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.
I started stitching this morning. I have rather a lot of it to do. Of course I knew this, but it is only in actually starting the process and spending a good part of today on it that it is clear just how long it will take me to do it all!
The stitches serve two purposes: they fix the silk pieces to the felt and they add texture and marks to those already in the silk. They can help to blend the different pieces together and accentuate certain areas. I am purposefully keeping some of the creases in the silk as the reflective qualities of these are what give a similar feel to the reflection of water and wet sand. My stitches can help to fix these in place and add reflective qualities of their own. In placing the stitches I am responding to the marks on the silk, using the boundaries of colour already there and thinking about how material is sorted and arranged on the beach.
Having undone the bundle I had left on one of the groyne bolts on my last visit I prepared to leave some more to mature for next time. I'm trying to take marks from Spurn itself, using things that are part of the place. Because Spurn is a Nature Reserve my work has to have no impact at all on the place. This means that I can't pick leaves from the sea buckthorn to dye with or anything else along those lines.
The rusty metal that I am finding both on the groynes and lying around on the beach is part of the make-up of the place. Man-made structures are very much part of Spurn's history and the things that are washed up on the beach are as much part of what Spurn is today as the sand, pebbles, seaweed and plants (whether we like it or not!). If it wasn't for these additions then the spit probably wouldn't be in the form it is now.
If I can use these things to make meaningful marks on paper and cloth, with little use of other materials then I feel I am really taking something from the place, making something of the place without any negative impact.
I'm using the sea water as an agent to help me too. I do find that the addition of tea really helps transfer marks from the rusty metal onto paper and cloth (see here for an explanation) so I am using that to help, even though that isn't something that occurs here - I have found a few old tea bags in amongst the other flotsam and jetsam, so maybe that justifies that one! A mixture of sea water and tea from my flask to wet the fabric before wrapping it will hopefully help get things off to a good start and then they will be submerged twice a day by the North sea.
