Calling From the Deep

24 October

The Drawings I Made

A few days after packing up my work at the Lookout. I rolled the drawings and took them home, unrolled them to give a final layer of fixative. I reflected on what I had done and felt so proud to have achieved so much in a short space of time. It’s been several years since I made such large pieces; scale is so important with how you work, the range of the hand and arm and the type of marks that you make. Scaling up let me discover things that I couldn’t have done in the initial small preparatory drawings. I feel a strong connection with these works and how they were made. I wonder, where will I show them next? What other drawings and paintings will develop because of them? What comes next for Calling From the Deep? I’m hopeful and curious, which is a great place to be….

22 October

Talking About the Project

On the final day of the exhibition, artist and curator Devi Singh agreed to do a short video with me, talking about my project and the works produced. It was such a privilege to do this together and the spontaneity really comes through in the footage. The audio is a little rough in places but in a way that is an archive of the place, in the way that the marks of the wall coming through into the drawings are an archive.

20 October

Exhibition: Day 2

The wind blew and blew all day. I watched the fishermen on the beach struggling with their rods and seals popping up from the choppy waves. I sat by the fire and thought about the week, about what the future of this project and these drawings might be.

On Saturday, we installed the sound piece in the top of the tower, which can only be reached by a vertiginous spiral staircase winding up the outside of the tower. Because of the weather conditions today, I decided to keep the top of the tower closed. It made me think about how to integrate the drawings and sound pieces together in other contexts, including for experience online.

19 October

Exhibition: Day 1

For two nights, we projected working images from the residency onto the Lookout’s tower. On both nights, there was a supermoon and the light on the sea added to the ethereal ambience of the projection. Seeing the images woven together made me pause for a moment, thinking about the intense period of work during the week. Interestingly, I felt there was something in common between the soft edges of charcoal tonal areas and the way the light played on the Lookout (hard to describe but a definite feeling of connection between the two).

18 October

Residency: Day 5

The final working day of my residency. I knew what I wanted to do, the areas of the drawings which needed resolving to feel cohesive. The fourth drawing presented an interesting opportunity to experiment further, with loose mark making. I was inspired at the bottom by suggesting the shapes of shingle, such an important part of the scene right outside the Lookout. On the third drawing, I chose to substitute the bell for a swinging lamp. The surrealness of flame under water felt strange and a little magical.

Bo has made a video of photographs of this week’s residency and we arranged to project this onto the Lookout tower during the evening. There was a supermoon full and clear over the sea tonight and it added to the gentle and haunting silent projection in the night…..

17 October

Residency: Day 4

One of the most important things about a residency is discovery - the unexpected inspiration, often because of an unintended action, that opens up new possibilities. Yesterday, on the second drawing, I took a rag and swept the charcoal dust that had naturally fallen to the floor. I used it to obliterate the white space at the bottom of the drawing. When I stood back, I realised that I really liked the marks I had made. After talking with a friend, I decided to leave them instead of drawing in the sea, as I had originally intended. I also decided to experiment with recreating the marks on a fourth drawing.

As time was quite tight, I knew I also needed to start drawing the composition for the third drawing too. What a day. At the end of it, I had two new drawings started - the third, the top of which was based on Lake Kaindy, was roughed out but I had a feeling that I didn’t want the bell at the bottom, so I chewed the thought over to decide definitively tomorrow. On the fourth drawing, I chose to perch a boat at the top of the paper; there was a picture in the Dunwich Museum that has stayed with me and I decided to use this….

16 October

Residency: Day 3

I had hoped to finish the first drawing yesterday. This morning, refreshed, I decided to start the second - a less detailed piece with more dark sea an sky. I wanted to get a feel for how the pieces would look together and also to take a break from hyper-focusing on the first drawing. I made good progress on the second drawing in the morning and that relaxed me enough to finish the first drawing during the afternoon and early evening. I finished by spraying the first drawing, hopefully I’ll have time to work into the blacks a little more which the first layer of fixative allows me to do. But - only if there is time. Tomorrow I want to sketch out the third drawing and continue work on the second drawing…..

15 October

Residency: Day 2

Today I continued to work on the first drawing. I made good progress, making the dark areas richer and darker and working in the shapes of the town, the patterns of the sea and the clouds. I was disappointed, as it got dark, that I had not finished this drawing today, as I hope to finish three drawings of the same size this week. But after and intense day of concentrating on drawing, it felt there was no more energy left. Tomorrow I hope to start on the second drawing, perhaps the beacon which is the least detailed and so, I suppose, may be the most quickly achievable of the three…

14 October

Residency: Day 1

The beginning of a residency, particularly a short one, is full of nervous energy. What can I achieve in the time? How will it be received? What unexpected obstacles will I come across?

