My secret garden 2004

Dream Tbilisi

Tbilisi appeared last night ringed with water. And as I arrived the city wove itself around me more beautiful than any I had seen before – the buildings grew out of the ground in pastel shades as if so old they were part of the earth they rested on. Waited. I got on the monorail that led around my head, dripped down to the water and threaded together the parts that made this place. The areas were scrunched up like discarded handfuls of paper – squashed into corners or left on the ground as an afterthought. Old and accidental this place had grown to look more natural than any I had ever seen. My eyes shivered.

Poem when I was 25...

You had a kite.
And it blew
in the wind ‘til pulled out
the sky in ribbons frayed
around the edges I thought I saw things try and struggle out.
They were in different colours and
fell gently.

I lay down by your feet.
Tried to catch the sounds they made
footprints
marked around you in spilled shudders.

I’d circled you in grass by the time you moved away.
Left the objects fallen
on the ground.

We looked after you.
Made noises too quiet.
Quivers.
Dropping.

Cawsand post-its

An alphabet of ivy

Found photo and imaginary alphabet. Story. 2008.

The future of nostalgia.

"I realised that nostalgia goes beyond individual psychology. At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time - the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against a modern idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to the irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition." Svetlana Boym in "The Future of Nostalgia".

I've been rereading the beautiful book this quote is taken from recently and thinking more about whether it is a true original almost medical definition of nostalgia that influences my work as much as a sense of memory. Can dealing with memory in relation to place actually be detached from nostalgia when the two are nearly etymologically linked (it literally translates as longing for home). I have always been interested in the crossover between dreams and reality - echoes that act almost as ghosts of our past swimming around us as we go about the everyday - and in the 17th century when the term nostalgia was first coined, sufferers were said to confuse the real and the imaginary, the past with the present and were even more likely to see ghosts, as if nostalgia was what opened up this inner layer of human history and consciousness. Could nostlagia be the key to unlocking the poetic quality of making sense of our memories and the past - these days nostalgia is seen as something quaint and often kitsch (especially in relation to communism - something I am particularly interested in), but perhaps by restoring it to its original status as serious condition we can begin to unravel the layers of history that confuse us - the personal rather than collective memory that is reflective and Romantic as opposed to restorative with a claim to historical authority. I am often interested in souvenirs and personal mementos - esoteric collections and cabinets of curiosity. It is hard to make concrete sense of such objects as they are inherently caught up in a personal reflective life we cannot ever empirically prove, but I think these objects can still hold history - perhaps even create an atmosphere that in itself is relevant for what it hints at - the everyday life which is how we all experience history when it is the present, and is how we remember the grander historical events when we look back through our own memories - how the world was falling to pieces on the TV whilst we held our favourite mug or glanced at a broken toy in the corner of the room. It is the stories behind these things I seek to bring back in my work.

From Dorset to Berlin...

Torn up story and found graffitti 2008. Part of a series (some to be mounted on embroidered newspaper).

Memory notes...

I put a verison of this piece up when I first started this blog, but I just realised it was a cropped photo - here is the better original version...

Ethel Smith's hammond wonder ladies

Tico Tico...

Twirling treehouses...

Pattern by the wonderful illustrator Alice Stevenson based on my novel "We lay here slowly sinking." A version of which is soon available to buy as upholstery fabric (the company wanted a version without faces as apparently that is too creepy for chairs)!



Here is the version suitable for chairs...

Story tree for Port Eliot...

This told the story of a boy who lived and loved in a tree somewhat larger than this one - fragments of an imaginary journey all the more magnificent for how he gazed out above the real world, each moment held in an old paper luggage tag that had travelled to these places as if they had been smeared around his head till the thoughts left smudges like inked words for others to read once he'd left for somewhere more distant...

I miss Tbilisi...

The Mnemosyne Atlas

I've been thinking a lot about personal archives and how people connect images and ideas in their heads - how we make personal maps through our lives everyday. Thanks to the lovely Andy for this one...

By Brian Dillon copied from Frieze.com

"In 1879 the 13-year-old Aby Warburg, the eldest son of a wealthy Hamburg banking family, is said to have traded his birthright for a more lasting inheritance. Already convinced (despite parental objections) of his future as an art historian, he struck a deal with his younger brother Max, who would inherit the family business on condition that he agreed to supply the elder Warburg with as many books as he required. (Max later wrote: ‘I gave him what I must now admit was a very large blank cheque.’) When Warburg died in 1929, his library contained 60,000 volumes and had been transformed by his colleague Fritz Saxl from a private collection into a research institution. Four years later it was transplanted to London and became the Warburg Institute, now part of London University.

