk on. To walk out on it on a starry night (on a receding tide) is to be engulfed by stars, above and below, reflected in the water on either side. Scale becomes irrelevant; it is an experience not to be missed.

Home

I put an application for a residency and commission for the ‘Home in Cliftonville’ Project on Monday. It would be a wonderful project to work on. As usual the anticipated onerous task of the application process was very useful. There is nothing like a deadline to clarify and organise thoughts. In fact I need a deadline to really get on with work. I can spend a lot of my time in an observational state. I enjoy watching clouds blow by, bees pollinate and birds fly etc.

 

Just looking.

I used to curse myself for this lack of focus. But now I understand it is this observance that fuels my understanding of the world. I like to understand how things work, what people do etc. This has, in hindsight inspired my own design process, so I now try to honour the need for interested observation, peaceful reflection and understanding. Admittedly I still feel a niggle of anxiety when I realise that time has gone by and I have nothing concrete to show for it. This is I believe the stress of being a self-employed consultant, because when time is seen as money, time without concrete results can be seen as ‘worthless’.

Watching the tide turn and come in.

When I had compiled my application by revising my CV, adding an artist statement and clarifying my proposal I recognised that all time is worthwhile. For me, pathways represent a metaphor for life’s’ journey. We follow a path in life that may not look clear at the time, but it leads us to where we are now. Looking back, the route is obvious, but at the time putting faith into doing what felt best, with upmost integrity seemed like the best I could do, keeping going, stepping one foot in front of another on an unknown journey. Now, after reading my revised CV, I realise I may have known where I was going in my career, all along.

Sometimes you have to forge ahead and make your own path through.

(I completed my MA last September and recorded the last two months of it in another blog called thesaltwayfarer.blogspot.co.uk

Please feel free to look at that anytime, as it is from that, that I am where I am now.)