I’ve recently been thinking about how to extend my ‘tuning-in’ way of working to go beyond the human world. In Italy I love to spend time with early Renaissance altarpieces and statues. I find them very powerful; their intensity resonates with me. The first time I saw a group of Jain sculptures at a show in London, many years ago, when I took a group of students, I was mesmerized by their power and their particular refined quality of stillness.
In Norcia at the beginning of my research trip/holiday I spent a day at the birthplace of Santa Scholastica and San Benedetto, and it was very restorative and powerful. I had a dream of Santa Scholastica which guided me towards thinking of a new research project, to be centred in Italy, and the Sibillini National Park, where there is an ancient and still prevailing way of living with Nature, the Saints, and beauty.
I love to spend time in wild nature too, and if you sit quietly with plants they can have things to tell you. But you must be quiet, and you must wait. On the Piano Grande in the Sibillini National Park I was drawn to work with the spelt stems, their vigour and elegance was captivating, but also a sense of something I did not understand, and which led me on, and to listen, to hear with my drawing, with my hands.
Notes from sketchbook made when tuning in: Like many hearts made of moss and air
Sky sculpted, sky roads, sky raven comes down
L’Arte, la porta per il divino
the coloured band of indefinable, unknowable colour which hovers
the air of colours, coloured air, sun arms, cows full of flowers
dreams of looking for, and finding, pastel-coloured keys in the landscape
Tiny grasses, tiny seeds, pointy-nosed falsetto tiny bees; hot sun, millions of flowers in every direction; trees in thick green clotting the valleys, threadbare on hills;
spider thread loose on my bag; the squeaky songs of parent birds, the drowning sounds of warning; the crickets close come to sing now I am still and silent; the blue-violets salvia and the pale-washed pinks white sun balanced daisy; the fat-budded orchid; the legume with pink crown perfection growing here by the trillion an eternity of pinkness flung down
Thanks to Andrew McDouall for the photographs above.
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Drawings made by tuning in, by listening, drawing with eyes closed…. (and artist photos)
