Drifting over Lake Sevan

Raiding my old photos I'd forgotten about whilst obsessing over strange Soviet Architecture - there's old and new here from a beautiful day out I had to Lake Sevan, Armenia, many years ago now...

I removed the poem that was up before too as I decided it wasn't very good!

Krestovsky Pereval Belvedere

I've finally found out what this strange viewing platform I stumbled upon when getting a marshrutka up the Georgian Military Highway to Kazbegi is. It was built in 1983 to celebrate Russo-Georgian friendship. The view was rather spectacular too...

On the same roadtrip I was also fascinated by this building that I liked to imagine was a church for lost horses - turns out it is an abandoned holiday camp that is now used by monks...

The Secret Sounds of Spores

Wonderful art project recently installed in an Edinburgh gallery. Thanks to Astrid for this one! I always like a good invisible part of mushroom and xylophone combo...

Secret Sounds of Spores, Inspace from The Amazing Rolo on Vimeo.

The root bridges of Cherrapunji

Every now and again I come across something that appeals to me so directly that my eyes widen and a huge smile spreads across my face. The people of Cherrapunji in India have nurtured these bridges for hundreds of years. They are not woven branches but actual tree roots that are still alive and growing, adding further strength with each year. In a region trouble by floods these bridges are stronger that if they were made of other materials and not growing directly from the ground. The skill of nurturing them is handed down through generations as it takes over a decade to grow a new bridge. It is thought some of them are up to 500 years old! There's amazing footage of them on the recent BBC Human Planet series in the rivers episode if you can track it down. Beautiful, beautiful...

Rambling notes - story left in mud 2004

Post-It of the day - Cawsand 2003

Eden Project Cafe Exhibition

My job really is cool... Created over the last week by me and the lovely population of St Austell...

The oldest sweetshop in England and Grimwith Reservoir

I took this photo late 2009 when I was writer for the 60th anniversary of the Yorkshire Dales National Park and was staying in the really lovely Pateley Bridge running workshops up at Scarhouse Reservoir (we went story hunting in the ruined dam builders' village - super fun). One of the best shop windows ever (rivalled by the next door vintage jewellery shop full of black pearls and opals with diamonds)...

I also ran workshops at Grimwith Reservoir for this project, where there was a particularly good sci-fi water level measuring structure...

Here's the poem I was commissioned to write as part of the project - I'm dying to tweak it now over a year on, but I'm still really pleased with the atmosphere...



Grimwith Reservoir.


The day started with small noises.

Birds later
But first it was whispers -
Echoes bubbling through still water
Breaking pools of distant shine
Like rings of misplaced mirror

Where the hills paddled
In bruised paintings smeared
A reflected landscape of
Shadows calling out from under water,
Floating round discarded buildings
They used to know.
They asked in gentle darkness
Remember me…

I stared as birds flew against the wind
Like waves going backwards
To where the dam curved in a horseshoe
Daring them to break through.

It held so much in darkened stone -
Bled strength into the water.

Inky waves of peat
The colour of brown bottles
Broke against the edge
Of torn rocks that were a subtle flood
Spilling like fallen crows
To stare back at mourning ferns
Whose greenery
Had been stolen by frost -
Turned toffee and burnt sugar
Before anyone could notice
The change

The landscape took
And gave back
A lot around here -

Fed the shore
To splatter then reveal
A rocky junkyard of nostalgia
Through low water -
A refuge for discarded memories of
The flooded world below.

Maybe the barn would protect them?
Its heather-netted roof lay
As if a blanket gift from
Echoed material
Which sat in patchy swarms
On distant hills
It burnt in invisible fire -
Spindles of smoke drifting to the sky
In forgotten clouds
Left to darken as
The rain drew near.

Other clouds just hovered
A second sea of mist
Above the coolly steaming water.
They would lift later –
Reveal another world of
Secret inlets melting into
Lost hills…
It was strange to think how long ago
They had been full of people.
Changing colours show imprints
Of settlements as well as different plants:
A staggered chain of sheep
Like misplaced dirty pearls
Of wool
Could each have been a child.

(Hidden bird song now)

I tripped through puddles
Lying as if carved out by giant raindrops
To smile open mouthed at the moving sky.
Its light could change this place in seconds -
Send the water from darkest purple
To swimming pool
Jeweled turquoise
Flecked gold with sparkled sunshine
And imagined boats
Skimming the surface
Like flat stones gently thrown.

They warmed up shivering folds
Of water.

Held my gaze -
Took it out across the reservoir
Here shining like torn clingfilm
Sliced with silver.
The dam was straight now.
Stared back at me
Before dissolving through the landscape.
It just left its sci-fi tower
Ignoring me and quietly measuring

Every
Single
Drop.

