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Encounters Found Art Happenstance Language of Objects Observation Poetry rag-pickings Signs and Signifiers

Transitory Islands

Foregrounded over the Forth

An archipelago of transitory islands

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A solitary tree, inhabits the island

 

 

Island of the hidden lagoon

 

 

(Love) Island of the heart

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The ‘Transitory Islands’ pic was a fairly random phone shot from crossing the Forth Rail Bridge by train – a journey undertaken many times. Perhaps this chance encounter pulled something, initially unseen, out of these raindrops:
Serendipitous encounter No. 1: (On twitter @gawanmac asked: “it just me, or is that archipelago humpback-shaped?” A delicious coincidence as a number of humpback whales had been seen in the River Forth that very week). Is that also a gull masquerading as an eye?
Serendipitous encounter No. 2: playing Julian Priester’s Love, Love and drawn to the cover which I hadn’t really looked at closely before. A view reminiscent of the outlook, crossing the Forth Rail Bridge by train, where the gulls are often seen flying below you.  Some disturbance in the water, have we just missed a humpback whale breaching?

Now playing: Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto – Love, Love

Categories
Found Art Happenstance Observation Poetry rag-pickings

Strange Gravity

 

light / pool

flood / line

cascade / spill      a

strange gravity

 

Now playing: Catherine Lamb – ‘curvo totalitas’ (2016) from Yarn/Wire Currents 4

Categories
Found Art Happenstance Observation Psychogeography Signs and Signifiers

Reveal of Unhalfbricking

Now playing: Fairport Convention – Unhalfbricking

Categories
Encounters Found Art Happenstance Observation rag-pickings

Another Green World

 

Another Green World

 

 

 

After the fall

Small increments in green

 

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Now playing: Eno – ‘In Dark Trees’ from Another Green World

Categories
Found Art Happenstance I Remember Language of Objects Observation Poetry Psychogeography rag-pickings Signs and Signifiers

The Surface is a Zone of Encounter (An Assemblage)

I think that light makes material space … light is really the primary form of our habitation and makes surfaces come to life.

The surface holds what we project into it. It is an active site of exchange between subject and object.

Giuliana Bruno

 

Two sides of the border

Cleaved

Landscape

    of mark making

 

 

———->

Lines of travel

<———-

 

 

Whilst waiting

eye follows line

of divide    –  lit

spill      on surface

softening shapes

of solid geometry

 

 

Celestial movement in concrete

Cascade of perseids?

Constellations and star signs?

 

 

Whorl

Eye

Portal

 

 

From the atlas of green worlds and frozen seas

 

 

From the atlas of mutant landscapes

(Oracle?)

 

 

Where the striped fish, with no name, shoal in the ocean of lambent light

 

 

Emerging language: futurescape

(in process)

 

 

The point at which surface folds

New ecological imaginaries

Ambivalence of the non-human world

 

 

When the colour & texture of the sky triggers a memory of James Turrell in the Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon.

 

Dream:

High sun burns over thin snow. The very last snowball harvest.

 

New languages of underfoot

 

 

Spectrum edge

Light cuts

 

 

Interiors of darkness

Draped, infolding

 

.

Out of darkness

a huddle of shadows

settle to stillness

.

From the silence

quiet violence

of a whispered judgement

.

.

Material Surface / Mental Space

Optic / Haptic

Interior / Exterior

Local / Global

Past / Present

Present / Future

Public / Private

Found / Lost

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Now playing: Lawrence English – ‘A Surface for Everything’ from A Colour for Autumn.

Reference:

Giuliana Bruno,  Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Photographs from:  Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, Koganei Park, Koganei, Tokyo; Meiji Shrine, Tokyo; Rosyth Station; Inverkeithing Station; Grounds of The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Abandoned railway carriage, Turnhouse Road, Edinburgh; Fife Coastal Path; Museu Colecção Berardo; Rosyth Churchyard; Lisbon; South Bridge, Edinburgh; Shinjuku, Tokyo; House Interior; Koganei, Tokyo.

Categories
Found Art Happenstance Language of Objects Observation rag-pickings Signs and Signifiers Sounds of Spaces and Places

When a wall whispers: Not I

 

When a wall whispers: Not I

 

 

Caesura || Sentry

 

 

Island

 

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Now playing: Morton Feldman (Ensemble Modern) – For Samuel Beckett

Categories
Found Art Language of Objects Observation rag-pickings Symbol

Requiem for an Unknown Event

Found object, St Stephen Street, Edinburgh.

Now Playing: Lawrence English/Thor Harris Requiem for a Reaper / Pillar of Cloud’ from Cruel Optimism.

Categories
Encounters Field Trip Found Art Happenstance Observation Poetry Psychogeography rag-pickings

At Crombie Point

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Ink etched blue silence. Cold harbour spires, sketched over cubist sails. Thorn pinned birds still tethered. Wings opening, sensing the sky

 

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The ruined pier at Crombie Point. (January, 2017).

Jules Verne travelled to Scotland for the first time in 1859. He arrived at Crombie Point on 30th August, following a three-day exploration of Edinburgh.

