Mapping on …

Today’s  weather forecast was terrible: torrential rain and a yellow warning for thunderstorms, so I thought I would nip out in advance of the bad weather and have another look at the horizon around Bwlch y Ddeufaen. As it happens I need not have worried: I’m safely back home without more than a few drops of rain and a distant rumble of thunder. I’m watching the storms brew up on https://www.lightningmaps.org/# and feeling pretty smug.

Spring comes late at this elevation and the grass is still brown on the hillsides. The gorse is just greening up at the tips – lower down the valley it’s in flower in gorgeous gamboge yellow.  The new shoots of the bilberries are a lurid  lime green and the white seed heads of the cotton grass are everywhere. There is plenty of colour if you look for it.

So of course I made some large drawings in black and white, revisiting the idea of a 360degree view of the horizon.  I’m hoping that concentrating on the horizon for the time being will clear the way towards the larger pieces needed for the exhibition.

Drypoint etchings on re-purposed clear plastic (from the lid of a box of chocolates). They’re completely out of scale here as the “plates” are  only 10cm. long. Not really suitable for hanging from a high gantry in an arts centre, or at least, not on their own. I shudder to think how many I would need to make any kind of impact.

I’ve been making some preliminary studies derived from horizon lines.

The most obvious thing about Bwlch y Ddeufaen is its’ bleakness: peaty moorland, rocks, no trees to speak of. The next most obvious things are the electricity pylons. Two rows of massive, ungainly pylons.

It would be dishonest to ignore them, but it’s going to be difficult to resolve the tension between industrial straight lines and the more gestural marks derived from the horizon.  And, as it’s a map, it might need a grid of its own.  So: vertical horizons with and without pylons.

Thinking about the practicalities of making a large piece of work to hang high above a communal space … it needs to be big enough to make an impact; it needs to be robust enough to hang in moving air without ripping or falling onto someone’s head. OK., the air is barely moving, but the principle still applies. It needs to be able to move gently without ripping, etcetera; the image needs to have an impact from a distance of several metres. Close inspection of the details will be impossible without a telescope or a very long ladder.

During the recent tidying-up session in the studio I came across this maquette hanging from a beam. It has probably been there for ten years, overlooked and consequently invisible.  I think it may date from my “imaginary bones” phase, and was never developed any further. It might serve as a template for the new piece, but will need to be scaled up a wee bit.

I was back at Bwlch y Ddeufaen last week in the sunshine and bitterly cold wind.  I remembered to make a video, but forgot to take the furry microphone cover thingy (baffle? muff?) so the results are much as you might expect.  Very, very noisy.  Also, I don’t seem to be able to upload it from the iPad. Need to work on this.

On the other hand, making a panorama drawing on partly pre-prepared paper was definitely more satisfying. I usually find it distracting to work over a ready made background, but this seems to have turned out alright. Didn’t prepare enough pages of course.

Photographing it has been a challenge, but I’m not convinced that using the panorama function on the camera is really a breakthrough. The artefact is interesting and a bit reminiscent of those polaroid collages which were fashionable a long time ago.