Ruined rollercoaster of the day - Six Flags Louisiana

Another abandoned theme park in Louisiana - it seems to be a hotbed of them really. I need to take a trip... Six Flags was dramatically flooded during Katrina - the photos are quite powerful in terms of the post storm apocalyptic landscape... I like how the rollercoasters look like sea monsters - like they've come to life in their destruction and are now free to swim around and guard their domain...

Next week at the new Eden Project Cafe, St Austell

If anyone happens to be in St Austell (Cornwall) next week pop on in to the fabulous new cafe, run by the Eden Project, where I will be running 7 days of drop in workshops (from Monday 10-4)for adults and children alike. You will be creating a 3d self-portrait to populate the strange secret history/old photo/cabinet of curiosities/embroidered diorama world I am making for their display cabinets. It should be fun and the food is v good and v reasonable! Click here to read more about this great new community space!

Mist fishing in the Atacama

In the driest place on earth people cast nets into the sky, catching water from lost sea mist like strange spiders weaving webs for dew, like sky fisherman or farmers of the unseen - harvesting and milking water though it does not rain. Okay so it's actually just a very clever and practical way of collecting water where it seems there isn't any, but I can't help but romanticise it - mist fishing! Tis too perfect...

Aunt Aggie's Boneyard

I've been meaning to write about this long vanished place in Lake City Florida for some time, but it's my recent musings on memory and ghosts, and how these things exist around us and how we acknowledge this, that made me think again of Aunt Aggie's Boneyard.

Aunt Aggie built her garden out of animal bones, making trellises and strange structures to create a lot of the shapes familiar in a garden of plants. It was well visited in the early 20th century and people used to come and visit and write their names on the bones. Everything I have read about this place suggests that people were never scared by its macabre strangeness - yes except for one human skull hanging they were all animal bones, and Aunt Aggie was a good Christian which would have comforted some, but I still find it interesting that a garden of bones was a place of delight and rest, not fear. Maybe it was Aunt Aggie's belief and desire to create something beautiful that rubbed off on them - she made visitors bouquets, told stories and fortunes - she had created her own bit of magic and opened it up for the rest of the world.

This makes me think of how the feelings of those who create a place can somehow be absorbed by that place. That like the idea of memories floating all around us, feelings and intentions could work in the same way - inhabit the air with an emotion, good or bad, that we pick up on. I have certainly been in seemingly pretty places that have felt sad and disturbing, yet here is a garden of bones that was calm and delightful - a place for magic and fondness.

I also love how she had a small homemade natural history museum with bottled snakes and alligators amongst other things. Perhaps along with the general fascination with such things, there is an appeal in that this was a personal collection - the whole garden is an archive in a way of one woman's dreams and thoughts, and I think there is an inherent intimate appeal in being let in to such places. As my friends know I am fascinated by monumental versus personal history - in theory as well as in terms of objects and monuments themselves. With a monument we are told represents an important event, our experience of the memories of that event is always mediated by someone's idea of what we should feel about something - it is difficult to have a truly personal experience of it. With something like Aggie's boneyard visitors have access to a personal vision - a monument to real memories (why I think Wilfred Owen's war poetry is a much better monument than the generic war memorials in every English village. Their power is in their words, the names of the dead listed, not the stone structure - if they did not have those names written on them, that personal touch, their power would be diminished) - and I would argue it is these personal monuments that memory really is contained in and is more accessible to all - it can be felt.

So long live eccentric gardens, outsider architecture, personal collections and archives, diaries and all personal visions that could never be created by a mediator. There is a wonderful power in the architecture of homemade.

Ghosts deserve art too!

Whilst planning the Car Boot Museum's American debut for this autumn I've become obsessed with the idea of who the audience can be - with a project as flexible and evolving as this who are we creating it for? The plan at the moment is for a tour starting in Nashville and somehow going through New Orleans incorporating house shows, but a huge chunk of it will also be made up of impromptu stops along the way at any place that looks interesting, whether people are present or not. In places where there is no traditional art audience, is it art for its own sake, art for me and Elle, or art for something else entirely...?

I then (obviously... ha!) began to think about memories and ghosts. Both these things always influence my work, but is there a way to make them part of the creative process - my work is often collaborative with strangers - a way I could bring the ghosts and memories into it too to work with us? As we collect and create work to add to the museum as we go could we become almost ghost curators of lost memories? Search out the hidden for the hidden - creatively bring to life things we can never see or prove?

