Salt of the Sea - Salt of the Earth

I've received two messages...about salt...

One message is from Vancouver; a weather report from a friend:
Weather wise, we got another huge snowfall on Saturday and another expected today or tomorrow. Vancouver has used 7000 tonnes of salt to melt ice so far, whereas most winters they only use 1000 tonnes. Salt shortage everywhere prompted Vancouver to hand out free salt on Wednesday but it was gone in minutes and people who had been lining up for it left disappointed.

Canyon Correspondences Revisited

Due to a technical (hosting) meltdown elsewhere, I'm attempting to retrieve and piece together some remnants of a 'creative diary' - a rescue mission. These writings were originally assembled during, and soon after, a period as artist-in-residence at the Grand Canyon (Arizona) in 2011.
(Below is a combination of all the entries into a single blog-post; parts of the entries are currently missing. Perhaps the time has come to pick up some of these old threads?)

Water Everywhere?

Working with water; Working with tides (Bristol, Jan. 2014)

The year begins with a return to the topic of the endless dialogue between water and land; between the sea and the shore. Flooding is much in the news - along with mounting evidence of increasingly energetic couplings of weather events and rising sea-levels (including tides). There has been some very interesting coverage of the 'island village' of Muchelney in Somerset. Accompanying the typical deluge of media coverage of these latest floods (river and coastal), there is also to be found some more considered public discussion of strategic solutions - aside from the stock political/techno-fix response of "we must invest in more defences".

Submerged (Drowned Lands)

Chew Valley Lake, July 2013

Submerged (Drowned and Dammed Lands)

[aka The Almanac of the Submerged]

Environmental artist Antony Lyons is working with others, including Professor Steve Poole (UWE-Bristol/Regional History Centre, Bristol) on an Arts Council England funded initiative, involving creative fieldwork, community conversations/voices and research at a number of locations. The first phase of the project runs from Spring 2013 to late 2014.

The approach involves a creative and poetic response to a variety of landscape and cultural settings that are affected by changing water-levels. The unifying theme is that the waters come, the waters inexorably rise. Then everything is changed (and the waters recede...)

Dammed (Damned) Landscapes

Dammed (Damned) Landscapes 

During the slow assembly of a new publication based on two landscape-residency projects, there has bubbled up the memory of an aerial photograph, from 1946, (shown above) of the farmhouse now ‘drowned’ beneath the Hawkridge reservoir near the Quantock Hills, Somerset. This was a topic I briefly explored - and put aside - during the Quantock Dreaming investigations. But it now returns, in a changed and charged way, as I become aware of the many drowned/dammed/damned landscapes that have featured in my creative projects and residencies. It seems now an inescapable thread - one that is destined to form the warp for my present audio-visual weavings. I am working on a film/sound piece as a stepping stone to a more complex installation. Some of the far-flung landscapes in question (or currently under investigation) are: The Colorado River at the Grand Canyon; The Alqueva Dam and the (former) Guadiana River Valley in Portugal; the aforementioned Quantock reservoir; and a nod also to the Colorado Delta, Mexico - not dammed (but possibly damned?), but affected by the 100 or so dams upriver on the Colorado.

more on this very soon...

Obfuscation and Illusion

Colorado Conjectures (continued)
The Grand Canyon is extreme in many ways - the magnitude, the space - but also extreme in the domination of a packaged pictorial 'view'; the 'picture postcard'. For most visitors, the iconic images are familiar before their arrival; and the main focus of the on-site encounter is the photo-op. For some, no doubt, the on-site visual experience is a disappointment when compared to the pre-packaged representations. The sense of the 'sublime' has already, and in a piecemeal way, been undermined by  thousands of published photographic images.