Having gone down to the Aldeburgh Beach Lookout in the morning, I met with the founder/owner Caroline Wiseman to get the keys. I spent some time measuring the space and then went back to where I am staying in the town to cut the large roll of paper to the size I wanted. I’m using a thick paper that I have been working with for many years - Fabriano Artistico hot pressed extra white 300gsm. It’s important because I know how the surface works with the charcoal. The roll size is 1.5m x 10 m and I cut four lengths of 63 x 188 cm ready to work on in the Lookout.

Opening the doors of the boathouse, the light came flooding in from the sea. I cleared the space and organised my things, including the books that inspired me.

Taking a deep breath, I used my small drawing as a reference and started to rough out the drawing that uses Sant Roma de Sau as a starting point…..

22 September

Kaindy, Kazakhstan

In Kaindy Lake, Kazakhstan, the bleached trunks of trees project from above the water. The images of these white projecting trunks have a spooky feeling, like beacons or art installations. Seaweed has accumulated around the roots beneath the waterline.

12 September

Sant Roma de Sau, Spain

One of many towns flooded to create reservoirs to meet the needs of local people, Sant Roma de Sau has an 11th Century church whose bell tower has reemerged in recent years due to drought conditions. This led me to start this small scale charcoal drawing (sneak peak of a detail in this image). I started to think about ecclesiastical imagery and how that could be integrated into the drawings. The imagery in churches was designed to tell stories for those who were illiterate and that has started to inform how I am working up my ideas into drawings.

1st September

Beacons

There are beacons along the coast, including at Aldeburgh. They were originally used to send messages along the coast, often in times of distress. More recently, they have had a ceremonial, celebratory use. I thought about the fact that they are perched on land overlooking the sea and in this drawing I experimented with transposing them into the sea. With no sign of land, the flames feel surreal and endangered but the fierce light in the darkness suggests hope to me.

25 August

Working Out Design and Logistics

Some notes about how I want to design the installation with prompts I give myself to work things out.

12 August

Sketching Plantlife on the Beach

I spent some time on Aldeburgh beach looking closely at the plantlife there and drawing it. It is a shingle beach and the plants that grow, in the face of the North Sea wind, are hardy. The flowing shapes of this type of plant have always appealed, their leaves curiously durable. At other times you see poppies of even hollyhocks sprouting in the cracks of walls next to the beach.

2nd August

Poetry

Misplaced shoreline, the sound on the wind a half-known thing once thought lost.

Or, perhaps, we cling to what cannot be retained, reformed, reloved.

The shoreline there had a name, the name was given by someone, the name is a residue of that / those voices.

The sound of the bell is iron and salt, the taste algal bloom.

The suddenness of it makes you blush as you realise your own smallness.

Your breathe out and shudder into dust.

In the sea, you settle the bell deeper under silt - the heavy swell dislodges the shingle and it rings, calls,

Sweeps saltily into the ear of someone else.

31 July

Writing to Form Impression

overlaying, it has effaced its previous shape, altered its name. It rejects absolutism as it does not live mortally, there is nothing to save. There are only patters that repeat, subvert, adapt. The sounds are the children of other sounds, they are a type of repetition in splintered voices. The textures speak to this. Overlaying, the polyphony. I think about the reflections of trees upon the water, and of the trees lost to the sea (some disintegrated, some petrified like lost monuments). The way the reflections fall upon the water and the restless distortion of shape and light. My hair will change colour soon, a colour loss but a slow vivid process. I imagine my long hair swept out on the waves and catching and turning another colour in the tint of the water and so it becomes indistinguishable from the seaweed. That is a type of metamorphosis, a curious evolution. There is a seeming chaos to the thought of all these textures building up, overlapping, rewriting, obliterating, soaking through. Salt water; distorted shapes; algae; the felt shapes of submerged stones in the clouded sea with its near random stones that are really part of patterns of longshore drift, the action of the moon upon the tides, even the hunting actions of animals. It is chaos / it is repeating patterns so rich they cannot be codified. Our smallness is sort of reassuring?

The Raft of the Medusa

In 2007, I saw the painting ‘The Raft of the Medusa’ by Gericault in the Louvre. It is enormous. When I first saw a picture of it in a book, I was struck by it and drew it over and over again. The composition, the way the figures interact with each other, the emotion - utterly extraordinary. Everything is happening on the surface of the water, the ship has sunk unseen beneath the water. I drew a part of the painting again in my sketchbook while thinking about this project; it seemed to me that the last desperate moments in the painting must have a contrast with another story under the water. It helped me think about the composition of my drawings, how I might make the language of the images contrast in the sections above and below the water.