If his library was already the most eccentric of collections - organized not alphabetically or according to subject but by ‘elective affinities’, the secret intimacies that Warburg himself intuited between its volumes - its oddest offshoot is surely the massive and fragmentary constellation of images that Warburg, in the last five years of his life, obsessively tended and reorganized: the Mnemosyne Atlas. It is the strangest of art-historical artefacts: the kaleidoscopic image of the scholar’s enigmatic reordering of a lifetime’s meditation on the image. The Atlas, wrote Warburg, was ‘a ghost story for adults’: it invents a kind of phantomic science of the image, a ghost dance in which the most resonant gestures and expressions its creator had discovered in the course of his career return with a spooky insistence, suddenly cast into wholly new relationships.

In a sense, the Mnemosyne Atlas has never really existed, at least not in the form Warburg envisaged. At the time of his death it comprised 79 wooden panels, covered with black fabric, on which were pinned some 2,000 photographs from Warburg’s collection. The project was never completed, and only ever constituted a provisional version of its eventual incarnation in book form. 1 The panels themselves were lost when Warburg’s colleagues, fleeing Nazi Germany, relocated to London, and the images are now dispersed in the archives of the institute. Warburg’s final arrangement of the Atlas survives, however, as a series of 79 photographs. In reproductions these are often cropped to show only the black background and the luminous images, but the original photographs include the edges of the panels, beyond which can be glimpsed the shelves of Warburg’s library, so that you cannot fail to imagine the scholar himself at the centre of his grand photographic planetarium, setting the whole thing in fantastic motion as he searches for the proper arrangement of his fragmentary universe.

Warburg conceived of the art historian as a ‘necromancer’ who conjures up the art of the past to give it an enigmatic new life, a ‘strange figural floating’. 2 He was intrigued by the representation of movement, by the way in which the gestures of Classical bodies in motion survive into the art of the Renaissance and beyond, each image possessed by a particular ‘pathos formula’ which gives it a specific allure and is resurrected centuries later in similar attitudes and expressions. Obscurely linked by the ‘conductive medium’ of the black ground, human bodies flex and falter in an array of gestures that stretches from Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus (c. 1485) to the contemporary physique of a woman golfer, from medieval zodiacal figures to a 1920s advertisement for 4711 cologne. Zeppelins float in the darkness beneath ancient cosmological maps; the entire anachronistic discordia concors is dedicated to finding the most startling relationships between images that are worlds apart. The Atlas proposes an art of the in-between, what Warburg called the ‘iconology of the interval’. God, he famously declared, resides in the details; the inhuman presence that hovers in the darkness between these images is, says the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, ‘the dark demon of an unnamed science whose contours we are only today beginning to glimpse’. 3

It is perhaps fitting that the sturdy panels of Warburg’s unfinished project have vanished somewhere between Hamburg and London, evanesced into the dark drawers of the institute’s present archive. The notion of its essential immateriality, its existence as a pure phantasmagoria in the imagination of its author, is given a faint outline on the pages of the large hardback notebooks in which Warburg ceaselessly planned and revised its shape. The pencilled ghosts of absent images haunt these volumes’ notional arrangements of the actual material. With their blank squares and scrawled captions, they are the perverse mirror images of the textless patterns on the photographic plates, hastily sketched storyboards for a movie that only ever played in the mind of the scholar/director. Warburg, who was obsessed by the figure of Laocoön, the dying Trojan prince, seems to have conceived of art history according to an image from G. E. Lessing’s Laocoön (1766), in which the German writer describes the poetic and painterly depiction of mist: ‘it is used to render both the visible invisible and the invisible visible’. Gaze long enough at the dark screen of Mnemosyne and it is like looking at a ‘black’ cinema screen; as your eyes grow used to the dark, something comes to light: the screen itself, the empty but meaningful interval between images.

If there is a ghostly quality to the Mnemosyne Atlas, perhaps it resides in the odd amalgam of science and superstition that it shares with other works on the image and memory. It looks back to the taxonomic efforts of Charles Darwin to photograph the essences of human emotions, and forward to the memorial extravagance of Gerhard Richter’s Atlas (1962-ongoing). But it also brushes up against Walter Benjamin’s ‘aura’ and Siegfried Kracauer’s ‘monogram’: the memory-image that adheres to the last photograph of a loved one. Despite Warburg’s intense effort to bring the past into focus in the present, it appears to suggest that an anatomy of the image is only ever a science of spectres: an impression heightened by its sudden demise in 1929, as if Warburg had succeeded in freeze-framing European culture in a paradoxical pose of frenzied immobility, just before the continent was plunged into the terrible mass-mobilization that sent his colleagues into exile in 1933. Warburg turned the scholarly archive into a mobile (and moving) artwork, transforming, as Karl Kraus wrote of the true artist, a solution into an enigma.

