Cats Cradle – A performance collaboration with artist Carrie Stanley around ideas of Trauma Release – More Updates soon on this work – Photography by Andre Lichtenberg

 

Blood, Water, Honey and Wine – Ritual Spoons – Ruthin International arts Festival, Elsewhere (ruthinartsfest.org) – Ruthin, North Wales

I completed a durational drawing performance  by drawing a very rare pair of Iron Age Celtic Ritual Spoons over 2 days in the Welsh ritual landscape of Ruthin, North Wales. It was a combination of drawing the collage I had prepared in advance of the spoons as portals/reflections of the landscape and looking at the landscape and drawing it as I was in it. The drawing was constructed using a graphite block, powder and pencils on paper. The drawing was made sitting at, moving around and even climbing on at points an old wooden table and chairs to add a surreal element in the landscape. Oak trees surrounded me that represent the druid’s strong connection to nature/trees which are used in rituals and are seen as very sacred. I wore a robe, it could be Pagan or Christian – I wanted it to be non specific, as both Christian and Pagan communities have sought ritual uses for these ritual spoons, the Christians believing they could have been used for Eucharist ceremonies, and the Druids for Fortune telling, possibly measured by the sun or moon. As I drew I rubbed any excess graphite on the robe to show the labour involved and the emotional and physical journey to making the drawing. I also wanted to channel both the dark and the light in ancestral histories.

After the drawing was completed I sent the drawing down the River Clwyd from a peaceful setting – it was very common for Druids to throw votive offerings into the river, coins, swords etc as water was extremely important spiritually to the Celts and symbolises a gateway/portal to the Otherworld. I  asked the people who carried the drawing with me in this intimate ritual/ceremony to make their own personal offerings and  to let something go to the Otherworld as well.  This was a natural place for the drawing to go and eventually disintegrate/go back to the earth/water, or to travel to where it was originally discovered ( probably at a druid’s burial place) near the railway line. As the drawing was set free it curled and undulated in the water, even rolling up like a fish or eel at one point.

The original spoons were made of metal, and can be preserved in the soil by the ash of the body of whom they are buried next to. Aerial photographs  show their discovery site. The site has never been properly excavated so there is a lot of undiscovered work there. It is a Ritual landscape also close to a temple which heightens this interpretation.

It’s also possible to speculate on the fortune telling aspects of the spoons by performing a ritual using water, blood, honey and wine or possibly fine sand or graphite) as this project continues. These extremely rare spoons are fascinating and the real spoons are held in the Museum in the National galleries in Scotland and copies of the spoons are in storage at the National Museum in Cardiff

 About the spoons – The Spoons are over 2000 years old and have a hole in one side and the other spoon is in four quarters – these quarters were the Fortune telling element and seen possibly as the four quarters of the moon.You come to the spoon with a question and the liquid would roll one side or the other good/bad/dark/light to decipher the answer to the question, maybe around life events like birth, marriage, death etc This possibly relates to the famous Celtic Moon Calendar The Coligny calendar written in Latin and found in Northern France.

They were discovered/ upturned in shallow sand/soil close to railway line and cupped together by a local man then passed onto Reverend Edward Lowry Barnwell in 1862 (also Headmaster of Ruthin school)

My question is what do these artefacts mean to us now and what new stories/discoveries/ connections can be found about our relationship to them and this unique ritual landscape.

Thank you to Dr Toby Driver and Fiona Gale for their academic research and assistance in this project – also to Ashley Calvert and Joe Lee  for the photography and  to the RIAF curators in seeing this project through Mengting Zhou and Cheng Xi. Also thank to to Nantclwyd y dre for exhibiting my research box.

A research box of materials that encourage the viewer to interact with the artists book, look at the landscape in different ways with magnifiers and viewfinders and question our traditional methods of measuring time this can be viewed at Nantclwyd y Dre a 15th century townhouse in Ruthin and will remain there for the Ruthin archaeology festival until the end of July 2024. Dr Toby Drivers video below gives more information on these unique and very rare artefacts.

Green Magic ( the ancestors /the divided self)

The Green Magic project is an ongoing exploration divided into two parts. Firstly it explores identity and portraiture as I perform for the camera aspects of family members and ancestors in the Nower ancient woodlands near my current family home. This work is based on spoken narratives, half truths, mythologies and the natural distortion of memory over time in relation to family history.  Looking specifically at the idea of  characterisation, a hedgewitch and forager who is displaced in time and history  who explores how to survive, with just the natural world at her disposal whilst carrying all her worldly possession attached to her clothing. This work addresses ideas of displacement, stigma, story telling,  historical prejudice and ancestral connections in relation to movement and travelers. {Photography – Paul Smith}

Green Magic is a project exploring the medicinal properties of plants in relation to folklore, superstition, witchcraft, herbal medicine and magical practices. This is a long term ongoing project looking at historical narratives, half truths, ancestral knowledge, documentation, alchemical and botanical illustration, folk history and herbalism.