30 April

All Saints, Dunwich

The last church to be lost at Dunwich was All Saints, finally lost to the sea entirely in the early 1900s. There is one grave left not yet lost to the crumbling cliffs, called ‘The Last Grave’. Nestled inside green woodland, with the sound of the waves so close behind it, it is a curious and haunting thing to encounter. Behind the Last Grave are the ruins of Greyfriars Monastery. The shapes of the stones and flints and the remaining shapes of windows through which the sky can be seen had an elegiac feel, against the peace of grazing horses and the song of meadow birds.

“I am walking with ghosts on Dunwich Shore” - poet JW Gosling

30 April

Dunwich, Suffolk

Dunwich, once the sixth largest settlement in England, now has a population of around 100 people.

The small but excellent Dunwich Museum tells the story of how Dunwich was mostly lost to the sea.

The collection has many items found in the area. One area interested me in particular - the section about ‘ampullae’, lead bottles used by pilgrims to collect holy water from sites of pilgrimage. The ampulla at the museum has a ‘W’ meaning, they believe, ‘Walsingham’, another site of pilgrimage. I found the idea of people carrying water from place to place and the loss of water from one place into the earth at another, intriguing. I collected water from Kenfig Pool on my visit there, as an artefact that I could integrate into my eventual installation. Is there something about water and its character of movement that makes us want to capture and (de)still it?

Dunwich had at least eight churches and two monasteries - the churches were lost to the sea (St Bartholomew’s, St Leonard’s, St Martin’s, St Nicholas’, St Peter’s, St John’s, St James’, All Saints, St Francis’ chapel, St Katherine’s chapel and St Anthony’s chapel). The folklore here, as with other ‘Drowned Towns’, is that the church bells can still be heard on stormy nights.

30 April

Walberswick, Suffolk

The Walberswick Ferry pier

The Walberswick ferry is a pedestrian ferry across the estuary from Walberswick to Southwold. As she rowed, the ferrywoman said to me that the ferry used to go to Dunwich and that the ferry had been operating since the 1100s. The curious collection of boat chandlery and mismatched fishing huts on the Southwold side drew me in. I’ve been recently working with charcoal and the textures of the huts and the hulls whose hulls showed signs of having been breached and in the process of repair meant a lot of looking and thinking about different ways to render those texture in charcoal.

I was struck by the idea of a ferryman as archetype, the one that takes us from one place, or state, to the other. I thought of the idea of a ferryman who takes their passengers between life and afterlife, the means of a necessary transition.

Visiting Walberswick was a first stage in a day dedicated to research at Dunwich, a well known ‘Drowned Town’….

30 March

Kenfig Pool, Wales

On Easter Saturday, I found my way to Kenfig Pool in South Wales. The water was incredibly still and trees were growing in the water. There weren’t many people around and the quiet made the place feel magical.

The legend says that hundreds of years ago there was a town here. A poor man wanted to marry a rich man’s daughter; to gain enough money to do this, he murdered a rent collector and stole his money. Because of this, a curse was put on Kenfig. After nine generations, there was a terrible storm and the whole town was flooded. On stormy nights, it is said, you can still hear the church bells toll.

I decided to collect some water from the pool, as well as some stones and dried ferns. Having these in the studio makes me feel connected to the experience and I may use these ephemera in my installation in Aldeburgh in October.

4 March

Introduction to ‘Calling From the Deep’

From under the sea, bells toll.  

In the surviving places near Drowned Towns (Dunwich, Cantre’r Gwaelod), bells continue to be heard. Inland, bell towers overcome by reservoirs reemerge under drought conditions (Derwent, Llanwddyn).

WG Sebald writes of Dunwich as a place where past and present overlap, a theme that I’ve been drawn to for many years. Bells summon, they celebrate, they lament and they warn.

Bells tolling under water seem like a place’s past calling to its present, the voice of the bell an avatar for human voices fallen silent. The sea is beguiling with danger and longing; we are an island nation and our sea is slowly rising. 

This theme is something I became interested in several years ago. A friend last year suggested that I get in touch with Caroline Wiseman at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout to suggest it as a theme for a residency. I’ve long been a fan of the work shown at Aldeburgh Beach Lookout, so I was really pleased that Caroline was as enthused about the project as I am.

My residency will be 14 - 20 October 2024.