I've been away to other shores than Spurn's. The school holidays always disrupt the normal work pattern and things have to be fitted in differently or put aside for a while. Since my week at Farfield I've put Spurn things aside and I realise I haven't posted anything here. It doesn't mean that I'm not thinking about it all though: I carry it with me wherever I go.
I want to take a step back and show a little of what happened to Cloth #2 before I started constructing it at Farfield.
Back in June when I was unwrapping rust bundles and discovering the marks that had been made on cloth by the rusty groynes, the base cloth for cloth #2 had its first experience of Spurn.
This long piece of linen (actually several pieces joined together) is long enough to hang in the tall lighthouse room half way up the building: approximately an 8 or 10 metre drop. Although this piece of cloth forms the base to bring together the marked and dyed fabrics I wanted it to take on something of the place itself. I wanted it to get salty and sandy and to experience the place in the way that the fabric that had spent time wrapped and submerged by the tides had.
I laid it out on the beach and allowed it to get wet in the waves. The water pushed it about and slowly it took on the shape of the leading edge of the waves in the way that the sand and debris is moved around and left wet in a curved line.
This long and seemingly large piece of fabric was suddenly dwarfed by the scale of the beach but its length and width seemed right in proportion to each other: a long thin strip being quite appropriate to this drawn out fragment of land with its strips of land/sea interface.
The patterns in the sand left by water as well as the patterns of the water itself have really grabbed me and given a focus to my sketchbook work. These both present their own challenges for drawing: the water is constantly moving and, although the sand is static when I can see it, the ripples are part of such expansive areas.
On my last visit I experimented with a borrowed camera and took some little movie sequences of both. There was a keen wind that kept the surface of the water lying on the beach moving.
I've never tried adding movies to a blog post before and I suspect they might be too large so the other ones are here, here and here. The last and longest one was taken walking across the beach looking at the ripple marks in the sand as I walked, approaching the sea. It wobbles a bit in places but I think it shows the scale of things well, from the detail of small ripples to the expanse of water and sand stretching away.
I started to experiment with how I can create textures based on the ripples for print. I'm developing drawings with pen into ones using stitch:
The wind is still blowing fiercely from the west but the rain has gone and there is bright blue sky between fast moving clouds (for now...). The sun reflects off the sea turning it to liquid silver. The waves on the Humber side (usually the calmer side of the spit) are relentless and the estuary is full of dancing white horses. There are all sorts of greens mixed in with the browns of the water, all with constantly moving cloud shadows.
Nothing stays the same here for any length of time. It is difficult to know which direction to look in, what to focus on: there is so much going on.
The constant change means difficulties for drawing. How can I capture this movement and change?
