A wet bank holiday Monday, I’ve been making drawings in the studio using copper ink and acorn hat ink, drawings for a project and one in response to a mail I got from Bec down under. She sent 5 images with her text. One was of a brown leaf caught between the water and its edge and all boundaries are lined with polystyrene balls, a bouyant, static, clinging. I drew this one in copper ink and acorn hat ink and thought mundanely about how all things come from nature and return to it. I’m using home made materials, a toxic copper solution, with salt and vinegar, which will eventually erode its substrate, and ‘natural’ acorn hats boiled and bound together with sap from a tree and combined with iron used to ‘sadden’ and fix the colour, also corrosive, so much so that some mediaeval texts have lasted till today as lacework letters holding themselves together on an emptied ground. Polystyrene, ink, leaf, mud, all shook up into a cocktail with different paces of digestion and erosion. It’s Autumn there heading into winter, the days are shortening. I’m here after 6 and the evening stretches on till late. It’s been windy and there are tender shoots strewn about, mainly from the sycamores. I am drawn to find margins and edges of things to send to Bec, I like seeing the willow herb rising out of the shredded tree that has been thrown down as mulch at the water’s edge.
These are the images I choose for Bec
and these are the images Bec chose for me:
Images I didn’t include are these ones
Next day, Tuesday I had a meeting with M and A, having an agenda is my least favourite way of visiting the Glen and there is a biting wind. We talk loosely about plans and meetings and what to say and what to ask. I stay on and walk M and Corey back to the Blackpool end taking the road back through Scotland blowing away the cobwebs and priding myself in not removing my camera from my pocket once on this trip.