The Bluebird Card Co

The Bluebird Card Co

Geronimo!

Watercolours > the combination of pigment, paper & water may be the perfect way to tell the tales of the landscape

A watercolour painting borrows all its components from the landscape itself - water, pigment & cotten for the paper & many of these pigments are simply earth itself 

Water came into existence during the early formation of the Solar System some 4.5 billion years ago. In other words, it is older than the earth itself

Very little water has ever escaped the earths' atmosphere and no new water has ever been made


The water, mixed with pigment, that represents the landscape in a watercolour painting has been co-existing with all the other water in the landscape itself for billions of years

So, perhaps not surprisingly, the medium - watercolour - is intriguingly placed to represent & re-present the landscape we experience when we take a stroll in the hills or mooch around lichen adorned gravestones in a churchyard

When painting, it's exciting to watch the pigments flow and interact in water > and if it goes well, it may look like a cloud rolling over an escarpment in real life, or water flowing in a stream. A microcosm. A miniature earth on a piece of cotton paper

It works. 

A watercolour painting suggests a feeling rather than offering a description. It conjours up emotions rather than telling us what things look like. At its best, it's a shortcut to the land itself

At its best it can glow like stained glass, as the transparency of pigment + water allows the luminescence of near pure paper white to appear to light the colours from within & I sometimes like to imagine, when looking at a evocative and eloquent piece of work, that it's possible to feel the same sense of wonder that a medieval visitor to a medieval cathedral may have felt when looking toward a multicoloured rose window - Aah, I imagine they may have mused, so that's what the world really looks like




I also sometimes wonder if some of the maybe limitations imposed by the medium itself add their own magic to the mix. Simplification. Paring the landscape down to the bone, to its essential elements maybe helps to explain the connection we feel, via the painting, to the landscape itself

Maybe the beauty of the earth can be all a bit much to take in, in one go, in real life. Just too much information. The watercolor, along with the necessary simplification - no one tries to paint every leaf on a tree- makes it easier for us to experience the experience of a landscape in a 'less is more' sort of way

In any case, the paintings reproduced here are based on the sort of feelings I have after 5 years or so living up in the hills in the Black Mountains in Wales, after a bit of simplification, along with an amount of emotional distillation

Available as greetings cards > well, nearly! Wish me luck now and please check back for updates 

Snow at Bones Cabin Sculpture Garden, The Black Mountains, Walesland, 2022

The snow and ice and silence up here at Bones Cabin were a gift for me in terms of the photography

Prior to the recent frost I've struggled to photo the stuff, the sculptures and that around the cabin

 

it always seems to come out a bit ho-hum 

or lack lustre, or a bit banal, although the photos often seemed to work better in Black and White

The snow and ice and winter colour helped to outline things, or glamorise them, or simply re-present the stuff photogenically and I'm happy with these recent photos

I've been working on the sculpture garden itself, along with the sculptures themselves for a little over two years now and here goes!

A photo tour of the sculpture garden at Bones and a few thoughts along the way

This piece above is Bramble Piece is from a year or so ago, re-painted with a linseed oil paint in titanium white for the 2022 show

 

I love the way it holds the light right up to the end of the day

 

It's the last thing you can see as the light dies

 

and the first too

 

the first thing that can be seen, I mean, if you look out the window here at Bones, in the pre-dawn light 

 

The stylised cormorant in negative space, that you can't really see in the photo above has become a motif for me

 

and I began to see it as a symbol of the unfolding environmental maelstrom that lies ahead

 

Nature, in the shape of the cormorant, along with the subtleties of 'negative space', takes a nose dive into the ground

 

I was pleased enough with the subtleties of bird in space 

 

eat your heart out Brancusi

 

to build on the notion of 'ecology as stylised cormorant', and the piece below, Weather Vane Angel hangs at about 2 and a half meters, down the other dingle here, The Esgryn, that joins the Dulais Brook below the cabin  

Now I don't know what you've been told, but I've heard, and from the hardest of Hilly Billy Ranchers up here, that this spot, just below Bones Cabin, the confluence of The Esgryn and The Dulais Brook, is the place where the fairies play

 

There's a huge tradition of 'the little folk' in and around the dingle that guides the Dulais Brook toward the Wye, and it is, apparently, the last place to have had sight of the elfenfolk

 

