Adventuring is one of my favourite things. Bag packed, takes me back to childhood when I would often fill a bag with essentials – paper, pencils, novel, sweets – and retire to the willow tree or the garage roof for some peace.
It was in this spirit that I set out to discover. I tried not to plan ahead too much (but took sweets) this , with hindsight not planning can be both a benefit and a hindrance.
I thought to wander and collect along the way to where I wasn’t deliberately aiming to see where I got too. However I was not inspired to hang around the quiet home road and as walked through the late 60’s surburban street , moving towards the high street, passing a Tudor house I felt drawn back in time and moved inevitably towards the call off the hills.
In a couple of hours I covered several millennia.
Lesson 1 – it’s all very well taking a range of media and papers but stopping to remove from my rucksack was a pain. Particularly in the manufactured environment I found my phone camera and a5 sketchbook were all I used for the first part of the journey. I made more effort to stop at chosen points that caught my eye in the valley.
Lesson 2 – on returning from the walk I realised that many of my ideas for recording were time or distance based, neither of which I measured. I’m interested in sampling from specific points on a journey – this could be time, distance, height, at every bird call, every yellow , or purple. I could record at every footprint – the benefit of this would be to act as a filter for collecting. A hinderance would , I can imagine selecting a filter would be a difficult decision for my rambling mind.
Lesson 3 – if I know that I may want to collate sketches and gatherings , it would be best to use loose leaves of paper – I photocopied pencil sketches rather than rip them out of a5 sketch book and this does not give a satisfactory result.
I embraced the idea of collecting sounds , making marks in my notebook of bird sounds and water running, and captured video clips of water falling and the accompanying sounds, loved this but have yet to edit them together.
There is a predominance of grey in my photograph of the narrative of my journey, most of my sketches and mark making were black media on white paper.
The collective words/phrases that I could use to describe groupings are:
Fissures, timeworn/weathered, cloaked by nature, layers, patterns in nature, linear forms, borders/boundaries, surface,
Background colours of nature, a myriad of greys and browns, none uniform but mottled or reflecting – no smooth flat panels of colour. Pops of colour caught my eye, Berry red, moss, emerald, ochre, many shades of green.