Last month I spent a few days on Dartmoor with the (award-winning) artist Martin Prothero, walking, talking and wild camping at a few choice spots. Martin's got a unique take on environmental art - he's trained in fine art but is also a busy bushcraft teacher and environmental educator for people like Wildwise and the Somerset Wildlife Trust.
Martin's best known for his 'carbon light life' series - animal footprints caught on blackened glass and presented as art in light boxes. He created an installation of these for me in our Hide! project at College Lake in 2010, replacing the glass windows of a bird hide and lining its back wall with collaborative work made with local children.
Martin often strives to find ways in which the natural world can represent itself in art. He may frame and select, but it is often wildlife that does the composition. Our next project is attempting to apply that philosophy to the rivers of Dartmoor, beginning (we expect) with the Dart itself and its many tributaries. The project is likely to include sound recordings, live events, drawings and participatory walks. Funding permitting, we'll get going this summer.
On the same trip, I made this short film to introduce my own art project for 2012 - Wild Water. Thanks for the camerawork, Martin!
I'm interested in drawing attention to the way in which our relationship with water has been industrialised and de-personalised. We buy our tap water from companies that profit from extracting it from our river systems; we complain about leaks and hosepipe bans, but we also flush it down the loo; most of us drink too little of it and waste too much of it. Our behaviour is full of contradictions, and of course it is only when supply is restricted that we see our dependency on water for what it really is: a defining characteristic of our species.
'Wild Water' is a way for me to get back to a more honest relationship with water, and to remind people just how good a mountain stream can taste, flavoured by the rocks and soil of its journey. I like the idea that by bottling water as art, I am removing it from the planet's water cycle, containing it, commodifying it ... however desirable and inevitable its return to the system may be. Long after our extinction, water will continue to shape the landscape, as species come and go.
I've also been conspiring with artist Duncan McAfee, a regular Outdoor Culture collaborator. Duncan's work often takes sonic forms, exploring voice, language and story. We worked together on an audio guide and sound art pieces for the Sensory Trail at Burnham Beeches.
Duncan and I spent a weekend in Snowdonia planning a new piece, that has evolved out of discussions we've been having for some time about bothies - see this previous posting for the first incarnation of the idea. We stayed in one of my favourite bothies, Penrhos Isaf, that I've visited many times since first finding it in the dark forest of Coed Y Brenin three years ago and reporting on the experience here.
Duncan's vision is to bring together the cultural phenomena of bothies and traditional song, animating a number of buildings through acoustic performances by local people or visitors with a connection to the bothy. The bothy, like the song, is shared over time, transcending ownership and individuals. The project will result in a set of sonic portraits of places and people, presented as a publication and CD.
We had a good weekend at Penrhos Isaf walking in the forest, talking things through and staying up too late on Duncan's birthday. On Monday morning we were joined by Aled Thomas from the Forestry Commission, which owns the bothy. Aled had very kindly agreed to come and be interviewed for the project, and had a fascinating take on the building, that he first stumbled upon in the late 1970s. It's because of progressive thinking from people like him that the Mountain Bothies Association is allowed to maintain several open properties on Forestry Commission land. Aled gave us a real insight into the evolution of access and leisure as FC priorities alongside forestry, and he's a fantastic ambassador for the movement to re-connect our communities with the natural world.
It feels good starting the year with some embryonic concepts to work up, alongside the projects for which we already have the funding. As January comes to a close, we've just had the fantastic news of a major grant for a new project on a nature reserve in Oxfordshire. I'll put the details up on the Outdoor Culture website as soon as the funder will let me.
Just to make the year even more exciting, there's a major pan-England action research project in the offing, to stimulate, evidence and make the case for outdoor learning in green spaces, working with 200 schools over 3 years and substantial government funding: I just hope that whoever wins the tender to deliver it can build properly on the learning of Creative Partnerships programme of 2002-2011, and avoid repeating its mistakes. The project has a golden opportunity to spotlight green learning in the national education debate, and not a minute too soon.
Have a great year y'all!