The literature is a bit scanty, but there's general agreement that the fairies dance under foxgloves but are not adverse to a barn dance or two, and sightings 'within living memory' are documented as recently as 1912

I've seen fire flies down there, or 'back-lit' flies or gnats swarming in low summer sun, and the effect is ethereal, and adds to the magic where the sculptures maybe play with the fairies

The sculptures themselves are from found objects from here and about the cabin, or based on gifted bits and pieces from neighbours

 

Timber from felled oaks and metal from rusted gates, hurdles & bedsprings, old parts from derelict machines and tools are re-presented in the same landscape they were found

 

and, without wishing to sound like an idiot, I sometimes see them as 'playing hide and seek' with themselves and the landscape and twanging like a taunt guitar string, hinting at the evolution of the landscape and of our place in it

 

The piece itself, Weather vane Angel is on a swivel from one of those hanging basket chairs from the 70's and although it doesnt function as a weather vane, has a lovely subtlety about the way it turns and dances in a breeze or a gale 

 

I wanted something a bit more optimistic for this piece, as opposed to the nose dive piece I mean, and I hope it hints to the notion of the guardian angel. That the bird in space, this time, is being shepherded to safety, safe in the arms of the weather vane angel

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Golly gum drops!

The next two pieces are more straightforward

The Moon in a Boat, below, is also 'kinetic', or whatever the word is

the boat and the moon bit swivel independantly in the wind and is based on ancient myth

The Gods worried about the moon, especially when it went around the perilous underside of the earth, when the world was flat


Hermes, the Gods' messanger and all round 'good egg', was charged with its safe keeping, and, being a resourseful fellow, decided to put it in a boat, for safekeeping


I came to love this notion of the moon in a boat, along with the harmlessness of the strategy


The beautiful innocence of it all


A million miles away from firing rockets at it, or landing on it, or pretending to have landed on it

or whatever it is that they're doing to it now

The Moon in a Boat, on a yonic willow plinth, a homage


to the now seeming innocence of the ancients

 

 

 

 

 

I fibbed, maybe this next piece, Anti Totem, isn't straightforward, and maybe borrows from the sculptor David Smith's 'Medals for Dishonour', where each medal depicts a specific war-time evil

David Smith's Bombing Civilian Populations, for instance, refers to the devastation of the Spanish town of Guernica

Anti Totem references extinction

The traditional totem celebrates kinship groups, kinship groups between humans and between humans and nature and the spirit of nature
 

I wanted to paint 'Anti-totem' white, like they do with ghost bicycles on the continent, but time ran out, and me and my mate Andrew ended up hoofing the 6 metre monstrosity 'up' with no time to spare

The frost came as a gift. I really wouldn't have known how to paint it so beautifully

There's a couple of distressed birds and an egg at the top, a skelly belly fish in the middle, and a horned skull at the bottom

OK!

last piece now, and nice and straight forward too!


I did a couple of these for the last show, they're from the buttresses of large oaks that are about to be felled, the bit that flares out at the bottom that the foresters remove to get a lower cut on the trunk


The shapes for the birds occurred quite smoothly, suggested by the curves of the buttress itself and completing themselves without any drama


I was struggling for a title for them, musing to a friend, I like them I said, but I can't think of a title


They're blue, I continued


They're bird like


but what are they called?


Err, how about Bluebird, suggested my friend


aah, thank you, I smiled


Now why didn't I think of that?


Bluebird I and Bluebird II


So that was that. The tyranny of titles, sorted. Somethings gone right!

 

The sculptures are still here, mainly, but the snow's all gone


Anyone wishing to visit is very welcome by arrangement

 

 

It's coming on time!  

Bones Cabin & Friends, ARTEXPO22!

Please save the date: September 23rd-25th 2022

The Beginnings of Things

Most of my new pieces for the show started as, or were suggested by, found or gifted objects

The beginnings of things

Is that the hardest part? 

