This is a conversation in image and text between Clio in Logan’s Meadow, Cambridge and Julie in the Glen River Park, Cork
There is always a dance involved when capturing the wicthes butter, turning the phone to selfie mode and reaching into the gorse surrounded by brambles it is a quest and an initiation into the realms of the otherworldly.
Something placed to prevent two worlds colliding, mingling, using one another as passage. Here’s a bollard, been here a long time, growing bracket fungi on its top and sides. Smaller, less highly coloured than the one in Cork, and fed largely by nutrients in asphalt of different ages and in the cracks between them. It’s not rained on much from the clouds, but, as gatekeeper between two passages, it sees many raised dog legs.The Final Corner
Thinking on your ancient Willow Clio There is a place in the Glen that I have named the Gothic quarter and used to be an orchard, here there is a kind of natural amphitheatre which encircles an old broken and decayed tree. The tree stump is full of fungal growth and this secluded area is used for all kinds of secret actions. Most recently a young human (I imagine) has been filling the hollows with branch structures, looking like an attempt to protect the tree’s vulnerable interior from harmful activities. Drawn in by the bigger actions I see there are more careful placements of stones and twigs… altar pieces or offerings?
I love to think of you, Julie, looking deeper into your willow, and of the human reparations you witness there. This one, the hulk I wrote of, has a cracked surface like elephant skin which makes me think of long memories, and of how the many layers of its experience become its structure. This feels familiar to my own process, and surface, as a late-middle-aged woman
Responding to your post Clio, and the skin, I come across some old barbed wire fencing,its end vanished into the tree, it looks like a brutal unzipping, on closer inspection one finds the tree’s bark is building itself around the wire and absorbing it into the trunk, almost an act of extremely slow devouring, I imagine years from now the wire gone, though some trauma must stay locked inside the tree undigested,