1. Eventually published as Der Bilderatlas Mnemosyne, ed. Martin Warnke and Claudia Brink, Akademie Verlag, Berlin, 2000.
2. Philippe-Alain Michaud, Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion, trans. Sophie Hawkes, Zone Books, New York, 2004, p. 261.
3. Giorgio Agamben, ‘Aby Warburg and the Nameless Science’, in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1999, p. 90. "

Music City stories...

The dried trees got deep and dense, crackled where the water flowed. I thought the river would continue as a trickle, but it widened, grew faster, skipped round displaced bricks and large tin cans, made noises that grew louder. Made me realise that though I was in an unfamiliar place this could only be Nashville. Even the river was singing.
You see this city sucked in music. Like LA with actors, every waiter in Nashville was a musician. The city brought people here just to throw them all back out again, spilling failed songs from their fingertips. I think the trees caught these songs sometimes – snagged notes on their branches as they tried to get blown out of here, singing their way on the breeze to some bigger town with a bit more going on. They were too much part of Nashville though – the most recent layer of its history. The branches kept them still – humming softly like a wish tied there, always wondering if it would be fulfilled as I penetrated further through the city’s layers. I heard these notes tingling as I moved down the river – tremor as I passed in case I reached out and grabbed them, took them with me to its past or future. I trailed a stream of music through the water like a sodden peacock’s tail.

One day...

... I will have a rollercoaster wrapped round my house. Actually maybe I'd rather have a helter skelter round a tree with a house at the top with its own chair lift to the rest of my treehouse village. And a monorail. But this castle will do for a start - it's from 1895...

Crystal Palace for William

There was a palace here once. They say it was made of crystal. I still think of how it might have shone out over the city and let the whole sky be lighter. Cleared the blackened buildings with light not soapy water. Nothing could be more powerful at cleaning than light. I wonder if the bricks were tinted with sunshine those years. The palace didn’t last long. Burned to the ground. Must have got too hot in all that sunshine. It slipped down the road like a volcano made of molten glass. Not the ones that explode but just melting to the ground, it oozed glitter. Can’t have been big enough to cause that much damage, but I like the idea that the city could have been wiped out by light, have made its own Pompeii out of glass and sunshine.

Flying machines!

Extracts from "We lay here slowly sinking."

One day I got stuck. We were not that far from the village. There was a small wood that though only a few metres wide always felt like it was deep and dense. I felt a bit different here. That everything was not quite so easy. You went on ahead when I decided to climb higher. The tree was tall and wide with a hole that took up most of its middle. I crawled inside and sat still for a while looking out – I couldn’t really see around me as the bark was too dark and tight. I was quite happy hidden here, when I realised that things were watching me – small things lower than my level. I pushed my elbows to the side and scrambled upwards, but this hollow was higher than I thought. When my head poked out the top I could see the canopy of other trees and not where you had gone here. I called out and watched my voice trickle on a breeze caught up with dust and leaves. A few birds turned round, but though they soon flew off, I knew they weren’t taking my message to you. That would be ridiculous.
I waited all day for you to find me. Knew you wouldn’t leave me there. It was well into the dark time when I heard a soft noise and felt something pulling at my legs. I started thinking that it was probably a fox or badger nibbling away in the night. But it was a firm hand that grabbed my ankle – my arms shot upwards as I scraped down the splintered tunnel – felt my dress slip away – left it behind above my stretched out fingertips. You smiled as you saw me there, bleeding in my bra and full of small bits of wood. We stopped a while as you picked some of them out. Swung up the outside to fetch my vacant frock. Dad was furious, but no one would have guessed how things happened by the way I looked that night, slightly gleaming with my hair messed up. It was tender.

*

I saw you coming towards me and ran as fast as I could. When I landed on your chest I’d jumped a good five feet. You looked up slightly puzzled as I’d floored you. And as you held my eyes I pushed your hair back into the mud and kissed you quite a lot. It was for a long time that we lay here slowly sinking.
The wind stirred up and though there had been sun, it was leaves not rays of light that fell upon us. The warmth they gave was good though – softly knitted themselves together stuck down with dirt and water. I couldn’t wrap this round me, but as we moved or lay still, it did so with us. Stopped us getting cold. And if things landed on my back, beetles or pieces of wood, they did not feel heavy. All was light when we got entrenched in the ground. Felt like I was floating though my arms were wrapped around you. I hugged you ‘til we almost flew away.
It didn’t always happen like this. Sometimes you would find me. I’d be walking along a path and feel my feet slide under as you rugby tackled me. Scrambled forward with my arms ‘til I realised it must be you and turned my head, slightly smiling. You would kiss my cheek, and I would feel your hair stroke down my neck as your hands pushed me further. It always seemed like we were going further into the ground. That somehow it was part of us. I remember coming home and my little brother asking questions about how I’d got in such a state, while my parents ignored the fact or gave him a harsh look. I never tried to cover it up. I mean at first I didn’t notice what I looked like, then after a while, when I had, and guessed it probably looked like I’d been dragged through hedges, well then I liked to leave it. Felt like you were still with me in bits and pieces.