A journey of a thousand miles, starting with a single step, is true, of course it is, but it doesn't address the the initial problem of direction, and the feelings we may have of inertia, of not starting the journey because we know we could well be starting off in the wrong direction, and so, in fact, we don't head off at all

'Thank you', then for found objects, and the shortcut they offer as to direction as you start the thousand mile journey, in the pursuit of whatever it is, and whatever it is that sculpture 'is'  

That's me, at any rate, and, if Lady Luck smiles, it's something like auto pilot after that, and I can bish bosh through the other thousand miles of the journey with the enthusiasm of a Jack Russel, and the piece, the piece of sculpture or piece of work, runs away, almost as if it's under its own steam, as soon as the found object has found its way

The snooker table legs that are now the totamic 'Snookered', are here via a chance encounter with a friendly electrician 

Ta very much, Dave Cokey Lewis, my neighbour here at Pentre Higgen Farm, for the oak bole that led, eventually, to 'Riven Piece', below

Thanks too, for some old school chairs, those ones with the bottom shaped insets in the seat part. that led to this mobile piece below:

The Moon in a Boat finished itself at speed once the direction given from curved elm had been clocked and investigated 

I remember writing something a couple of years ago about how it felt to be an artist, about how it felt, on a good day, to be a bit like being a rascally private detective, but instead of, say, a missing person, the quest is form itself.

In the case of the piece above, 'way led on to way', to slightly misquote from Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken', and the piece romped along and evolved like an episode of The Rockford Files

I loved every stage of the work, and am pleased to report, that on a breezy day she spins just like a weather vane should!

Please save the date: September 23rd-25th 2022

There's some general stuff about the show, along with directions and that on the previous post, if you scroll down a bit from here

Bones cabin and friends

EXPO!

Friday 23rd - Sunday 25th September 2022

This'll be the second show, sculpture and that, at Bones Cabin, well, for me, at any rate, goodness knows what's happened here in the past, there's been some sort of shepherds hut here since forever ago, and who knows what went on then, way back when

This show's special of course, on account of the refreshments

A range of teas, home made cakes & soft drinks will be available for a donation or for free and there are places to picnic too. The garden itself is on the very edge of The Black mountains National Park, nestled as it is in the shelter of Pen y Begwyn. Just a step or so to the ice cream van under Hay Bluff! 

Tea and cakes 

and ices too!

The works themselve are set in the garden below the cabin and comprise my own stuff and that of some friends of mine

My new work builds on the work presented at last years do in 21 and I hope that it continues to explore the potential of eco art, or whatever its called, art with an ecological heart, art that seeks to understand humanities place in nature

 

 

The above is one of the new pieces, Weather Vane Angel, at about two and a half metres, and made mainly from found objects, including the top of an old telegraph pole, a devon shovel, and one of those old school chairs with the bottom shaped indentation on the seat part

Here's a detail shot from the workshop

 

 

The halo's in copper cable. A lot of the other metal work's in roughly flattened & thoroughly venerable corrugated tin, or Corrie, as we used to call it, what they call Wrinklytin around here. The ear ring is, of course, an ol bedspring, and the ring finger ring is a drawer pull from a very rococco sideboard

 

A Little Bird Told Me, 

 

 

this is a detail shot of one of Mick Morgan's larger clay forms. I'm guessing the piece stands at about a metre sixty five, and, as a piece of work, well, for me anyway, sits neatly somewhere in between form and function, an offers insights into all sorts of things, not least, maybe, into the whimsey & beauty of uselessness. A lot of Mick's forms are a sort of antidote to the prosaic, combining a beautiful & figuratve uselessness with a hint of function, that can, in the right context, continually intrigue

There'll be other stuff too, along with mine and Micks', other artworks set around and about and in the cabin too

Please save the date: 23rd -25th September, 2022

Teas, Cakes, Ices!

an some art works too, including a couple of lifesize automata, all set in a tumbledown Alderwood, a stones throw or two from the ice cream man at Hay Bluff!

 

Golly

 

   

 

An Invitation Up the Hill

 Bluebell Lodge, Pentre Higgen, Hay on Wye, HR3 5FG

 

Open weekend: 24th, 25th & 26th September 2021

Directions: Find Forest Road by the Swan Hotel in Hay-on-Wye and follow the signs

 

Follow the signs in the hedges & beware the troll as you approach the Black Mountains! Do not be lured 'into the forest' by following The Glych in your phone

Bluebell Lodge is about 5k out of town & opening times are 11am - 7pm

The sculptures are mainly from 'found objects' borrowed from the local landscape and re-presented with - well, I hope, only minor embellishment & presented in the garden below the lodge

Garden: well, prehaps 'garden' is overstating the case but there's a steeply sided precipice lurching toward the brook that can be negotiated with care. Stout shoes are recommended along with cool heads. Some of the paths are handrailed for safety

