Stillness of Horses

Stillness of Horses

Stillness of Horses is a work that encompasses, movement, drawings, basket making, wood carving and writing, the total merging to become performance.

I have a way of working that weaves together threads of my particular curiosities. I have learned to listen, to trust, to investigate and to follow the curiosities as they arise and amongst them to find my works. I sit in the quietness of the call that comes from a work that is preparing to emerge. Sensing the beginnings of a work while it still holds the fragile quality of a dream, needs particular attention, for dreams easily disperse on waking, a gentleness is needed to encourage the work to come into the light. As I begin I do not need to know what the work will be, I glance towards it sidelong as I would a wild animal, for I have learned that a direct gaze may send it into retreat. I often have the feeling that works already exist within the dream of all things, as I tug on the thread of a particular dreaming I become a part of the call.

The call of ‘the being’

You came to me head first from a new sea-washed bank of shingle. Your face, I saw your face amongst the pebbles. I picked you up. At that time you were not connected to the rest of your body. For years, your head looked out at me from a place on a shelf in my studio. I did not hear your words, or if I did, I did not understand them. You dwelt there amongst other small, strange rock faces. It was clear to me, even then, that only yours, amongst the heads, awaited a body.

The time it takes for work to come through, out of the dreaming, is its own. For some years the presence of the head circled my awareness. In time, I began the hear a more insistent call for the head to be connected to its body. In my mind’s eye I saw a figure made entirely of wood. Now they are here. I am aware that I am able to follow ‘the being’ into other realms, magical realms, where I feel the essence of all life and where I hear a deep singing heart of wonder, magic and a quality that brings me awake to life and fills me with an earthly solace.

While under an ancient tree holding these experiences, I scrape back the surface of the earth with my fingers, revealing pure dark black gold of leaf litter slowly becoming earth. I lay ‘the being’ there. Crows call in preparation for the descent. In their turning and wheeling above me I feel a portal open, together we become porous. We feel the thrumming of the earth, we feel the roots of the trees around us diving deep below us, rumbling their stories to each other. Amongst the stones they thread their remembering, now whisperings of what may come to pass, may fall away, must fall away. Crows continue to call frequently, their voices keep the threads zinging in tune with each other so that the way remains alight, clear and pulsing. We follow the light, it is delicately held as though glistening amongst morning dew, impossibly beautiful, mysterious and unmistakably alive amongst the shifting colours of refracted light. Moment to moment ancient memories are awakening.

Emergence of the drawings.

I feel old memories running through my body, memories of the scent of wild garlic as I move over it crushing leaves and then lying down upon them gazing up towards points of shimmering green. Other images return of hanging heavy bodied along and over fallen moss covered boughs, both limb of tree and body weighty. Dreams of sitting attentive, listening amongst the excavation mounds of badger. Scents and forms of the much loved woodland carried carefully home in body then onto paper through movement of pencil. The feeling of shape and scent and movement held as echos in my body flowing out on to paper. Circular, the pencil moves round and round, creating a multi circle within the once empty square of paper, a circle akin to an out-breath begins to fill with echos of the woodland, trees of different ages reaching for light, new leaf waking, roots entwining and conversing across the circle. As the drawing begins to emerge, I see that, more than I was aware of while in the wood, appears upon the paper. The drawing is emerging from a hidden channel, one that connects my body to earth body.

Onto the surface of the paper a circle round and round of pencil, filled then with smaller circles and connecting lines that are both drawn and stitched, it’s, a map of places as yet unknown to me. This ‘map’, this map is more song or sound or breath, it does not translate shapes of earth and sky into something readable something perhaps lesser than the form of the mapped. The domain being mapped, remains a mystery, must remain a mystery in order for it to fully sing of itself.

Through the drawing of the map, other drawings, echos on paper, begin to come through. First a movement of a circle, round and round and round, some pencil, others charcoal, ink, stitched thread, less a circle more a shimmer becoming gateway for echos of earth and body and star, wind, light and dark soft mosses, marks made coming direct through the body from both the seen and the unseen of the more than human realms. The images are called in through visceral, multi layers, they are like beings in themselves, animate. They come through the body of the cartographer, one after the other, then a few together, others slower with long spaces, days and nights between them, there is an edge of chaos and unpredictability in their manner of their arrival. In time there are many, many, each and together holding memory, shape, form, sound, feelings, there is a field now, a landscape, mapping and un-mapping. Some come through with a wild darkness and others are filled with such light that they hardly seem to be here at all. They tumble through unstoppable until they are done.

Performance/Installation ‘Stillness of Horses’.

Now that the main body of the drawings feel complete, I take time to sit with each drawing to sense the call and echo of each one. Some drawings feel as though they hold old earth stories, others of the movement of the skies, others hold what feels like ancient tales of the stars while some quietly echo of the emergence of moss. Each drawing holds a unique response to the wonder that we live amongst.

The sense of stillness and wild life force that I have witnessed in horses when they are living life roaming relatively free, as do the ponies of Dartmoor, is a quality I sense in the centre of this work.