*

You liked to bring me things. They were hidden in your pockets – you were never too keen to have things on show. And sometimes I would only catch them for a little while – these gifts would fall from your fingertips like a dandelion feather – blow away from me as I kept missing them. I dived on the ground once for a small piece of paper – it was shaped like a house, and the rooms were cut out in silver and lines of pencil. I held it up against the sky and the trees in the distance – wanted to see where it fitted best. Would put it in my pocket knowing that view would be where it would end up, where, later, when I was washing up or sitting in my room, it would really be, outlined against the countryside.
This was one of the presents I could save. Others burst into flames before they could reach me. You liked to do that – wave them before my eyes before setting them ablaze with your lighter. I tried to guess what they’d been by the colours of their sparks. I don’t know what you added but green usually meant an animal, blue an object I could have held longer.
I kept them in a shoebox. The presents I rescued and bits of ash from the others. If I lift the lid off I can still hear the spluttering as they come to life. The sparks struggle to light up, but slowly things move apart and I can see how they all lined up in our landscape. Which hedge a paper bird rested on, or where in the river the swan used to swim. And somewhere, amongst trees and dampened sunshine, there is always the little house. Standing there, against my now rural bedroom wall. And I wonder if that’s where you are these days, whether that’s why I can never find you. That you haven’t gone away. Just stayed in the same place. It’s harder to get back to the same place sometimes. Places where stuff got left behind. You are in miniature amongst my paper views and blu-tac stains – stuck behind some green chipped paint.


I began to build places for you in return for these gifts. It seemed like something I’d be good at and the places I had found when roaming inspired me. You’d got a bit fed up with us nearly getting seen by people, and I thought that a den could hide us. I missed childhood den making too – the places created under sheets and chairs in the sitting room that could somehow feel like a whole new grown-up world. These were good places. I carried bundles of sticks a day ahead of you. Guessed where you might lead me next and quickly wove them into low branches or a muddy bank. It was good too you know, as I could leave supplies for us – a thermos of coffee or a couple of blankets, they’d sometimes go missing but it was worth the risk. It was easy to forget to keep warm, or that we weren’t as warm as we felt we were.
Sometimes I would wait. Come to the dens alone. I hung things from the trees. Bits of shiny paper and a triangle I’d once nicked from the school music box. There was a robin who I swear followed me for all the times he appeared to perch on it and swing in silver, or stay nearby and tap it with his beak ‘til it rang out. He almost looked as if he were posing.
I drew maps on the ground. Put a coin on the places we hid out – marked our treasure. I didn’t really think about how if someone were there reading the map, then I guess they would have already had to have found our dens. But there were other places. I’d built a kind of kingdom, and from my scribbles in the earth it was possible to work out more or less how it all fitted together.
They were mostly close together these dens. They were almost like small houses as they had roofs and doors. I spent many hours in them when you were not there. I don’t know what I was preparing for, but I felt that if I showed you them they would fall apart. Maybe you would get excited and trample them down, or just not like them – laugh at what I’d been working on for weeks now.
Although they were deep in the landscape we’d written ourselves, they seemed like mine. You did not belong in them. The objects I lay out in preparation for you lay unused. It was like they represented you – where you would have sat and what you would have done if you had been there. And they didn’t shout like you sometimes did. Maybe whispered occasionally, but mostly they just listened. Stayed still. You were everywhere but here in this landscape.
I wandered between these dens – sometimes visited more than one in a trip – did a quick tour, but they were often far apart and I liked to take my time – lie down and fall asleep looking at their wooded ceilings. One was quite near a road. It seemed silly to build one so close to noise and possible people, but when I stumbled through the gap in the hedge to this spot, there was nothing else I could do. I hardly had to build it at all as it sunk slightly into a wooded hillside and leaves fell down on drooped branches like a bead curtain. I’d always wanted one of those.
I was sat here reading a book and occasionally looking out once, when I heard a bike. This would have been normal but for the clatter and screech which I knew could only mean it was you. You used to tie tin cans to the back wheel – pull them up on your lap when you wanted a smooth journey, then, when you got bored, just let go – took your hands off the handlebars and lifted your feet over them. You grinned into the wind as they clattered in streamers of noise behind you.
I don’t think you could have known I was there, you never noticed other people if you were making noise and you liked to ride on your own. I had spied you once or twice riding round the car park by the old factory, or down a lane late on a Monday. It was like you’d found your own mobile disco as the cans danced in off beats around you. You never told me about these trips – your musical experiments. I wasn’t supposed to know about anything that happened to you when you were not with me. I wondered what would happen if you always were.