Wheeled access is limited to a couple of choice viewing spots close to a good place to park. Kids are most welcome. Dogs on leads please

Refreshments are available indoors & there are tables outdoors if the sun smiles or please: bring a picnic

The work itself: Here's a taste: Acrobat piece:



It borrows from a form I spied in the Barbara Hepworth museum at St Ives. My bit's in oak with two minimalised bird shapes and a jump for joy, a touch of the toes or a skater maybe singing along to Joni Mitchel:

Oh I wish I had a river, I could skate away on

There is a river, by the way, just below the cabin. The Esgryn Brook. In this case Esgryn possibly translates from the Welsh as 'the bones of the landscape laid bare by the brook' and led to Bluebell Lodge's nom de guerre: Bones Cabin

 
Now then: The first accidental bird to arrive appeared in the piece below: Bramble Piece


 

I was into the thorniness of thorns at the time - there are monster bramble thickets up the hill here - and it wasn't until 6 months or so after the piece was finished that I spotted the stylised cormorant, diving into negative space. This was a lockdown delight for me, as was the appearance of further birds


So approach the place with caution, if you come. It'll maybe be as scarey as a scene from Hitchcock's 'The Birds' if things continue apace

furthermore, & with tongue in maybe cheek


I decided to interpret this nose dive between the thorns ecologically, to see it as a comment on the peril that faces anything with a penchant for a stable climate, and, furthermore, was pleased to be able to interpret more of my stuff with an eco-twist

 

Bird and Chick rest on a flawed plinth underlining the fragility of, golly, everything,  Weathervane Angel runs away with the wind and a version of Sheela Na Gig beguiles us from the dingle & from forever ago

Plus: Objects of outdoor furniture: 'objet d' funiture' & some other pieces too, from friends of mine, around and about and mainly in the tea room


That's the stuff > and that's all folks, for now

Portfolio IV

Does anyone remember Laura Dern as Lula in David Lynch's film around the nightmare ride to the very bottom of the Wizard of Oz?

After a bloody beginning things take a turn for the worse. This is Lula, dazed amongst the wreckage:

'This whole world', she says, 'is wild at heart and weird on top'

fact follows fiction an all that 

However 

A few things remain constant and this blog, my yearly look-at-me, look-at-me aims to be one of them!

Something to rely on!

Smiles, *irony*, here follows a list of works since Portfolio III. A whole years worth of toil! A tale, told in the wild of the Black Mountains, full, I hope, of the beauty found between form and function

Some thoughts too, on the making process itself, along with, of course: desultory ramblings & an update on my work up here on the now little-bit-less-derelict marginal hill farm on the edge of the Brecon Beacons

I've put the hours in up here: The good-for-nothing 'situation' in 2020 has in fact been a good one for productivity. Well, it has for me, at any rate. A lack of society and long summer evenings has translated to time in the workshop and I'm pleased to have completed four new 'pieces of work'

'Pieces of work'. Indeed. I rather like this expression, because, rather than in spite of, its ambiguity. I love the fact that the phrase, 'piece of work', generally taken to mean someone of quirky or intriguingly questionable character can also refers to a piece of art work, and I wonder if the phrase itself begs an answer to the essential question about art itself: for what else is art for if it's not to pose intriguing questions?

I've placed the four pieces of work here at Bones Cabin and am hoping that they'll prove to be the beginnings of a sculpture park. They're down by the Esgryn Brook, just below the cabin. Esgryn translates to Bones from Welsh and is of course where Bones Cabin derives its name

This is Anvil Piece

or: Love in the Time of Corona. It's from a piece that woodsmen cut from a tree that my neighbour was having felled.  You can see the concentric rings radiating out from the centre of the piece. As it stands it's probably about a metre or so wide. It must have been quite a tree!