Verne along with his traveling companion and old school friend, Aristide Hignard, had boarded the steamship The Prince of Wales at Granton Harbour earlier in the morning. The ship sailed up the Firth of Forth passing Aberdour, Queensferry, Rosyth, Blackness Castle and Charlestown with Verne recounting tales of historical events associated with the coastal landmarks. Approaching Crombie Point, the weather turned violently against them with high winds and waves proving too strong for the steamship to moor at the pier. Verne and Hignard managed to transfer into a smaller sail boat to reach the landing stage safely but very wet. They were met by the Reverend William Smith, from Oakley, who ushered them into the nearby Black Anchor Tavern to dry out and take a whisky.

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What was once the Black Anchor Tavern, Crombie Point. Now a private house. (January, 2017).

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Beyond the door-less door. An invitation to enter. What lies beyond the threshold, the scattering of leaves and crouched shadows?

On the ancient whispering walls, the faces start to appear. Language of the stones, silent tongues ….

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And on this short stretch of coastal path, the receding tide and dying light coats Torry Bay in an emulsion of gun-metal grey. A vista of colour bleached beauty with a tangible undertow of concealed violence bleeding over the mudflats.

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In the middle of Torry Bay you will see witches rock. This rock was used to tie-up and restrain anyone suspected of witchcraft. Here the witches were judged and simultaneously sentenced as the tide rose. If they drowned, they were absolved of being a witch, but if they survived they were deemed to be to be a witch and burned at the stake.

(adapted from heritage interpretation boards located on Torry Bay)

More on the dark history of this short stretch of Fife coastline emerged from the Tales for Travellers Project which we recently participated in:

On Torry Bay the sky appears to expand to a grey cloak as we experience a brief rain shower. It’s a suitable backdrop for Kate Walker to tell us of the dark history of witch hunting along this coast in the seventeenth century. Zealous, self-appointed witch-finders, usually being local clergymen searching for those who had ‘danced with the devil’. They used an armoury of pseudo-scientific techniques to prey on poor, elderly, and vulnerable women, with their use of witch pricking and searching for the devil’s mark. The familiar power structures embedded in organised religion and misogyny. Kate recounted the tragic story of local woman Lilias Adie, buried face down in the mud on the beach, between the high tide and low tide marks as it was outside consecrated ground. Buried neither on land or at sea, huge stone slabs were placed on top of her; a folk remedy for revenants who were suspected of returning from the grave to torment the living.

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Now playing: Ensemble of Irreproducible Outcomes – ‘Trio and Sine Waves (With Wind, Snow, And Birds)’ from Memory and Weather.

Reference:

Ian Thompson, Jules Verne’s Scotland: In Fact and Fiction, (Edinburgh: Luath Press, 2011).

Categories
Field Trip Found Art Happenstance Observation Poetry Psychogeography rag-pickings Signs and Signifiers

Spectral Dreams of the City Stones

 A dream in masonry and living rock

Robert Louis Stevenson

the habit of dreaming and the ability to dream are primordial

Fernando Pessoa

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.

adrift

casting a line

to pull down

the stars

.

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.

at the threshold

of hearing, sounds

of the city, stored

in the stones

.

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.

thought bubble

of the white dove

 

fractured figments

of translation – PA?

.

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.

dazzle me

with dreams

of a kinder

kind of blue

.

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.

even electrons

get lost

in the forest

    (scratch)    —–>

this way

 

≈≈≈

From a walk through the New Town of Edinburgh on 14th January 2017.

(Edinburgh’s) buildings are dominated by locally quarried sandstone so that the stone-built heritage literally grows out of the bedrock foundations of the city. (McMillan and Hyslop, The City of Edinburgh: Landscape and Stone, 2008).

Now playing: Morton Feldman – Triadic Memories (Steffen Schleiermacher).

Categories
Collaborations Encounters Field Trip Folk-Lore Found Art Observation Poetry Psychogeography Signs and Signifiers

Following Ben Jonson: From Culross to Dunfermline

To begin the journey, we congregate almost four hundred years after Jonson. In front of the Palace walls, a set of variations in muted ochre, the orange pantile roof catches weak strands of sunlight on this September morning …

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Tales for Travellers and Travellers Tales … walking in the footsteps of Ben Jonson

It was a delight to be part of this wonderful project where we took Ben Jonson out for a walk in September.

Rebecca Crowther has documented the activities of all who took part in a new website which records our nine mile social walk from Culross to Dunfermline. Here you’ll find some background to the project, photographs, a short video, sound recordings of our interactive stops along the way and our own contribution from Murdo Eason.

Some extracts below:

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still

s

i

t

t

i

n

g

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In a quiet place

I watch the sky

fall to earth.

.

A few leaves

cast adrift, circle

as clouds and trees

slip silently below

the skin of water

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The sock & coulter symbol of the plough. A farmer’s life, turning soil, slowly returning to the land

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You can find it all here:

Tales for Travellers and Travellers Tales … walking in the footsteps of Ben Jonson

 

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