When you came round next I had seen you on the street two days before. The noises you made had got louder. Drums banged when I saw you there with your feet close to some bins – you liked to take the lids off – get someone to clash them together while you took a run up to kick the rest; stole steel crescendos that should have fallen dead like tin. Nothing could dampen you when you were like this. You strutted and shouted and your face was taken up with smiles. Couldn’t see anything but your pleasure swirling. You snatched out frustration ‘til it twirled and giggled into a new stave of bolts and thunder. The sky shuddered around you.
I walked past slowly. You should have seen me, yet I wanted you not to. Would have interrupted everyone and made me realise how I made things quiet. That if I opened my mouth it would be as if in a whisper – that would crawl out, move forward lethargically before falling. Thud. It was sods law it could only be loud as it slumped to the ground. Made a strange noise for you all to laugh at. You just liked to hear strange noises – would record them on your tape player to show me later. They sounded a little better when they made music.
I turned around when you were probably out of sight. Could see some movement but not what you did with it. Just the aftermath. The old ladies that walked up the road cursing what you found to do with your time. Had too much of it apparently. They’d had too little. Dogs didn’t like you either – got over excited then ran away. Squirrels sat and watched in the trees.

*

We practised stuff on each other. Raced downhill on our bikes or timed how long we could hold our breath; sometimes underwater, but that was especially hard and quite cold too. I didn’t always like getting wet. You were good at making catapults and bows and arrows. I don’t know whether you showed your friends this, as I guess they would have seen it as kind of immature – a relic from the childhoods they all pretended they’d never had. But I thought it was cool that you could do these things – I watched as bits of paper and stone were flung through the air – I didn’t look at where you were aiming, but at the motion that got them there. You loosened your body once you’d let go, spun slightly as your arm went limp and you jumped back a couple of times and smiled round at me. That’s the bit I liked best – I had no idea where anything landed.
I would bury my head in your tummy. Lift up your t-shirt and just stand there for a while with my cheek against your skin. It was soft and smelt warm. Of incense and the strange washing powder your mum must have used – it never varied – your clothes always smelled the same, almost too clean. I thought it funny that there were no traces of how you spent your days. How you could go home and no matter what the marks, if she took your clothes from you, then they would still smell as she had left them. I wonder if there was a comfort in this. That you were not growing up before her. Just staying the same in slightly larger sizes.
I slipped my arms around your waist and let my lips brush past, rest above the belt-loops of your jeans. My back started to ache from bending forward and I could feel you laughing – wondered what I was doing. Let me stay there quite a while, ‘til you realised I was just resting and pulled my head up. Grabbed it and pushed it against yours. You took your turn then. I felt you go under but you did not stay still as I had – you moved around and my skin prickled with hot breath – nipped a little as you caught it with the side of your teeth. I felt myself fall back to the ground – a sharp chill as you went further and my skin was let out to fresh air. And my eyes closed and I saw colours that danced like strange flames. I had not realised where you were going. Blew up into a fire storm and then the flames had gone. I was shaking in the damp leaves when I saw your face come up for me again. You tasted different, and held me. I rose a little quivering. You walked me to my door that night. Held me with your arms. I was dizzy ‘til morning.

Poem when I was 23...

14/1/02

I fell off the ceiling when I first saw you.
Been up there somewhere, collecting cobwebs - making patterns
in their sticky snow.
And you almost caught me.
I think I felt your fingers
brush the t-shirt that hung around my neck
by old pearls.
They broke when I landed. Scattered
on the stone and woven thread.
Bare.
I looked up and you were almost there.
Held my gaze with the turn of
your head as you walked past the wall
I lay by.

I stayed for a while.
Thought you'd come back and pull me
up with hands.
Did it myself, by and by.
Still smiling. Smiling.
Still.

Ryugyong Hotel, North Korea

Apparently considered by many to be the ugliest building in the world I fear I'm in the minority by finding the Ryugyong hotel in Pyongyang quite beautiful. The first time I saw it I was working for an architectural charity and on the back of a magazine there was an advert for a competition to sort out this biggest of world architectural problems, but what I saw was a gothic pyramid - its emptiness somehow perfectly echoing this most abandoned of cities. Find rare footage of Pyongyang and you will rarely see a car on the street, tourists aren't allowed unless sponsored by the government and from an approved country. There's something amazing about the sheer scale of national denial in building the world's largest hotel in a country of no visitors. Yet it seems to be a fixation of many an isolated dictator - before he died Turkmanbashi of Turkmenistan was working on a whole street of marble 5 star hotels that he must have known would always stand empty. These buildings for me contain the very essence of the confusion, wasted misplaced dreams and hipocrisy of these societies. And brutal architectural ambition is hardly a new idea in dictatorial regimes - look at all the giant impossible edifices Stalin dreamt up that never came to life and the extraordinary communist structures that sometimes did (perhaps a subject for another post...).

