2024 – Natural & Bleached Calico ; Cotton Organdie
I began with researching the history of the landscape around Abbey Home Farm, via its mapping. Its prehistoric roots were of course the origin of the exhibition through its flints, but this land is rich in history far beyond that. It is framed by Roman roads, a salt way and a drover’s road; it was crossed by a railway and later sliced through by a dual carriageway. I have been drawn to historical maps as an inspiration for some time and traced the past of Abbey Home Farm through one hundred years of Ordnance Survey maps, nineteenth century tithe apportionment maps and current field maps.
As with previous projects, my attention focussed on layers of the past and the signs of it in the landscape. This landscape, like many, is a palimpsest of human activity from prehistory to the present day. So many traces, clues, tales, uses and meanings; the past can be read in the landscape if one only looks. The way Will Chester-Master spoke about his field walking, carried out for pleasure rather than as a systematic archaeological exercise: slow walking, observation, being in the moment, focusing through a single sense reminded me of a passage in Study in Scarlet.
“…[they] proceeded slowly down the path, or rather down the fringe of grass which flanked the path, keeping [their] eyes riveted upon the ground.”
I overlaid modern maps on tithe maps and researched toponyms, techniques of landscape archaeology, field name studies, and took that understanding on my walks at the farm. The changes across time overlay each other both physically and in the naming of features in the landscape.
The names of fields hint at uses, owners and key topographical features to the extent that one could read the landscape from the map as well as from the ground. The aptly named author John Field, and his ‘English Field Names’ dictionary, provided rich reference for reading the land.
For some time, I have been using darning, patching and repair as a metaphor for landscape history, or at least my experience of it. The simplest stitch echoing the lines of footpaths, layers of fabric, rips and frays. Human interaction and use of the land is etched and worn into our landscape, like the impressions and repairs formed in a well-loved armchair. In an essay, Marx’s Coat, Peter Stallybrass wrote that clothes makers and repairers in the nineteenth century would call the wrinkles in the elbows of sleeves, memories; the wrinkles recorded the body that inhabited the garment. In this instance this referred to the way clothing takes on the form of its wearer. For me, this is analogous to the traces in the landscape made by people; culture upon nature.
There is a linguistic connection between landscape and cloth too. The origin of the word clue comes from clews, or balls of thread, like that given by Ariadne to Theseus. Looking for clues (clews) to the past in fields and hills.
Beginning with sample making, learning, building the layers of understanding of the materials and how they could represent. For me, this making also becomes as meditative a practice as the walking itself. Such mindful practices echoing the way that Will described his fieldwalking activities.
The patchworking of the modern field system in muted minimal colours, using a combination of bleached and natural calico. Roads overlaid; a railway overlaid then frayed back. The slightly haphazard patching creating shape, echoing inaccurately the natural undulations in the landscape. Returning the idiosyncrasies of older mapping to the precise modern.
This is the first step for this fragment of land. It will be suffused in the landscape, through foraged dyes from the field margins. It will be extended and grow. It will become worn, less neat just as nature pulls at the edges of the human tidied landscape.
The patchwork is based on the modern map, which is a landscape well documented, geolocated, measured and in motion. The tithe map is translucent organdie, stitched with the old hedgerows and roads. Its outlines based on the hand drawn, the estimated, the ghostly remnants of the past laying beneath. If it is laid over its calico sister, it will sometimes match but other times show change. Its field names enabling recognition, identification and giving their location. Fields named for their daily use or their topography – labels loosely attached and prone to loss as time goes by and ownership priorities shift.
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