colva's aeronautical centenary

100 years ago this coming weekend, in April 1912, four days after the RMS Titanic hit an iceberg and three days after Harriet Quimby became the first woman to cross the English Channel by aeroplane, Denys Corbett Wilson - courtesy first of a buffeting wind that caused him to drop his compass overboard, necessitating a night's stay in Almeley, near Hereford, and second of taking advantage of this unscheduled stop to do some maintenance on his engine, filling it when he did so with the wrong grade of castor oil - found himself about half an hour into his flight from Almeley with a badly misfiring engine and in pressing need of a flat spot to make an emergency landing. Unfortunately, at that moment he was flying over the hills of Radnorshire where flat spots are a rarity, but nevertheless managed to touch down in a reasonably level field ('the only level bit of ground for miles, only 120 yards long and about 40 wide') in the remote hamlet of Colva, where the plane stayed for three days, awaiting Corbett Wilson's French engineer, Gaston Vial, to arrive and get it back into flying order. If Corbett Wilson had appeared in the Les aviateurs du monde series of postcards that were produced around this time, this - Corbett Wilson taking off from Colva just after dawn on the 21st, watched by the hundreds of onlookers who had come from far and wide before dawn to see this amazing sight - is what it might have looked like.

30 henry jekyll's partial statement of the case

april 2012
112mm x 194mm
hand-sewn booklet with wrappers
14 pages

Henry Jekyll's Full Statement of the Case, chapter 10 of Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, is here divided, re-aligned, cropped and re-presented as a fractured and jittery account of his hubristic adventure that nevertheless – thanks entirely to Stevenson's clear and pungent phrasing – still clearly transmits his horrific journey into an irreparably parted self. Aligned to left and right but gapped between, the account is printed as two columns to be read across, though a reading down the columns is also possible. The rather sinister character on the cover of the booklet I found in Home Words for Heart and Hearth – a pious book dating from the same year that Robert Louis Stevenson wrote Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885), filled with prayers, moralising stories and sermons and, best of all, engravings of various church worthies of the day. And a seedy-looking bunch they are too. There was some stiff competition for the cover, but in the end it was Dr. Jackson, the Late Bishop of London, who won out.

33 disuse is bad for the machine

january 2012
hand-sewn booklet
124mm x 164mm
10 pages

The nine commandments laid down for the correct usage of 'His Master's Voice' products on a 1920s 78rpm record sleeve, among them: 'Don't wind spring too tightly'; 'Don't interfere with regulator unless an adjustment is necessary'; 'Avoid the slightest injury to the Mica Diaphragm', and – gnomically if now inscrutably – 'Keep leathers which operate on governor friction plate well oiled', have a hectoring quality which stems from the manner of their listing, beginning with Rule Number 1: 'Disuse is bad for the machine'. To me, this implied a proto-Orwellian world (though in time and vision it comes closer to the Moloch Machine and its ceaselessly gaping maw in Fritz Lang's Metropolis), with the suggestion of people as slaves to the requirements of machinery finding ready parallels in our own time. The short texts within, taking their cue from the 'His Master's Voice' commandments, are leashed neither to time nor place, making the writing hard to pin down, though its tone is characterised by a mournful, impotent regret at possibilities lost. The booklet is thin and deliberately cheap-looking, implying scarcity of resources in tawdry, mass-produced times.

31 hill pond

march 11

154mm x 184mm

18 pages

What started out as 'sixteen photographs' (see below) transmuted into 'hill pond', without any photographs, which became ever less necessary to the project. In fact, the booklet - descriptions of a winter of visits to a hill pond about 40 minutes' walk away, from October 30th to to the first day of skylark song on the hill, on February 12th - underwent a process of ever greater simplification. Its concessions to decoration are now limited to its pale blue-green wrapper that references the colour of a lichen that I regularly found on my walks, and the colour of the title itself, that of dark winter heather. Full stops in the seventeen pieces of writing somehow went missing along the way too, replaced instead by gaps in the text, which hopefully have the function of regulating the pace at which they can be read. Unsurprisingly, these descriptions are as much about the sky and the wind as they are about the pond. Reading them again I am transported entirely to the moments of their birth, to certain patterns of cloud or conditions of light, as well as the curious newt that settled itself in a couple of inches away and watched me as I crouched by the pond to write the very first piece and a chill settled in from that morning's rain.

artesian

The third issue of Artesian, from Go Together Press, is now out and is a beautiful addition to the series. Following issues based around Earth and Water, its theme is Time, and features writing by John Berger, Jan Svankmajer, Ry Cooder, Bill Morrison and Tilda Swinton, among others. I have two pieces included, one a reflection on rock painting, the other a poem on Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence.

buds

Andrew Morrison of Two Wood Press recently printed up 40 copies of this lovely letterpress and woodcut print. The print was a collaboration - the words are mine from a series of 2009 garden writings, the woodcuts his. The print measures roughly 37cm x 59cm and the colour of the twigs in the print is actually more of a velvety taupe than this reproduction shows. There are copies spare so do get in touch if you are interested in one.

