Edge Combing

Holmfirth Branch Line Berry Banks

Clowning Around, Cophurst Holme Styes Woods

Like children that once lived here the poppets are out to play, they’ve come out to see what’s going on, to watch over their wilderness. Usually safely hidden in the nooks and crannies of the derelict buildings, they observe and record the secrets of this space.  As nature reclaims the abandoned habitation the poppets look out for the wild things as they quietly go about their business.  The untidy corners matter, here nature mends and the wild things make their homes in this no man’s land, it’s nature’s land where the poppets play.

Installation in Art in the Woods Holmfirth Arts Festival

Art in the Woods - samples

       

Making Poppets to watch over the ruins. They will be made out of rubbish abandoned in the woods, each one also containing a little treasure from the woodland, then wrapped with nettle yarn.

My next project is about the edgelands, decay and recovery.

In the words of Paul Evans,
'I love flowers in the ruins; Nature reclaims our most audacious works and they disintegrate, becoming colonised by plants and animals.  I love the romance of decay.  Ruins have tearful edges, a melancholy which persists in places once cherished, alive, lived in, now desolate. Their stones, bricks, slates and concrete hold a recording of all that happened there and plays back to me like a distant gramophone.  Ruins have a residual life absorbed by water and earth; they are a becoming. Rot is beautiful.'
From Field Notes from the Edge - Journeys through Britain's Wilderness

A Manx Tale - Raad My Foillan

SWELL

HOLDFAST

Words from Helen Macdonald

'of all the lessons I've learned in my months with Mable this is the greatest of them all; that there is a world of things out there - rocks trees and stones and grass and all things that crawl and run and fly.  They are all things in themselves, but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up our views of the world.'
Helen Macdonald in H is for Hawk, Vintage London 2014

Way of the Gull

Well maybe 1000 hours of practice if I'm lucky.