I'm obsessed with the outer realms of physics and its theories of reality. I don't pretend to fully understand them, but I don't think that negates the creative possibilities they open up. One theory states that as information can't be lost, even into a black hole, reality could essentially function as a hologram does, made up of information projected from the edges of space. I know I am hugely simplifying this theory, but if we accept the premise that information can't be lost, and visually think about the idea of a hologram, then in theory all information could be constantly floating around us and for me this includes memories - they are things that have happened - become information in the moment the action occurs that creates them. I like the idea that this could therefore work for people too - we are our experiences to an extent and therefore a collection of information that can't be lost. Could this be a new definition for what a ghost is? I know that this theory was never meant as a justification for the possibility of the existence of ghosts, but the nice thing about interpreting things creatively is that for my purposes it can be. If these ghosts of disembodied memories cannot be lost the logical conclusion is that they are everywhere. Therefore wherever the Car Boot Museum stops, even if there are no people around, there are memory ghosts. I like the idea that they could therefore become our audience, collaborators and co-curators of the places we visit; that we can create work with them, film invisible interactions, bring to visible "life" their memories as we go on our way.

In this way we could also become archaeologists of memories. Archaeologists look for physical artifacts to explain the past through physical activity in digging etc. I ran a creative workshop last year where to discover the past of a school grounds we dug up the back of the playing field. We found many objects that could illustrate the known history of the school - i.e. we found lots of bricks and we knew it was built on an old brick works - but what fascinated me was how we then took these objects and created stories and poems around them and the world that was brought to life by the children became not the known history but their own imaginary interpretation leading to a realm of memories. I have always wanted to discover an unknown ancient creature (preferably a dinosaur due to my general fixation!) and archaeologists constantly get the opportunity to do this, whether it's a new dinosaur like the recent one-fingered veloceraptor relative discovered in China, or the full mammoth skeleton found in November in New Mexico. But could memory function in the same way - can I creatively excavate a place to bring its memories to life, therefore having a chance to discover my own lost world?

My other pet outer physics theory of reality is the sci-fi fave of parallel worlds. It sounds ridiculous, but there are physicists who believe that theoretically every action performed splits reality so that there are an infinite number of different realities functioning at any one time. It's just we can't see them. But part of what fascinates me about this is again the idea that therefore these different realities, and the memories of them that presumably again can't be lost, are existing invisibly all around us. We can never "know" them in the traditional sense of what we expect from reality, i.e. physical experience (unless we are in that other reality, but we wouldn't be conscious of that...), but that doesn't mean that creatively there isn't the opportunity to bring them to life by exploring the hidden memories and stories within a place. Again I am thinking the Car Boot Museum could try and seek them out. I also think this ties with our original thinking about the Mnemosyne Atlas and the physical gaps in the displaying of images that the mind fills in with its own interpretations, I think obviously partly fueled by memory...

So, I am waffling now... but though the parts of the project where we stop in the middle of nowhere might seem empty of collaborators and viewers, I'm pretty sure this is not the case. After all... ghosts deserve art too!

Memories are waking dreams and dreams are sleeping memories

The ruins of Lincoln Beach - dream rollercoasters and the appeal of abandonment

I've been meaning to post on the wonder that is the ruins of Lincoln Beach amusement park near New Orleans, ever since Elle's guidance and my own obsessions led to my spending hours researching it. And then this week, again partly due to the delight that is reading Rebecca Solnit's "A Field Guide to Getting Lost", it seemed like the time to post it.

I have always been obsessed with the magic of ruins - the inherent power of them on an intuitive emotional level that brings them into the realms of the imaginary rather than the physical reality that they are standing before you. I have often thought this could be because they speak of how we perceive our world in dreams - how here is a physical embodiment in our "real" world that actually belongs to the personal realms of how places can be in our dreams. In this way ruined theme parks are particularly powerful for me as their abandonment without demolition somehow speaks of a world of lost memories - a representation of days out we haven't had, a realm of play left for the amusement of ghosts - that these ghosts somehow represent the playing of childhood we have left behind. On a recent school project with six year olds we invented imaginary friends and took these invisible creatures on a day out to the woods. I asked the children to then create what their new friends would like to do on their day out and we immediately began to build rollercoasters of twigs and leaves. It was like these bodiless creatures began to inhabit the making corporeal of what we would rather be doing than being at school - that somehow again there was a magic to theme parks. And when the day was over we left these woodland rollercoasters and fairground rides to decay at their own rate in the woods. Days later the children still talked of what their imaginary friends were doing there - as if these places were taking on a life of their own as entropy pulled them back down to mud and leaf pulp.