I like to see the finished piece as representative of the forgiveness of things. The remains - well, the stuff that hasn't been utilitised at the sawmill at any rate - of what must have been a mighty oak now offers to take you to its centre. The tree forgives the axe and now suggests the essence of embrace with outstretched arms. I like that aspect of it and I like the accidental bird and the fish shapes hidden inside it too. Can you see them? Can you be bothered to look? Yes! I see the bird as the 'eye' shape with long legs and the fish above it with a square nose facing R and I like the idea of this chimera of the forest doubling as a hug and act of forgiveness

A friend of mine saw an ice-skater in it and I like this too for the feeling of exuberance and momentum and balance involved in that state of nearly-but-not-quite toppling over and sailing impossibly toward the grace of the future

This piece, Yonic Piece

comes from an oak off cut from the sawmill close by at Whitney and stands at about 2.5m. It borrows from the artist Constantine Brancusi's pieces based on the movements of birds in flight. Brancusi's 'Birds in Space' were constructed in bronze and marble and I hope my piece works slightly as an echo of them in terms of negative space: as a sort of inside out version of 'bird in space' with the essence of form contained between the bramble stems of the piece itself

A farmer friend called round when I had it in the workshop. He had a twinkle in his eye and after I'd touched on the notion of negative space commented: But you know what it really looks like don't you? Of course, I say, and we have a word for it on the other side, the art side of life. It's 'Yonic'. It's better to be mysterious. We don't say kitty or anything like that.

We're smiling widely and my friend appears rather enthralled with the notion of a posh & possibly artistic word for pussy and I can see a glimmer of recognition fall into place for him as to the relevance of art in the everyday world of real life

Well, maybe, anyway, and I enjoy this interaction for what it's worth as well as for the value, for me, of trying to talk about the luxury of uselessness to a charming and sympathetic son of the soil 

And this piece, the next piece is: Ode to Ash

The trees around Bones Cabin and indeed the trees that constitute most of the woodland around here are a mix of alder, thorn, nut and ash. By far the biggest component of this mix is ash and over the last year it's suffered a vicious assault, probably from the disease Chalara or Ash Dieback

The four stems are from the clearance work we undertook last year as part of our strategy on the farm to reverse the effects of 'natural regeneration' and reclaim ancient pasture from scrub and thorn. The stems are of course, ash, and have been 'hexed off' with a draw knife and other, less patient tools, and set 'upside down' in what I thought to be the most pleasing configuration. 

I considered these two processes: The hexing and the upside-down-ness of things and see it as a - probably tongue-in-cheek - form of incantation 

Viz: the upside-down-ness of things serving in the same way that the reversal of the spoken word can serve as an invocation, and the hexing, well, a hex is of course a magic spell, and thus the reversal + hexing of this Lord of the Forest equates to a plea to the Gods and the witches to re-consider their assault on Fraxinus Excelsior

And now I'm wondering if Aleister Crowley, poet, prophet, mountaineer and of course, arch incantation weaver, would pop by from the past, and lend a hand to the cause

And this is the next piece: Acrobat Piece

And it borrows from a form I spied in the Barbara Hepworth museum at St Ives. It's also in oak and contains the same minimalised bird shapes as anvil piece, only this time, without the legs

I also like to see it as an acrobat, as a jump for joy, and as a skater maybe - yes, another one, jumping up and touching their toes

Oh I wish I had a river, as Joni Mitchel said ... that I could skate away on, I wish I had a river so long, I would teach my feet to fly 

And later, shamelessly seeking attention, I asked a visitor to Bones what they saw in it: 

Oh, a nose, she said, definitely, a nose in the time of Corona virus, with sniffling nostrils and contagion 

and I was pleased to have this lighter hearted view of it

Fences, trellis, gates and a couple of pieces of furniture

I've enjoyed the various gates, trellis panels and such that I've made over the last year, and have used a mix of hazel and alder in the main along with bits and pieces of old iron I've found here and about as I've tidied up on the farm. I like the mix of iron and wood and sometimes find a gate or bench a little on the clunky side if it's made entirely from wood

All the gates here incorporate pieces of iron in them, and if nothing else, it's a great way of re-cycling, or certainly re-using what might have been seen as 'scrap', and also maintains a connection with the past, a link to the other hands that have toiled on the land here, scraping a living or loving a life up the hill here

This feeling of connection, highlighted in the way that a rusty old piece of gate transforms to bright shiny good-as-new metal when it's cut into is something that pleases me enormously. A hint from the past: That other lives and ways of life are all still here, wrapped up in the landscape waiting to be discovered and coaxed out into a new way of being. I don't wish to sound grandiose: I simply love playing around with tools and materials and sometimes look for an explanation as to why, and this shiny-on-the-inside explanation is my itiswhatitis-ness of now

The farm and the garden up the hill here

This is Bones Cabin  - an interconnected static caravan and wooden shack with more than a passing likeness, well on the inside at any rate, to Walter White's hideaway up in Alaska when he was on the run from just about everyone in the TV series 'Breaking Bad' . 