I carry ‘the being’ and a pile of drawings, to the studio. I feel ready to begin to sense them and move amongst them as a whole, a collective. It is my first experience of being amongst the images all at the same time. I place ‘the being’ in the space, they are the centre of the work. As I take each drawing from the pile I let them go into the space. The images released one by one, slide across the space supported by a thin film of air trapped between their underside and the wood of the floor, till they find their place. They slide easy over and under each other and through, till all are in the space, visible. Settled in their place, no order, order. I find my way in amongst them, memory of places and their particular qualities jostle around me, portals open, ready to receive, ready to give, ready to take away, wide open, between here and there, wide open between body and other and between breath and wind. I sit quiet amongst them and receive the pool of images around me. From the stillness, I am called to the darkness of one, a deep blackness surrounding a fierce and vibrant crown of light, I find my hands smoothing into the darkness, deep body of darkness taken in through the palms of my hands. This particular portal calls me while others remain quiet, their maps shimmering, unopened, unclosed. I too shimmer amongst them, place my head over the deep dark, forehead sinking in, glassy eyed, tumbling in. Sounds of water moving fast, changing direction, circle my body and thread themselves into the map, meandering indistinctly between here and there, maps of the unseen join together in unison, waking, remembering, all water passing by, eons of water passing by always here, always here. All the while I sense ‘the being’ awake amongst the pool of images. The drawings ask that I travel with and through them, we begin to sing each other, we are the song of each other and of all between. The drawings and I become marked by the movement, the deep black of some of the drawings leave traces of themselves on my face and hands and body and on the other drawings, surfaces intermingling and marking their travelings upon each other, as we move everything is in flux.

The pencil, pen, charcoal, sewn, ‘stitch-drawn’ images are awake, they spill their stories amongst each other, they jostle, float and slide to find their place as I move amongst them. I enter the unknown of them, opening myself to respond moment to moment. I gather the basket holding ‘the being’ close in to my body, I sit with them in my lap. Slowly I rise to my knees and walk upon them amongst the drawings as though in supplication. I stand, ‘the being’ in the basket is in my arms, I move amongst the drawings, hear them, speak them, move with them. I place the basket. Stories emerge through my body in sound and word and movement, I move them and with them. The drawings are not fixed in time or space. They speak all at once of the vast and the minute, of ancient and new born, of stars and moss and rock and tree, of pulsing cells moving, growing, dying, they speak of body, earth body, animal body, hot, pepper hot stars biting hard into the darkness awake awake.

A pool of over thirty drawings are on the floor all around me.

Each time I enter the spread of drawings, ‘the being’ holds the centre while the constellation of images is changed and renewed. The ways of being amongst them seems to emerge from the core of their combined existence. They, floor bound, earth bound, speak of these changes, we are in dialogue emerging as shape and form within each moving cycle. Each time I enter I hear and understand more of their language, I feel like a linguist bringing a new language home to my body and so to gradually become fluent. As I move amongst the drawings slow ancient sounds emerge from me, in a remembrance. Vast blackness is torn into light from the secret depth of the sky. Sounds of rock worn over, smooth, ice smooth, wind, rain and earth grit bound. Body opens to the heart of itself. Moss, forrest-like grows its way over and through us. I look out far to where my eyes see nothing, look out, look out, see where the strings come together distant, distant far away in the time before. The strings shiver, the strings of existence shiver around me, shimmering, the strings are far away, they come here now……

Once the form of a work emerges, it is often necessary for me to undertake many cycles of working within its field until I begin to understand something of what has been made and then often longer still for real clarity to arise in relation to the full shape of the work, this understanding sometimes comes in hindsight, after a work is completed. As the work enters the public domain and I experience myself within it, I sense that on some level the work is a kind of advocacy for the earth and for all beings who live, have lived and will ever live, within her biosphere. Entering the field of the work, to engage with and offer it out, requires me to open myself to all the shifts and changes both subtle and devastating that are arising on the earth, while at the same time remaining connected to the sense of wonder that I hold through being alive and living each day amongst and a part of the many astonishing forms of life. The work feels akin to an offering of gratitude, a seeing, a listening, a song or a prayer and alongside these a strong call to us humans to remember who we truly are.

‘Stillness of Horses’ was first performed publicly at ‘Sentient Performativities: thinking alongside the human’, in Dartington Devon in June 2022 www.art-earth.org.uk.

‘Stillness of Horses’ is the second of my works whose emergence has been supported by the valuable process of working alongside other artists within a Walk of Life mentorship, the first being ‘Coat’.
I honour and give deep gratitude to our life giver, the earth and all the beings I breathe amongst and live alongside, to see and receive your magic, is a wonder. I thank Helen Poynor and the Walk of Life mentorship group 2020-21; Becca Parkinson, Caroline Thompson, Cecilia Macfarlane, Emma Rich and Kirstie Richardson, I thank you for your presence, I honour your work and our working alongside each other.

Photos: Christian Kipp / Hilary Kneale