31 sixteen photographs

Despite reasonable assumptions based on its title, there are in fact no photographs in this one (well, maybe one, at the end), which is instead made up of a number of descriptions of the same place - a small hill pond about 40 minutes walk away which I have been visiting at different times and in different weathers over the past six weeks or so. After a while, the exercise - which started out through a dissatisfaction with both the ease and limitations of photography - moved into the area of questions about originality and repetition in a series of written descriptions, considerations which I am still working through. The pieces also serve as a meditation on what photography cannot show.

29 shepherd in the trees

april 2010

8 page hand-stitched booklet sealed with thistle paper

11 photographs in plant paper wrapper

The phenomenon of 'spirit photography', arising during the 1860s and lasting well into the twentieth century, was formed through the combination of photographic practitioners, intoxicated with the possibilities of the new medium - as well as the money-making opportunities it presented - eager to suggest that they could indeed fix spiritual emanations on film, and a credulous public, whose amazement at the possibilities of fixing images at all led them to desire the camera to see what they no longer could. Many were comforted in their grief; just as many were sceptical.

However, a core of cases remain in which the photographers were seeking neither fame nor pecuniary gain, but who felt that by chance they had come across something that revealed an uncanny and hitherto hidden mystery of life. One of the most interesting of these men was Alan Broadrick, parson of the New Forest parish of Bramshaw between 1896-1904, and whose archive of notes, an intermittent diary and a large photographic album is now held in Lyndhurst's Museum of New Forest Life.

In Broadrick's case the question is not so much the veracity of the pictures - the original silver-gelatin photographs are beyond doubt genuine and bear no traces of having been tampered with - but rather his interpretation of their contents. For he believed that the photographs showed figures of good and evil among us, attending on our every move.

Shepherd in the Trees: A Bramshaw Parson presents excerpts from Broadrick's diary, and reproduces photographs from the original album that so stimulated his imagination.

32 a bestiary

april 2010

in progress

The diaries of William Greenwood, 7^th Earl of Monmouth (1687-1731), a keen amateur of the natural sciences, are a remarkable source for some of the more outlandish theories and experiments of his day. In 1730 he describes how, ‘being desirous of improving my nocturnall sight’, he rubbed his eyelids and chest twice daily with an unguent derived from a boiled-up owl. He confessed that ‘the ointment do smelle so ranke that I fear me the attentions of pie-dogs of the shire,’ adding that he masked the odour to some degree with the addition of lavender water. No improvement to his night vision seems to have been effected however, and the experiment is not mentioned after its initial two weeks. The Earl died the following year from a chill caught in an experiment in which he was engaged with testing the efficacy of whale grease as a barrier to the cold.

28 la vallée des merveilles

august 09

148mm x 210mm

poems inside flapped pocket with blind embossing

The thousands of rock engravings that surround Mt Bégo, in the Vallée des Merveilles in south-eastern France, are a comparative rarity in that, rather than being produced by a prehistoric hunter-gathering community, instead come from Bronze Age farmers; hence the occurrence in the engravings of metal implements such as ploughs and daggers. I have tried to capture this difference in emphasis in the two poems enclosed here, La Vallée des Merveilles and La Voie Sacrée. The cover design is a blind embossing of one of the engravings from the area.

27 scuggery or 'I wish I had a sister like Ruth'

august 09

120mm x 180mm

36 pages

24 copies

A piece occasioned by the chance find of the 1917 'Chatterbox' annual of stories for schoolchildren. Reading a number of its tales I had the impression that I was actually reading a collection of themes, to which the characters were more or less incidental. Most feature a challenge to a boy or girl's mettle, whether this arrives in the form of adapting to a new school, rescuing a sleepwalker, or journeying through the Canadian muskeg. Hence Scuggery is collated from the original writings entirely on the basis of themes, to which place, situation, character and gender are fully interchangeable.

flowers (cards)

march 09

55mm x 76mm

printed wrapper, silk flowers

Ten of the flowers that I wrote about in Colva Books 17, Flowers, appeared as embroidered silk flowers that were given away with Wix's Kensitas cigarettes in 1934-35. As these silks are still readily available I printed up a few of their folders with my own text replacing the botanical history and cultural notes that appeared in the originals and slipped the silks inside.