There's a Bluebird in my heart

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!