Many great cities have giant hills rising from them, important buildings that piece the skyline as if bursting from the ground - taking possession of the image of the city they come to represent. The Ryugyong hotel has changed Pyongyang from a visually anonymous city to an instantly recognisable international skyline. I also think the use of a pyramidal shape is interesting - they are the greatest tombs of the world - giant structures hiding unknown secrets from a society that it's hard for us modern westerners to permeate. It is said that the communist regime often airbrushes photos to make the hotel appear open, but rather than an embarressed cover up I sometimes feel that there is also a sense of pride in this building - like it is waiting there for the moment the communist regime wishfully thinks its star will rise, take over the world, finish this building and then the west will be jealous. Communist regimes have always liked grand claims and the Ryugyong is the largest hotel in the world.

105 concrete stories high, the 3000 room hotel began construction in 1987 and halted in 1992 after the regime had put 2% of North Korea's GDP into its building. Since then it has been left to deteriorate further and as this video shows is a virtual wasteland:

Architects call for its demolition even though it is in a country they will never visit, may not be allowed to even if they wanted to. There is something about the Ryugyong hotel that unnerves people, but for me this is its power. Yes it is a creepy, brutalist if Cinderella lived in Bladerunner vision, but how often now do real buildings exist more in imagination than reality? This video shows some Italian architects vision of it being westernised then disappearing like a rocket into the stars: But this illustrates my point perfectly - it is pure science fiction, but in reality, in its untouchable, preposterous state it is also a blank canvas - the scale of ridiculous project most architects will only dream of being involved with. It represents a architectural virtual reality we can all have a distant piece of. There is even a collaborative website run by two German architects where you can claim a section for yourself!

But as architecturally unfashionable as it is to say, for me I'm afraid I just find it weirdly beautiful. I'm a sucker for modern ruins and urban decay, granted, but there is something about this building that is so utopian yet ridiculous at the same time that I can't help love it. For me it's hardly human any more but has a life of its own, aided by its incomplete empty of people status - it's the first communist organic man-made mountain - a building forever suited to explorers not hotel guests. A natural phenomena that people are almost scared to tackle.

Japanese singing roads

Places I want to visit: the hill of crosses, Lithuania

I stumbled across this place when researching unusual sacred places and browsing through Flickr. Not many places immediately draw me to them but this place was so peaceful yet dark at the same time, so considered and full of dedication yet completely chaotic and almost violent in its history and layout.

Located in the north near the small town of Siauliai, it has represented Lithuanian spiritual identity since medieval times. It is built by ordinary people going there and leaving a cross. The Soviet regime raised it to the ground three times - burning the crosses, levelling the hill, making scrap metal from the remains, covering it with sewage, but the spiritual devotion of the Lithuanian people rebuilt it again and again. It has rested peacefully since the mid 80s and now contains hundreds of thousands of crosses. I am always fascinated by memory and place - how one contains the other and in general how woefully inadequate monuments are in truly containing a sense of collective memory - for me it is the personal memory that is the more powerful and truly defines how something was. Yet due to its personal nature private memory can be virtually impossible for others to detect - for me the hill of crosses is one of the few places containing a genuinely powerful collective memory - it is not trying to define a specific event in one object but has been built up in layers of personal history and national identity over many years. It is a true place of pilgrimage as you can leave a part of yourself behind - each person adding a new layer to the power and memory of the place. It is also extraordinarily beautiful...

I may have been born just plain white trash...

...but Fancy was my name. This one's for Stu

Places I want to visit: Kizhi Island

One of the most beautiful buildings I have ever seen - an ancient wooden church on an Island not far from St Petersburg. The Church of the Transfiguration uses traditional Russian building methods - there are not even any nails, just pegs of wood...

Gypsy bears

So inspired by ther wonderful photo in my previous post I decided to write an entry on Ursari - a branch of Roma people who traditionally trained bears. The young gypsy boy in Budapest obviously took it to another level, but the tradition goes back to the 12th century. A significant number joined circuses, but it is a distinct culture rather than a simple sideshow act. The term Ursari can also refer to a branch of traditional Roma language.

The Ursari tamed the bears by capturing them in their youth and rendering them harmless. However this obviously entailed some cruel techniques such as burning their paws in time to music, as well as the use of iron rods and nose rings. They were the focus of early animal rights advocates in the 1920s, but it was the repressive measures of the Romanian government in the early stages of WWII that was the first thing to really clamp down on the practice. But the legislation of the communist regime, whilst restrictive, protected the Ursari. It was not until the fall of communism that they were really persecuted, with mass arson attacks on Ursari settlements. However especially around the banks of the Black Sea they remained popular entertainment.

