Getting Real

Getting Real

With all the doom, gloom and terrorist horror in the news at the moment I have felt great solace to walk, to get outside and enjoy the reality of my life, at this moment. Who knows what another day or week will bring. Walking out there is real and allows me to count my blessings.

Getting out in nature is 'getting real'.

I listened to a BBC Radio Four Programme last Thursday that reiterated the benefits of the great outdoors. ‘Open Country’, featured the Wiltshire Wellbeing group, who I understood to be a group of individuals brought together by a prescription for ‘forest days’ by their doctors. The days were spent outside in the wood, working together in a community fashion, gaining awareness and skills that allowed them to connect more with each other and themselves. The skills included fire making, green woodworking and nature identification. Many of them said it had changed their lives.

Long shadow, short days; Winter Walking.

I ventured out today with some good friends for a very wet and windy walk. It was worth it; we stood sheltering by a copse of trees and watched the rain blowing across the fields in waves. The bare skeletons of the trees in the near distance were clear enough to identify their species but as we watched the rain swirling around us, the trees further away became shrouded in a deeper mist. Birds wheeled above us and still the wind and rain blew. Lunch was made even more special by this experience and changing into dry clothes we ate as if at a feast.

English Magic

This was the name of the most recent exhibition to show at the Turner Contemporary in Margate. Jeremy Deller created the work for the British Pavilion at the 2013 Venice Biennale, it has been touring during 2014 and this was its final showcase.

I have loved going to see it on two occasions. Yesterday we managed to get to see it one last time as it is due to be dismantled today.

‘Deller uses ‘English magic’ to explore mysterious acts and ‘magical’ transformations in british society- its people, myths and folklore as well as its broad cultural, socio-political and economic history.’

Turner Contemporary.

This may sound serious, but it was fun. He had created a film which can be downloaded here. 

It has music on its soundtrack from Vaughan Williams to David Bowie, artfully arranged and played by the Melodians Steel Orchestra. This means the music is still recognisable, it has been given an unfamiliar but surprisingly upbeat flavour. I liked it so much I bought the vinyl record, which is as thick as some early gramophone records that I have stored away somewhere in my house. The soundtrack was recorded at Abbey Road Studios and released by The Vinyl Factory. I think that this attention to detail, to create something long-lasting, sturdy and ‘proper’ is in itself a sense of English magic. We were once renowned for, amongst other things, our manufacturing plants and inventiveness. English eccentricity can lend itself to open minds and new ideas. This exhibition was a great example of this.

Motion

There is a main section in the English magic film that shows birds of prey flying, landing and taking off in ultra slow motion. Every flake of snow falling, every feather and its ruffling in the breeze is shown in its intricacy. Viewing this on the large cinema screen in the exhibition (whilst sitting on a podium type seat manufactured from one of the crushed Range Rovers shown in the film), was impressive. The birds showed such grace, power and beauty that it astonished me. I would love to feel that movement of taking off, to have the power to rise and glide.

I am bound.

But I will only be able to achieve this in my dreams and journeys, as a human I am grounded by my heavy frame, but given the anatomy to walk, run and dance.

That is something I want to explore. I have a meeting tomorrow where I shall be able to share an idea I have about movement in the landscape. I want to research the theme of human movement, specifically that of women in the landscape as an art project. I developed a design system during my MA study that looks at the integration of people and place. This is constructed using appropriate tried and tested way-marking and place-making methods from an ever growing ‘toolbox’. The idea is to create community engagement, sustainable tourism etc. I believe the art project will feed into the existing work creating a more dynamic and less preconceived model.

Music

I loved the music from the film, listening to it, very loudly is great. Speaking to a friend this week and discussing our attempts to ‘keep up’ with current ‘sounds’, I was recommended, amongst others, Bonobo. I looked on youtube for some more information and came across their song ‘Eyesdown’. The video is pretty mesmerizing in a similar way to English Magic. The woman in the video seems to awake in a forest and wears a costume of rags, (similar in style to the powwow dress of a Native American), she moves in motion to the music and eventually becomes a bird and flies off, out of the forest. Yes, the music is good, the idea behind the video is even better. This, I think could be a starting inspiration for the movement, women and land project. It needs a name. I would like music to be part of it. I will enjoy thinking about this, the meeting tomorrow should further clarify my thoughts.

 

Walking in the shadow of nature.

 

 (I completed my MA in September 2014 and recorded the last two months of it in another blog called www.thesaltwayfarer.blogspot.co.uk

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