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.