The garden: the sculpture-park-to-be, well, that's the dream, fingers crossed. It was all fairly derelict a year or so ago, excessively steeply sided and wracked with bracken. The terrace paths created a softer feel, and the bracken, after a stern talking to with scythe and strimmer, has given way to the beginnings of moss that I hope will form a magic carpet for: sculptures yet to be

The farm, newly acquired a couple of years ago now, nestles in the landscape like no other. Well no other that I've known at any rate. It's on the very edge of the Black Mountains. If it were any closer it would maybe fall off, such is the steepness. I'm reminded of Kurt Vonnegut's musing in Player Piano:

'I want to stand as close to the edge as I can without going over. Out on the edge you see all kinds of things you can't see from the center'


and this 'edginess' adds up, well, on a good day anyway, to the most beautiful of ways of farming inasmuch as a lot of the work is old fashioned : no agribusiness here, thank you all the same, for the steepness of the land requires mountain-fitness, experience and equipment and a heck of a lot of manual work

Here and along the way we've had the help of friends and neighbours, nudging us along in the right direction. The farm is presently let to a grazier - the neighbour in fact, with the insights into negative space for my Yonic Piece above - and this therefore allows me, a rookie hillbilly, a very gentle introduction to the rigours of managing actual livestock with their very real demands on skills and experience 

In with a bang, he tells me, and out with the fool, referring to April Fools Day and Guy Fawkes Night and the tupping and lambing cycle that was forever thus in the way of the hills around here for maybe the last 5000 years or so 

This insight remains as the limit of my knowledge of sheep farming so far. I set to, however,  repairing fences, gates and styles & as mentioned above, re-seeding meadows after the necessary scrub clearance, and the more intimately I come to know the landscape the more it continues to intrigue me

Here's a typical patch of wild

I wonder if anyone's been here for generations. To add to the romantic singularity of the landscape around here, a couple of the neighbouring farms were, apparently, pretty much abandoned during WWII, and it It was then that thorn trees snuck out across the land, and firmly established themselves into huge & unique May Tree Orchards before the sheep returned to search and destroy anything tender enough to chew on. This particular part of the landscape, pink blossom white in spring, scarlet strewn in autumn and gnarly bark wind twisted year round, remains up to now, and is beautiful, wild & hillbilly anarchic

If a hillbilly anarchy isn't really possible for a landscape a freewheeling spirit certainly exists collectively amongst the farmers that work this land. The ancient right to graze sheep on the fell, Hill Rights as they're called are, as far as I can tell, a 'no paper work kinda deal' and I wonder if this gift of a collective, communal & roustabout endeavour sets them slightly apart from the average 'doff your cap and #liketheroyalfamily' mentality of a lot of the rest of us

And there's 'the gather' too., autumn time & the sheep are brought down from the fell before the ground >  tractor trapping mud, & separated and returned to their respective farms for the safety of a lower altitude & a run with the tup

I've been invited 'on the gather' for the last two years. It's a day out like none other, a social thing and makes me think of a pre-industrialised agriculture

The only way to gather the sheep in this situation is with lots of people, and, along with an impressive amount of dogs, horses, quad bikes and whistling the countryside comes alive in a way that it must have done before mechanisation and the revolution in agriculture which saw the workers displaced from the land


Here we are at Blaen Bwlch, which maybe translates from the Welsh to The Farm at the High Pass and it's here that we had sandwiches and coffee and a bag of crisps apiece 


The crisps maybe struck a note of modernity, and, OK, the quad bikes too, but essentially I felt a connection with the land that other people through too-many-to-count generations must have felt since neolithic times

The value of this feeling of inclusion and solidarity as the present sits so comfortably on the shoulders of the past is hard to describe. It's a huge feeling none-the-less and gives me great pleasure. It's an absence of alonliness for sure, as being on 'the gather' links to the here and now as well as the past, and to friends and neighbours too, and gives me, at any rate, a feeling of connectivity in spades  

I wonder now if this feeling of sitting-comfortably-on-the-shoulders-of-the-past provides an insight into the feeling I have when re-using a rusty bit of iron in a bench or gate that's to be placed back into the same bit of landscape from where it originates 

Maybe this circularity of material and memory now delves beyond our own narrow individuality and ends up 'somewhere else', in some-sort-of-maybe collective memory hidden deep within a particular landscape, somewhere 'that just makes sense', as the poet Charles Bukowski once said, albeit it in a different context

I wonder. Maybe. But whatever the truth of the matter may be, this feeling of continuity and connection with the landscape when using objects found within it supplies a promise to the 'pieces of work' that incorporate them, for as these objects are re-invented to rewire themselves temporarily back into the landscape, they acquire a potential to carry, along with their individuality, new meaning into the future

For me, I mean, at any rate. Natch

Thanks for reading! 