In her chapter entitled Abandon, Solnit says:
"A city is built to resemble a conscious mind, a network that can calculate, administrate, manufacture. Ruins become the unconscious of a city, its memory, unknown, darkness, lost lands, and in this truly bring it to life. With ruins a city springs free of its plans into something as intricate as life, something that can be explored but perhaps not mapped. This is the same transmutation spoken of in fairy tales when statues and toys and animals become human, though they come to life and with ruin a city comes to death, but a generative death like the corpse that feeds flowers."

I think there is an inherent danger in the romanticisation of ruins that we forget the damage the decay of a city can wreck on its inhabitants, for example an arguably middle class preoccupation with urban exploring in the economic war zone that is the ruins of contemporary Detroit, but at the same time I think it is impossible to ignore that whatever they symbolise and physically represent, ever since the documentation of intuitive responses to ruins began in the 18th century with the Romantic poets, their appeal as a realm of poetry and dreams is indisputable. I was so pleased to read Solnit's comparison to fairy tales as I think it is in their ability to transmute reality into the realm of communication inherent in our historical folk psyche that their power could lie. That maybe there is something redemptive in how they communicate and that maybe rather than inconsiderate, ruins as a site of exploration and play is where they can become regenerative; where as the inspiration of art and dream-like ways of thinking they can open up a deeper communication between place and the people that create and pass through its memories. I think this can be seen in the playful scribbled interventions bringing lightness to the melancholy of the other photos posted - that the childlike defiance is the true spirit of such a place; is how it would like to be seen to exist now - I don't know... But I certainly think we should not underestimate the importance of the emotion of places - the power of how places make us feel as well as how they exist as a physical entity... I hope that with upcoming travel projects like The Car Boot Museum I will have the opportunity to discover the stories of these abandoned places of distant fun - the ghosts of days out past - for myself...

(Please note these are not my photos - I would of course credit them, but I cannot figure out their original sources!)

Hope lies in getting lost...

I'm currently reading Rebecca Solnit's wonderful "A Field Guide to Getting Lost" whilst ruminating on a current project with primary school children to create an imaginary version of Stoke-on-Trent. I could talk for hours about the flood of ideas its generating and theories of how to create personal transcendental experiences within familiar seemingly limiting environments, how to create hope through imagination in the everyday, but maybe that is for another time. For now it is a passage from Virginia Woolf's "To The Lighthouse" that spoke to me and created today's atmosphere of poignant optimism, so I thought I would write it here to speak elsewhere...:

"For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of - to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless... Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless."

Parkour was invented by Mary Poppins...

...not cool French boys.

I rest my case.

New old Soviet fairytale 1.

Sea of ground
Hovering towers made me realise
I did not know you could walk on water

Flicked stones - no echoes
Windows impenetrable
To acts of casual vandalism
Searching for princesses
I think you knew
That one was captured
Somewhere

Prison of grey sky reaching
Bridges with eyes
Too many to avoid
Unless blurred with aching distances

You walked
Legs like paper animation
A desert metropolis
Resting
With no foundations
For the upcoming years

Robots of concrete and glass
Are brittle
Crumble where mechanics can’t
They rely on each other
Grumble in static frustration
As you get away

Hair disguised as wires
Shoddy electricians job
It would have been dangerous
To take a guess
And climb braided ladders

Tears of flaked frustration
Glazed her eyes
In lens thin shards
If you’d only looked up
Second window, sixth floor, third building
As you walked away
On solid water

Like a fairground automaton
The vehicles weren’t ready to chase you

Somewhere in dreamland...

All I want for Christmas is trees that grow 1930s dresses and a carousel made of cake please.

Skateistan - to live and skate Kabul

I found this via my friend the lovely Elle

SKATEISTAN: TO LIVE AND SKATE KABUL from Diesel New Voices on Vimeo.

Such an amazing project... Never underestimate the potential future importance of giving kids a chance, however small, to reclaim their streets...

Supernova anthology is printed!

Sooooo exciting...

Aesthetica Creative Works Competition and Annual

I was recently very excited to discover my poem "Forgotten Holiday" was specially commended in the Aesthetica Creative Works competition. Here's the press release from the lovely folk at said organisation:

'Local Artist Beats off Competition from Thousands to be commended in the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition 2010.

Local artist, Alice Maddicott has been commended by the Judges in the Aesthetica Creative Works Competition 2010.

Aesthetica is a British-based art and culture publication that engages with contemporary art and culture both in the UK and internationally, combining dynamic content while exploring the best in emerging and established contemporary arts and design. Established in 2002, Aesthetica Magazine is stocked in WH Smith, prestigious locations such as Tate Modern, Serpentine and National Portrait Gallery, and in March 2008 the company added a second publication to its fold, the Aesthetica Annual.

