I was lucky enough to take part in a project with ‘Walking the Land’ called Confluence, exhibited at The Museum in the Park in Stroud over April 2019. You may have seen my posts about the process of making Ac Sidu (oak practice).
In the enactment I took the prepared oak along the route of Oak road, as far as was possible, with a diversion to the Ampney Brook on the way there and on the way back. At the brook on the first time I gathered water and on the second time deposited the soil extracted from the original site of St Augustine’s Oak (or as close as we could get); at the Oak site I deposited the brook water (associated with eye-cures) and extracted soil to deposit in the brook – an exchange.
Here is a little documentation of the making and exhibiting of the piece – I showed the video and associated artefacts (the oak sapling, the bowl and the bottle of Ampney Brook water on the retina cloth used for its extraction). Below that is the resulting video of the enactment (impossible without the help of Kate Raw).
“Familiarity with a place can breed indifference. Once narrative is associated with it, the place can be re-enchanted. Objects and places are receptive surfaces, inscribed by activity and time which, much later, can be read or replayed. The enactment is a reiteration of a narrative association that renews these inscriptions, amplifies them, gives them new form.
All actions in the enactment are a means of inscribing my objects with narrative and the place – through ‘transference’, a form of consecration. In this way, the narrative of St Augustine’s Oak and Well is re-inscribed onto place and awoken in the present.”
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