All comments welcome!

PORTFOLIO III

It's been a year now since I compiled my list of works for Portfolio II. In the meantime I've taken a job working four days a week up the hill here in The Black Mountains on the Powys Herefordshire border, managing 70 or so acres of newly acquired marginal hill farm. The farm ajoins the garden that I mention in Portfolio II, and hasn't had a lot of attention over the last 30 years. Alder trees and scrub have joined forces with brambles and bracken to stake their claim on ancient pasture. Fences have fallen into disrepair, and there are anthills large enough to make areas of it look a little like the Valley of the Living Rock from the Disney film Frozen, and I wonder sometimes, as dusk falls, if trolls may appear to add their two pennyworth to the mix.


This is the setting. The job comes with a cabin, Bones Cabin, and Bones Cabin comes with a workshop the size of an aircraft hanger.


I've put it to use: Here's what I've been up to in 2019, when I havn't been out and about with strimmer, mower or chain saw:

Sculpture:

 

 

:I: Piece is in oak at about 2.5 m high with a cyanotype dye to give it this gorgeous inky almost blue-black blue. I guess it's a totem in as much as it references a totem pole, the sticky out bits at the sides reminding me a little of the wings or beaks of the eagles and thunderbirds of archetypal first nation poles. It's a totem with a figurative half twist as the central cutout represents the 'I' of the individual. Maybe everything in nature and art has a figurative twist as we have the ability to see ourselves in everything, including of course, the moon. The 'man in the moon' predates man on the moon by millenia. The 'I' in :I: piece is a nod toward this ability or curse of humanity to find ourselves or at least our image in everything. I love it here below Bones Cabin and the way the deep blue of :I: piece shares a twang with the deep green of the moss laden Alder trees, reminding us, maybe, that we are just a part of nature, and not its raison d'etre.

Exuberant Piece stands at about 60cm high and is finished with the same cyanotype dye as ':I:' piece. This piece is of course two pieces, both taken from a single stem, or trunk of Ash. I love the joyful, arms outstretched feel of this piece, as well as the feeling of empathy we get between the now two separate pieces that were once one piece. The grooves in the LHS piece that differentiate one half from another were accidental. I'd given up on seeing the piece as a 'piece of work' and had relegated it for use as a couple of treads for steps in the garden, and put the grooves in to stop it from being too slippy. In the way that accident is often the keystone of making the grooves somehow made the difference and, by supplying the necessary 'attraction of complimentarity', allowed the piece to work, well, for me at anyrate, as a piece of work in its own way. Of the three pieces of sculpture I've finished this year, this is the one I'm happiest with and so: to all the accidents that are waiting to happen out there, in terms of design and form, I say: 'Welcome' and thank you for fresh insight.

Vessels are 'vessels' in name only and are in fact, solid rounds of wood in Mountain Ash and Oak respectively. There's an energy about this mis-matched pair. Opposites attract and all that, and there's a wistful leaning toward each other  between the two jugs of an almost teenage intensity. There's also a slightly comic feel added by the handles, in their almost human body language, as if they're both standing with their hand on their hip, interacting animatedly. Whilst they do so of course, they combine to create a certain symmetry, and collectively make a torso, with both hands on hips, nodding maybe toward the humanising language that we use to describe vessels with their foot, body, shoulder and neck along with mouth and lip.

Outdoor Furniture:

I like to think that the furniture here all has a sculptural twist, although it's not sculpture as such, as it has a function, and can be sat on or at, or leant upon, or made useful in some other way. It therefore falls short of the luxury of simply being, of existing in the landscape or gallery without a care in the world as to ho-hum utility.



There's lofty precedents for mixing up life and art, to build a seamless bridge between form and function, to sit on the fence of aesthetic and utility. Marc Newson, talking about his aluminium chaise longue, Lockheed Lounge, says, 'Some people consider it a sculpture, some people consider it a piece of furniture. But the fact is, it probably lies somewhere in the middle.'