Pavement Meditations – the universe beneath our feet

Pavement Meditations is a project rooted in walking, daydreaming, drifting, street haunting and psychogeography. Most of this is done by walking and public transport and during these regular journeys to escape from the studio I  began to notice discarded, unravelled, torn, flattened, ephemeral and crushed pieces of rubbish scattered on my walks. These abstract forms of rubbish on the pavement fascinated me so I began to obsessively document them photographically. With the environment so much on the political agenda I felt almost guilty finding these pieces of rubbish so magical and intriguing. Each piece seemed to tell a story, or at least an imagined one, always with a trace of human life and behaviour attached. They were modern day artefacts of peoples lives. The coffee cup lid discarded by the commuter rushing off to catch the train and then trodden on by hundreds of other travellers. The sandwich packet remains of someones slow or fast lunch. These pieces of rubbish seemed to have a lifespan much like humans, plants and animals and the speed and length of that lifespan was determined by their materiality, chance and circumstances. A plastic wrapper could be tossed in the wind for days, weeks and months and travel great physical distances. A free newspaper was repeatedly trodden on and turned into a paper pulp by the rain showers then dried out again in the sun to take on a new solidified form where the words were no longer legible. A wet tissue could curl and dry into a form that resembled a cloud and a piece of knotted plastic could resemble a dancing figure. A whole universe/cosmos existed beneath my feet. The discarded objects are everyday and real and mostly banal, yet weathered by human contact and their environment they can twist and transform into beautiful abstract sculptures and forms. I decided to take this one step further by choosing several pieces to make artwork about and then project my own narratives in the form of short stories onto each discarded piece. This project is inspired by Brassai, Irving Penn, Virginia Woolf and all street walkers and daydreamers.

 After initially starting out  as a photography project ‘Pavement meditations’ has developed into a full body of work

Rented by the hour ( Instagram @rentedbythehour)

Rented by the hour is an ongoing collaborative curatorial research programme always searching for the next appropriate architectural space. 

The focus of the exhibitions and events is to exhibit in unusual buildings with complex histories that can be rented by the hour, away from traditional white wall gallery spaces.These exhibitions are site specific and the building itself works as an integral part of the artworks.We are aiming for the idea of an architectural “gesamkunstwerk”.

Several exhibitions over the years have been set in a very tired run down hotel in central London(Clearlake Hotel in South Kensington) that now is being repurposed by a developer. The hotel housed several separate apartments and had a chequered history having in the past been used as a brothel, a place to deal drugs from and generally a very low budget place to stay frequented by a very large variety of people.

The interiors were very shabby and dated. Walking through this labyrinth environment of the apartments what struck us as artists was how the building felt like a heaving, fragile, unstable and decaying body. The auratic feel of the individual apartments were heightened by the peeling wallpaper, tired and greasy kitchens, leaking taps and humming bathrooms. The building had its own noises and a weakening appearance, much like a human body breaking down as it ages over its lifespan.  We imagined each apartment could almost represent a different part of the human body, for example the nervous system, the cerebral cortex etc, but the individual artworks evoked less literal responses to the building. We wanted to create an immersive experience where the art interventions dissected the interiors looking inward and then mirrored and reflected the architecture back at the viewer, creating new narratives and imagined stories. By treating the hotel as a decaying organism we had the freedom to create sensory, oral, abstract and psycho social environments to create a unique experience for the viewer. We wanted to raise questions of who slept in those beds, sat in each chair etc and make the artworks respond to some of the activities that may or may not have happened in such a transient space.

As Bernard Tschumi writes “buildings only truly come alive on the point of collapse.”

Curators: Olivia Hicks, Laura Clarke and Beatrice Haines

The body in the landscape

This series of works are based on a personal response to the unique landscape of the Troia Pennisula on the Sado estuary in Portugal with its salt marshes, sand dunes and distinctive vegetation defined by their extreme exposure to wind and marine salinity.

This landscape is a place where a sense of time is lost and the past, present and future merge together to create space for imaginative landscapes to enter human consciousness. The landscape is steeped in history from Roman ruins to The Carrasqueira pier built on wooden stilts that has exsisted for more than two centuries. This co exists alongside a modern Casino and fast moving luxury housing building projects,yachts, burgeoning hotel complexes and golf courses. However out of season it has an immense tranquility with only birds, wildlife, sea grasses, holly and the islands cats for company.

In moments of rare total isolation in such a landscape our private identities can be explored away from what we present in the rest of our everyday lives.Inhibitions and social anxiety naturally slip away.

In these works personal rituals, gestures and imprints are left on the landscape to explore various emotions. Anonymous figures appear from different time zones and the body can be viewed as both present, absent and partially obscured to represent connections with nature, the landscape and the islands history. The sense of exposure to tidal flooding, temperature variation and salinity bends and shapes the trees, bushes and vegetation in the wind to create architectural bodily shapes. This process has existed from ancient times to the present moment.

Hotel Trauma

Hotel trauma is a developing body of work looking at the association between architecture and trauma. The work is based around memories associated with a high rise hotel where a traumatic event occurred where the human ideal for peace was shattered in an unexpected life changing incident. An act of destruction can lead to a rush to find closure to catastrophe but the process in reality is much slower. Architecture becomes a strong participant in the memories and also eventually in the trauma recovery. This work documents the ghosts and scars and walks through the memories, some distorted by time to serve as a memorial to those events and a specific moment in time.

The land of hope and inequality

 

Architectural structures can range from idiosyncratic unusual spaces to bland vernacular environments. Each space exists on a social, psychological, functional and aesthetic level.

This exhibition represents a collision of the dark and the light in our architectural surroundings. Buildings continually reflect our lives and how we live in them. Our experiences can be both singular and collective in certain spaces.

Architecture can appear to be dystopian, oppressive, fearful and isolating. It can also feel representative of inequality, segregation and control. Brutalist concrete palaces can instill feelings of awe and wonder and equally oppression depending on the viewer.

The opposite side of the spectrum is Utopian buildings. Spaces that still exist in the imagination or buildings that embrace the future with vision and hope. They carry an underlying message of unity and council, the idea of working for the greater good. A sense that everyone is equal.

“ A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which humanity is always landing. And where humanity lands there it looks out, and seeing a better country sets sail. Progress is the realization of Utopias.” Oscar Wilde

In this exhibition art and architecture cross over to explore a movement of darkness into light.
Utopian and dystopian ideals represent our ever evolving architectural spaces and the way we are  emotionally affected by them.