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?)

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.

Intimacy vs. greed/ speed/ disconnection

Intimacy vs. greed/speed/disconnection

(here, one could possibly add 'ecology' on the side of intimacy - to help balance an unequal struggle)

The fusion of projects continues. The theme of relationships to the land - and what the land holds - emerges for me in widely different geographical spaces. So too ideas around 'eco-symbolic landscapes' (as first encountered in the hills of Donegal), 'exploring the shadows'; and many more inter-woven threads (intimacy, speed, greed, disconnection, harmony, resonance, flow, presence…)

At the trans-disciplinary 'Catchment' workshop last year I was lucky enough to meet Mona Smith (a Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota), who - through offering a strong statement on 'relationship', helped crystallise - for me - a great deal of discussion around water, environment and society. In conversation, Mona also introduced me to the Dakota term 'bdote', meaning 'where two waters meet', 'confluence' or even 'where a stream meets a lake'. (A project called The Bdote Memory Map' is the hub of a constellation of resources providing stories about some of the traditional Dakota sites in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area).

Water is very much to the fore in my involvement now with a different Confluence Project, in Devon. A recent kayak journey on the River Torridge served as a cogent reminder of the essence of 'slow residency' encounters. But more on this trip in a future journal entry...

Slowly Encountering Place

For the inaugural journal posting on this new platform, I am pasting in a draft version of an essay to be included in a forthcoming publication.

Slowly Encountering Place

The process of assembling this volume has brought into focus an awareness of an evolving ‘meta-project’ - emerging over the space of five years, via a sequence of extended landscape-based residency projects. For me, the journey began in earnest in 2008 in England's ‘West Country’ with Quantock Dreaming, followed by the Lovely Weather project in Donegal in 2010, a residency at the Grand Canyon in 2011, and returning to the West Country for the art+environment residency, ‘Confluence’ Project in the North Devon Biosphere Reserve. Early indications of a composite approach - encompassing sculpture, ecology, memory - can be seen within the strands of the 2006 urban trail installations in Bristol, called ‘Eleven Minutes’.

Whilst sifting through the vast amount of moving-image and sound recordings assembled during the Grand Canyon project, I found myself re-considering the themes and ideas underpinning this journey, especially in dialogue with the wider fields of Deep Mapping and Land-Art. The ongoing support of the PLaCE Research Centre has been important in this respect. Iain Biggs (Director of PLaCE) has long pursued the aim of trans-disciplinary creative land-based work. Possessing a hybrid environmental science and art background - I have sought to carve out a personal approach, grounded in fieldwork, ecological knowledge, dialogues with archival material, geopoetic imagination and the co-creation of future-visions - all within landscapes that contain tensions and polarised perspectives.

“Pasts and futures, even if they are no longer; even if they are not yet, still haunt the present, and are, in a supplemental relationship to it, always coming back.” John Wylie, 2007

With the Colorado River now featuring strongly in my delvings, I have found myself attracted to the idea (and the ideal?) of ‘unmapping’.