Tricks the bears were taught include dancing to the rhythm of a tambourine, walking upright and leaning on canes, but the bear has a greater significance in Ursari culture. They are believed to protect Ursari houses, ensure fertility and chase away evil spirits. Bear hairs were popular in amulets and bear fat was used to treat rheumatism and skeletal disorders. The Ursari make up a significant amount of the Roma population of Romania, Moldova, Serbia and Italy. There is a sometimes seen as separate group in Bulgaria known as Mechtari, or monkey handlers.

However one of the most interesting things I think is the depictions of them in art over the centuries:

What are you looking at?

Polyphonic singing

When me and William were in Georgia last year we were lucky enough to be taken to see a young mens' choir rehearsing traditional Georgian polyphonic singing. I knew I had wanted to hear it whilst in Tbilisi, as I had heard records and thought it the most extraordinary thing - it genuinely sounded like nothing else, and while in many cultures I can see the links between the folk music with other areas nearby, this seemed almost implausibly unique. A friend of our good friend took us into this old building in the old town, up some twisting stairs and into a corridoor that echoed with the sounds of different groups of boys singing. We were not sure which door to go through as we didn't want to interrupt, but soon scruffy teenagers came out with a grin for a cigarette break and we went into a room. Everyone smiled and we sat on a rickety bench. I looked up at the group of maybe eight teenage boys laughing at us whilst one of them who was about to conduct gave them strict looks. It looked like they were just doing this for a laugh, but then they opened their mouths - it was simply extraordinary. At one point I felt tears come to my eyes in a cliche it was so beautiful... Sadly I don't have a recording of these young men but here is link to a website with a general overview of singing in the different regions and some interesting old recordings.

Rambo Amadeus

Somewhat of a cult figure in his native Serbia (so I have read rather than hearing from my Serbian pals I have to say...) Rambo Amadeus named himself an absurd paradox which continues throughout his music - sometimes comic, sometimes political, always anti-Milosevic - songs with such Serbian humour in the titles as "Don't happy, be worry". He had a top ten hit with a song he wrote with a Norwegian Journalist where a light house falls in love with an oil platform and a very big hit involving shepherds, both of which I could sadly not find, but here are a couple to introduce you anyway... the second one involves folk dancing robots which I guess can only be a good thing...



You can only buy his stuff on his website

Just in case you were confused when in Latvia...

Take care!

If a plain old coffin doesn't suit...

...move to Ghana!


The Ga tribe are Christian but still hold onto certain animist beliefs. They believe in a celebration at death and that it is important to bury someone in a coffin shaped as something that represented their life. For a more detailed post go to saharan vibe The coffins really are extraordinary...

Ghosts of the month!

Potentially a new monthly feature... This month:

The Windsor ruins. I have always wanted to do a road trip of ghost towns in the South and hope one day in the not too distant future this dream will be fulfilled, but what appeals to me the most the ruins of old Southern mansions. The windsor ruins are in Mississippi, a state with the most extraordinary dark atmosphere that I love, and I think would feel like entering a lost realm - my favourite atmosphere of all on arriving in a place.

If you're interested in more ghost towns this site is a great resource.

The other contender this month is this great blog of advertising ghosts - the echoes on buildings of things that were once advertised there. And the ghosts so silver is fascinated with memory and place and strongly believed that it is in the ordinary buildings and places in the city where memories are contained - that the city's true history can be found. Buildings have many layers of history and if we only look closely many of them are nearer the surface than we think...

I've always wanted a hurdy gurdy...

I grew up loving the sound of a hurdy gurdy - the sinister drones always made it the most atmospheric folk instrument for me - but I'm used to it in the English folk tradition when in fact it is a folk instrument around the world - here is a video of a Russian master doing his hurdy gurdy thing...

A silvery bestiary

I have for along time been interested in medieval maps (see Hereford Mappa Mundi above) and monsters - the hidden creatures in manuscripts and churches that the modern world seems to have forgotten. Why is it that the mosters from Greek myths are so well know throughout the world, yet the monsters that are so much part of our western european mythical heritage are virtually unknown? I have been recently trying to address this with my children's television and book series Map Monsters, but I thought that for today I would just list my favourite few monstrous races.

Blemmyae:

Blemmyaes are basically headless beings with faces in their chests. They often carry a large club and are very muscular and fierce.

Sciopod:

One of my favourites, the Sciopod looks relatively human until you realise he just has one huge foot. However this does anything but hinder them - for some reason in enables them to run very fast (I've always seen it as a bit of a seven league boot equivalent, enabling giant leaps) and it can also be handily used as a parasol - they are often shown in this pose and I like the idea that it somehow recharges them for more leaping - as if there were solar panels on the soles of their feet!

