Perhaps it is true that we are of the earth, of its evolving, changing, living nature. I feel my emotions and body change with the seasons and the availability of light, and I know others of us feel it too. Walking and observing - feeling wind, rain, frost, and the brief warmth of the sun ties me to the rest of the life that lives and dies in this valley.
I've been working on some paintings of raw clay and watercolour on plaster that are attempts to express my mineral bodily link to the post industrial sites in this valley. Attempts at a visual expression of how thin/liminal these places are. History speaks up from the disturbed ground. The hills and mountains are making statements.
10/11/22
Heights to lows, I'm not sitting well in my skin.
The wind blows around the house off the distant channel
funneled up the valley to the hills
it shudders the tiles and makes a sea of the trees
roaring waves breaking on a shore of branches
fox and badger hunker down
silent owls give voles and rats a rest
and the dogs, like me are in their beds
dreaming.
11/11/22
Unsuccessful! I keep on applying for residencies and failing. I'm just too old for all this rejection/application cycle, it's exhausting !
13/11/22
A bright morning. Woken by a pair of raven rattling overhead, overheard through the skylight window. A cool night, condensation lightly runs on the inside of the window edges. Golden light. I feel the liveliness of life again - it stirs through my body.
In the bright morning, we saw textures, diverse plants and jewel like colours. Sky, rock, water. Is loving a ravaged landscape possible ? I plant my feet and my minerality in this valley. The Upper Tawe Valley is the place my footsteps make their home, particularly Penwyllt, it has a very spiritual, rooted, connected affect on my soul. I don't know why, I just feel it.
Edges, living edges.
5/12/22
Suddenly the energy returns, it comes from a place outside of my small self/ego and seems to speak to something deep within my body. I know that this is not just my experience, but is the living experience of many humans that contemplate life beyond the mundane and manufactured.
I watched a video about the work of Cecilia Vicuna who, in her teenage years (like me and many more of us) saw that the life of the planet was being depleted by the actions of humans. She was born in 1948 in Chile. She calls her work precarious because it is fragile and vulnerable - that echoes my love of using plaster for the same reason. She focuses on what is dying, I do too, but also on what is living beyond us and our individualism.
There seem to be so many 'dead' humans in positions of power. They are dead to life more abundant, to the more than human life. Whilst the dead remain in power, they will continue to drag death behind them.
'Soul is the seed of life. Feelings, emotions, sentiments, intuition and reason pass through soul and manifest in the world....It is not only humans who have soul; animals, birds, insects and microbes have soul. Soil, trees, rocks and rivers have soul......The world is how you see it and what you make of it.' Satish Kumar.
13/12/22
I stood on the frozen 'ground' of the spoil heaps of the redundant Tir Bach Colliery looking toward the quarried and mined hill of Varteg opposite, a weak sun hanging low and watery over its top. The euphoric sense of matter - spirit - universe of yesterday replaced with a deep sadness, a lament that this remnant of a past extinction, this coal, helped to fuel our colonial ambitions, made some humans wealthy then left both the land and the communities here depleted of purpose. Then I see silver birch, hazel, willow in the low winter sun and realise it is a landscape in the process of healing itself.
Paul.
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