Eating with our eyes closed

Despite the best efforts of our celebrity chefs, this nation still seems to be in denial about where its food comes from. 

Our disconnection from the land has produced a society of squeamish supermarket shoppers who care more about appearance than truth, and who struggle to relate the living animals in our fields to the dead ones on our plates.

A bushcrafting friend of mine tells the story of a roadkill deer he saw on his way to work one morning. His colleagues were disgusted that he'd put it in his boot to butcher and preserve when he got home.   What once was normal behaviour has become unthinkable to most people. 

A head teacher in Kent has been forced to resign over a project in which pupils helped to rear a lamb, on the grounds that its slaughter upset some of the children:  http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/education/article7022554.ece

What are children learning from this witch-hunt - that it's better to eat in ignorance?

Elsewhere, the artist Matthew Herbert was forbidden to record the slaughter of the pig whose entire life he has documented:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/feb/11/matthew-herbert-pig-slaughter .  Whose agenda is served by this silence?

I'm all in favour of confronting reality.  Environmental art, and environmental education, should not be all fluffiness and sunshine.  It should communicate that humanity is part of a bigger system, that life is defined by the inevitability of its ending, and that nature is us.

Our need for food reveals us as the animals we really are.  Civilisation may allow us to look away from the killing, but our hunger always returns.  A little more self-knowledge would be good for us.

Through a gate into the woods

One project I'm currently working on is the creation of a woodland walk leaflet for the Roald Dahl Museum in my home village of Great Missenden, where Dahl himself lived.  The leaflet will offer a self-guided walk, with suggestions for family activities to do along the way, gathered from earth education practice and a few artist friends of mine.

On Wednesday, Feroze from the museum and I walked the route to test out the directions I'd written, which mostly worked but need a couple of tweaks.

It's thoughtful and green of the museum to encourage visitors to get out and enjoy the local countryside while they're here; and helpful to our high street economy if visitors stay local for longer.

Great Missenden is at the heart of the Chilterns Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty:  the landscape is always appealing, but it's unlikely that many visitors to the village will see it looking quite like this. 

The world was stunning in black and white on Wednesday.

Snow School

School closed?  Children bored of sledging?

Check out this set of snowy activities from Creative Star, an outdoor learning agency in Scotland:

http://www.creativestarlearning.co.uk/Flexviews/core/assets/pdf/creative%20star%20winter%20wonderland%20pack.pdf

'The best classroom and richest cupboard is roofed only by the sky'  Margaret McMillan

Human Animals

It's good to remember that people are wild animals, and can sometimes be fantastic flamingos:





Thanks to Gever Tully for sharing this clip.


Gever's visionary new book '50 Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Children Do'  is out now and available through the US Amazon site:  http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Dangerous-Things-should-children/dp/0984296107/ 


Here's Gever presenting some of the book's ideas on ted.com http://www.ted.com/talks/gever_tulley_on_5_dangerous_things_for_kids.html

Happy New Year!

Atlantic Solstice

My family and I escaped the arctic wastes of the South East last week.  The romance of the impending white christmas had worn off after a few days of sliding around on snow and ice, rescuing stuck motorists and trying to keep out of the way of cars coming sideways down the local hills.

We headed to Cornwall for a family Christmas under brighter skies, and it was like arriving in a different country - warm, sunny, snow-free and bathed in that wild Atlantic light.

This blog has been obsessed with light lately.  It's a winter thing, I think.  The pagan roots of Christmas are all about light in the darkest time of the year:  the rebirth of the sun at the solstice signalling the start of the lengthening days.  We bring the evergreen tree into the heart of our homes and illuminate it, as a reminder that light is returning to the world.

The Cornish love their Christmas lights, and there's no end of villages lit up with reindeers and Santas.  Perhaps it's because the daylight is so impressive that the man-made lights have to work that little bit harder.

I took these photos between 23 and 25 December, on the coast between Marazion and Porthleven.  We're back in Bucks now, and not only is it still sleeting but the ice on our road never even melted.  I miss the marine depth of that Atlantic light.

Northern Lights 3

James Turrell makes art out of light. But it's not lightweight.

I had a proper go in his Sky Space at Kielder Water last month, a few days before the rains flooded Cumbria.  It was alreayd pretty wet, and I'd driven for two hours in the rain from Durham.  Kielder Forest feels very remote.

The lake has a lot of outdoor art on its shores, and three bothies nearby.  It sits in a sweeping valley that looks great from the Sky Space.  The skies are the clearest in England, hence the sharp timber of Kielder Observatory, a short walk from Turrell's piece.

I wandered up the mountainside from the observatory.  Paths came and went, and I stumbled through bogs, tree stumps and peat hags to get a good view over the valley.

It was raining again as I got back to the Sky Space, so the shelter was welcome.  I stayed as dusk fell and the sky darkened.  The rain fell on the gravel below the aperture in the roof.

The sky looked more and more like a blue earth suspended in the ceiling.

Turrell's talent is to get out of the way. The art is the viewer's experience, often of an interaction of light and architecture.  The Sky Space is a different show every day.

http://www.visitkielder.com/site/things-to-do/art-and-architecture/art-and-architecture-list

http://www.mountainbothies.org.uk/

http://www.artfund.org/turrell/james_turrell.html

Northern Lights 2

Lumiere Durham provided an entertaining trip to the North East this month, with sound and light interventions across the city, commissioned by Arthichoke Productions.

Obviously, some installations did more for me than others, but I loved the idea of transforming an evening walk around this historic city.  I was reminded how important it is with site-specific art to have a strong starting point, which Durham's geography and architecture certainly provided.

One of the best elements of the event was 'Power Plant', a show in the Botanic Gardens produced by Simon Chatterton, centred on the work of the brilliant Mark Anderson, and originally commissioned by Oxford Contemporary Music.  A succession of sound and light installations took you on a surreal journey through the darkened gardens. 

The clear crowd-pleaser was Mark's 'Pyrophones' - a surround-sound fire organ. This is what it looked like in Liverpool last year:





Back in Durham's city centre, I was surprised to find that one of my favourite pieces was actually sited indoors, within the Cathedral.  'Chorus' by Mira Calix and United Visual Artists was a beautiful piece of music played through four static speakers and eight speaker/lights housed in pendulums that swayed and paused overhead, as the audience passed beneath them.  I sat in a pew and watched the whole piece twice:





The North East can't be accused of not being ambitious in terms of large-scale outdoor arts events - next up is an illumination of the 87-mile Hadrian's Wall on 13 March 2010.

But for me the most poignant piece in Lumiere Durham was this simple light sculpture, produced from a drawing made by a prisoner at HMP Durham.  How I take my freedoms for granted.

http://www.artichoke.uk.com/