Meander: Dreaming Into Being.

Mar 34 min read

I have lost count of the time spent painting this piece of work. Subtle layers of pale watery wash gradually building up, creating depth. It seems aeons ago that I began with a wooden panel and applied an ordnance survey map over 75 years old to its surface. Now, the map has gradually disappeared under the washes of water and paint and texture upon texture.

And all the while, he watches me through half-closed eyes.

Dreaming me into existence.

Or am I dreaming him?

The creative process is magical. I begin with a vague idea of where to start, some materials, and a direction. It is like going on a journey, a walk without a destination in mind; if I follow my feet step by step, the path will lead me somewhere.

Just like with walking, if you don’t hold onto where you think you might end up and let the path take you, you can find that the journey has plans of its own. A turn here, a twist in the road there, leading somewhere unexpected, something unknown to be revealed. It is the same with a work of art.

However, contradictorily, the process is also not magical in many other ways. It is just doing practical things one step at a time. “Ah, that is a little pale, but don’t add too intense a layer, or the map will disappear entirely,” says the inner direction. Is it a voice? Whose voice? His voice? My voice? The creative process does speak.

The show is called Meander: Land + Water.

This piece and I have already wandered together for a while.

I began thinking I was using maps for land and a hint of Cuckmere Haven’s meandering curves as the shape of the water element. As I spatter areas in rubber resist, the paler colours are hidden by the build-up of paint, and later revealed as specks of the original map are rubbed into existence and a cosmic river appears instead.

A river of stars; a shaman and a serpent; an eclipse of a celestial light body by a blue-green planet; or an egg and a sperm. A creation myth is being told in maps and paint and clay.

Bringing something into reality that didn’t exist before seems magical. Just as walking reveals new paths and treasures along the way, so does artwork - as well as new ways of using materials or what things do when you add more water, salt, or ink. So, it is very practical, but there is also this feeling of finding the way in the unknown. It takes time. And there are detours, paths taken that turn out not to be the way, that must be worked through, reflected upon, and then a redressing of the course ensues. But carry on taking the steps. Carry on.

As I am working, often in the peace of the darkness outside my studio, I am thinking of meandering by two rivers; one the Cuckmere Haven in the rain, when the ground was sodden with mud to the knees, my feet were wet, my clothes were wet... and then the sun came out; the second, the Thames, scrambling down onto the foreshore and walking, slipping, picking my way amongst the stones and mud. And it comes to me, he tells me in a daydream, “Yes," he says, “...and what did you find amongst the mud and city skyscrapers?”

What did I find? The receding tide had revealed traces of times past, layers of history suddenly unearthed by water, cast into the light of day for the first time in centuries.

The treasures from the deep themselves are not of great note or value; bits of broken ceramic pipes, smoked and thrown off a bridge a couple of hundred years or more ago; bones, jaw bones with teeth, vertebrae, all browned by the mud and water; horseshoe nails, oyster shells, pins, hag stones with holes in them; broken red terracotta roof tiles some maybe even as old as medieval; flashes of colour amongst the mud and stones, sherds of blue and white pottery, metal, bone, shell, wood, stone, clay. After years of decaying, they all begin to look alike. Like a honeycomb inside, the bone is strikingly like the decaying oyster shell. Metal rusting, wood wearing, clay rounding.

To this, it will all come in the end.

But there is also a third river - of creativity- that we can enter at any time.

In the studio, he stares at me with eyes reaching from a deeper place than just inside his clay skull. He wants those things, he says without words. I string him a necklace on waxed string. It is a spool of string I have had since I was 8. I find it, even though I had no idea where it was until it was needed. As a child, I was obsessed with wax string and made special trips to a Chandlery to buy some…but here it is ready to hand at the right time to be used.

Stranger still, some weeks before, I had cut some rough and random shapes in clay and put holes in them, intending to string them up as a glaze reference. But he wants them, too. They are very similar in colour and texture to those things given as a gift by the river.

When things I made without knowing why are suddenly called upon, I feel a strong sense of a universal creative spirit collaborating in the creative process. A river of creativity that flows underneath. Perhaps I have just long been making this work intuitively, even before I thought I was making it.

These are the final touches he needs, of colour and texture found on a wander along the water’s edge. The parts collected, the process, and the piece itself have gently meandered towards me and I towards them, arriving together in this moment of creation. Feeling the way of the walk and the process of making step by step along the road….

And he is finished.

He looks at me. I look at him.

There was never any question… he was always going to emerge in this way.