The pathfinder doesn’t just collect, but accepts, what the world has to offer because he is paying acute attention to everything.
Tim Ingold
A collage of observations/observances in the landscape on our walk in Merthyr Mawr.
Moving through a landscape, the body inscribes a path, traces an evolving line. The body also gathers to itself the residues (both material and experiential) of the places passed through. These parallel traces of the walk can be used to communicate that walk; the line and residues can both be seen as the indices, or direct imprints of person and place.
If an artwork could be used to recapitulate a pathway through the world, it is in some sense a map.
Aileen Harvey
the return
clarity of air and sound after months in the city: emergence
spaces between trees, the twist and dance
thickenings and conjoinings, embraces
reciprocation, observing and being observed
profusion. diversity. embodiment
dwelling in place, in self
creepers looping ferns sprouting moss absorbing
a glove in the fork of a tree: vestiges, absences, traces
neg a tive space
a step ahead, beneath: a sensing, rongomātau
stories. roots. language. connection, a mythology of place
footprints, stick holes, dog prints, rabbit fur, feathers, fag ends and crushed cans
boot marks on stone: crossing places, portals
placements and displacements, remnants, ravages
placings of bone: observances reclaimed
in the woods, chaffinches, bilberries on the dunes
oystercatchers, curlew and turnstone on the shore
the taste of gorse flowers, the pliancy of hazel, kins, buds and drops
dod yn ôl at fy nghoed. an awakening, a return
Rongomātau - an Indigenous-Māori word meaning ‘sensing the knowing’.
dod yn ôl at fy nghoed - Welsh phrase meaning "to return to a balanced state of mind", literally means "to return to my trees".
Sarah J Featherstone 