The Aesthetica Creative Works Annual 2011 is available in galleries and independent retailers nationwide and will showcase the very best in new artistic and writing talent. The Annual has been comprised of the winning entries of the Aesthetica Annual Creative Works Competition, which received an astounding 4000 entries.

Now in its third year, the Competition attracts entries from across the world, and engages with 4000 writers and artists, providing them with the opportunity to showcase their work to Aesthetica’s readers, and Alice Maddicott will enjoy this exposure having been commended for their artistic contribution.

Aesthetica Editor and one of the judges, Cherie Federico:

“This year’s competition was incredible. I was thrilled by the quality of entries, equally, I had to make some tough decisions, and I spent a considerable amount of time contemplating each piece of work. Being commended in the Creative Works Competition is a fantastic achievement as there were only 50 commendations for each category.”

With three categories for artwork, poetry and fiction, the Aesthetica Competition was judged by Cherie Federico, Creative Writing lecturer Dr Kate North, and writer and editor Rachel Hazelwood. Cherie Federico says: “I think I can speak for all the judges when I say that the entries were of an extremely high calibre. We actually had to extend the judging period for a week and a half because whittling the works down proved a huge deliberation, but it’s really encouraged me to continue championing new talent and encouraging creativity in everyone. There was huge potential in so many of the works which Rachel, Kate and myself saw and I would like to urge all the competition entrants to continue developing their considerable talents.”'

You can buy the annual here

My Tree, My Community - The Eden Project

Photos of our tree decorating at The Eden Project. Our tree was inspired by talking to the elderly residents of Indian Queens at a tea party at the school. We were fascinated by the discovery that the majority of the guests at our tea party, instead of a traditional Christmas tree when they were younger, collected branches of holly to decorate. We wanted to recreate this idea by creating our own sparkling branches. We were also inspired by how, when asked to design their dream tree, many of the class created a tree that was dressed up as something else or looked alive. This led to the idea of dressing our tree up as a holly tree. We also wanted to incorporate Christmas memories and stories, both of the class and of our guests at the tea party as we learned so many interesting things. Therefore inside our holly tree "clothes" there are fragments of stories, ideas and descriptions to act as a written memory museum of Christmas past and present - each leaf is a little book in which to share our discoveries. There is also a secret surprise if you look closely, really bringing our tree to life! Friendly Christmas tree monster anyone?

Thanks to everyone at The Eden Project, the super creative children and the lovely Miss Fugler at Indian Queens school.

The Telling-Grandon Scrapbook

I've been thinking a lot about scrapbooks recently. Partly to do with new projects I'm doing with friends such as the pen-pal work that will hopefully end up as part of The Car-Boot Museum, but also in terms of images and memory and how we organise these things - the invisible lines that link images together and trigger thoughts that could be completely different to the image displayed. I like the idea that everything is linked almost on an invisible washing line. Actually I really like washing lines as a display tool for words and images... But I digress!

The Telling-Grandon scrapbook is part of the Louisiana Digital Library - an amazing resource where you can browse hundreds of wonderful images. In the words of the library "The Telling-Grandon Scrapbook is a 28-page scrapbook/diary containing photographs and ephemera collected by an Evanston, Illinois group during a visit by train to the New Orleans Carnival of 1903. The New Orleans section includes brief references to Begue�s Restaurant, Fabacher's Restaurant, Christ Church, Metairie Cemetery, St. Roch Cemetery, Tulane University, the French Opera, the U.S. Mint, the Young Men's Gymnastic Club, U.S. and French battleships in port, Royal Street, the French Market, and the Rex and Proteus parades. While the scrapbook has no single author, several of the entries are signed by individuals within the group. Two of the more prominent among these were an Irving Telling and Willie Grandon; thus the title of the collection, Telling-Grandon."

I am fascinated by diaries as well as scrap books and the Telling-Grandon is a rare chance to see text as well as archive images. I also love the atmosphere of the photos - the creepy carnival outfits to the old balconied buildings that really remind me of Tbilisi! Here are a few to look at, and you can look for yourself here

Tree house of the day... The Chene-Chapelle

... and it's also a wooden church! I am happy. The Chene-Chapelle in Allouville France is located in an oak tree over 1000 years old. Truly beautiful...



I have a new book on treehouses of the world I bought whilst working at The Eden Project yesterday. Perfect accompaniment to chilli and lime chocolate and Saturday afternon tea...
In other treehouse news I am thrilled to discover that the supreme court has saved this fabulous treehouse in Clinton, Mississippi. Read more at www.saveourtreehouse.com