I like the maybe senseless beauty of making sculpture, but dislike the amount of agony involved, and the endless doubt as to whether or not the piece of work works. You know. As a piece of work, as an object to be desired in its own right.

As a contrast to this I most often times find the limitations function imposes on form, when maybe a piece of furniture is being made actually dictate a freedom, and allows the sometimes tortuous paths of pure creativity a careless passage. For me it's Bish Bosh That's Finished  when there's a lashing of utility in the mix, as opposed to the indecision of how do you know if it's finished? involved in making something purely sculpural.

The finished piece ends up somewhere in the middle between furniture and sculpture. A piece of Funiture has been achieved

Ho ho ho


The subtleties that lift a piece of furniture toward sculpture leads to interesting questions about the meaning of form and maybe even beauty itself. 'What is beauty?' is a question that has been around for centuries and is, I suspect, unanswered by life or art individually, or indeed by the lone wolf approach of either pure form or unadulterated utility.  Maybe, however, answers are hinted at, or an understanding gained by this combination of form and function.

Greenwood Table in oak and ash. I worked on the ash legs staright from the tree, just recently felled. It cracked rather well, and I was pleased to be able to smooth and round over the cracks and integrate them as part of the design. The top is from green oak supplied by Whitney Saw Mill, and the superstructure is constructed with standard mortice and tenon joints along with interlocking bridal joints let into the castellated top of the legs. This was a learning curve for me, and a tricky one to boot, although it proved to be childs play when compared to getting the table into position on the deck. Green wood is considerably heavier than its kiln or air dried equivilant, and the deck and it's approach, high up as it is here in the hills, was as slippy as a saint on a night out.

Standard Lamp out on the deck at the back of Bones Cabin. The base is Alder, and the stem's in ash, hexed off with a draw knife. The shade made use of a wire frame from a discarded rattan pouffe, along with ash and hazel wood verticals. I used a warm tone lamp, and love the invite of the orange yellow against the cool purple shades of winter.

 










Ancient Table is on legs from re-claimed oak beams that had been lying discarded up here for goodness knows how long. I like to think of them spanning back through the centuries to when the still visble marks of chisel and saw were originally made by the carpenter. I wonder where they were first put to use, who it was that fashioned them for purpose, and where the tree itself grew. I like it too, that I am part of that continuum, and that I resisted the notion to log the beams to fend of the harshness of winter. It's cold up here in the hills, and, this being my first year, the gauge on the wood store reads 'empty'. Aah, discipline! Thank you for calling! 

The stools are a temporary measure until I make time to conjure up some chairs. They're the trunks of multi-stemmed Alder, showing a beautiful colour orange on the cut face.

Picket Fence is also in Alder, planed of with a power plane as, unlike Chestnut that is  commonly used for fencing, Alder is reluctant to cleave

  

Bones Cabin

Bones Cabin came with the job up here in the Black Mountains and was in a derelict state. It's a year on now and whilst the boys at the builders merchant in Hay still call it Chateau Shacko my neighbour declared, on a recent visit: 'It's not a cabin Drew, it's a palace!'

Bones Cabin is actually called 'Bluebell Lodge' on account of the sea of blue that surrounds it in Spring but I like to call it after the river that runs behind it, The Esgryn. Esgryn is Welsh for 'bones', and according to a Welsh speaker I spoke to this probably refers to the bones of the landscape, laid bare by the river as it winds down the hill to meet the Dulais Brook, just below the cabin. The confluence of the two rivers is the place, or so I've been informed, where the fairies play, although I've yet to have sight of these. It is, nevertheless, a magic place, as is the whole setting for Bones Cabin. I love it here, with nothing but the birdsong and the silence for company.


Here's the shack, pictured below, along with some pictures of the re-built interior. 

 

Kitchen diner with unit in oak and ply. The water is fed from a spring, and is, as Kerouac might have said, righteously sweet. The table is in mdf, ply and chestnut, with a threaded rod connecting the top to the relaimed concrete base, and is, I'm pleased to say, as sturdy as the water's sweet.




Rolling shutter in mdf and oak, with free hand routed leaf drawing.

The lounge complete with a shelf full of memories 







 and the bedroom



That's all folks! Please follow my instagram account @drewzacharyken for new work in 2020.