Astomi:

Perhaps the most mystical and enigmatic of all medieval monsters, the Astomi has no mouth and consequently lives off smells. They cannot speak so it has been suggested they were almost telepathic. They are particularly fond of the smell of apples, causing them to be sometimes referred to as "apple smellers". But while nice smells are their bread and butter they can also die if exposed to bad smells... There are other related monsters such as straw drinkers who can only digest liquid food through a straw through a small hole in their face.

Cynocephalus:

Possibly the most fearsome of the monstrous races Cynocephali are also known as Dog-heads, though the head is usually that of a wolf-like creature rather than a pet! They have fiercesome mood swings and are great fighters. The picture I've posted here is particularly interesting as it appears to have been converted to Christianity, bringing me to the point that these creatures often got caught up in Crusade propaganda - it was easy to gain support for the Holy Wars if the infidels were monsters rather than human. Hence how in crusade literature people are often generically referred to as Saracens and Ethiopians. This had not so much to do with where they were from (Ethiopia was a mythical kingdom rather than an exact geographical location), but is sometimes rather a breed of mythical creatures not any less fantastical in the eyes of the average person hearing stories, than a blemmyae of a sciopod! Religion is a complicated issue with medieval monsters as it brings in the issue of physiognomy which at the time meant that if you had not heard the word of god then it was likely you would take on a monstrous form. Your physical appearance could also be changed by where you lived - the climate hugely affecting the four humors that influence how you were as a person, but also location determined whether it was possible for you to be human - for example on old maps, monsters often inhabit the antipodes, as there was supposedly a wall of fire detaching them from the rest of the world and as the word of god couldn't have spread through this, it was thought unlikely that anything human could live beyond it.

Panotii:

Perhaps the most endearing monster the Panotii has giant ears a bit like an elephant which some thought enabled them to fly. They were quite shy for monsters though and sometimes wrapped their ears around themselves like a blanket. However they were obviously evil in medieval eyes as their giant ears enabled them to hear things from a long distance, and this made them prone to listening to gossip.

Ice cream van music

I have always wanted an ice cream van. Not for the endless supply of ice cream, or for the fact that their ice cream is the sort of squirty soft stuff I was never allowed as it was somehow more artificial, but because of the idea of a vehicle that played music that made me feel like I was entering a weird realm. That is what ice cream van music does. It's like a private music box moment on a public scale. You hear it, but if you don't hurry or look in the right direction you might miss it and it will disappear, leaving only an echo lilting around your street - a hint of a different place where it might have gone and you could have gone with it. I grew up in the wilds of Somerset where we never had an ice cream van, so I associated them with mythic-feeling memories of seaside holidays in Cornwall. I remember when I was 14 my boyfriend lived in the centre of a town and I heard an ice cream van outside his house one day - I was amazed they strayed so far from the sea! But they do, and when they do, they take on a whole new atmosphere - kind of like the Pied Piper of the inner-city vehicle world, they call out to local kids. I lived on Brick Lane for a while and our local ice cream van played the teddy bears picnic (you can buy a cd of said tune here but watch out for the sinister voiceover on the sample files). Each day me and my flat mates would hear it calling, and the innocent children's song suddenly had creepy undertones of come hither children and we will lead you to a world far from here. This might sound ridiculous to you, but we never saw this mythical van, just heard it every day calling out, luring people in...

Anyway on a lighter note, for those who want it, click here to read a paper on the history of ice cream vans. There is also a good wfmu blog entry on the subject.

If you, like me, want to buy one, then click here
There is also a flickr group

But beware... they might sound pretty, but who knows where you will end up... Actually I wish I had a photo of what I once saw out of the window of a train in South London - it was what can only be described as an ice cream van graveyard - lots of them quietly rusting back to nature as plants twisted round them in a patch of abandoned city greenery...

World's Fairs

So this is one of my pet obsessions - ever since I was young and I discovered the fabulous dinosaurs at Crystal Palace Park in South London and realised that they were part of a grand festival which also included, well, a crystal palace housing newly discovered wonders of the world. What has happened to the days when structures were designed purely to celebrate the innovation and variety of what the future has to hold (and no the millenium dome does NOT count)? The Eiffel Tower in Paris, the Unisphere in New York in '64 - all were the result of world's fairs. On said subject here is a great little film about the Unisphere with wonderful '60s graphics:
For a general intro to the 1964 world's fair this film "To the Fair" is great:
One of my favourite things from this particular world's fair is the Futurama 2 exhibit by Ford General motors - space age vehicles and imaginary cities galore! If only they actually built these places... but the future never turns out as you expect it...
As an aside on the future as we may or may not expect it, here is a great and in places accurate short film from the 1930s on future fashions in the year 2000 Thanks to Fed by Birds for the tip off on that one.

Caucasian Cowboys

Having always been obsessed with Georgia (the country not the state) and having a love for all things old Wild American West, to discover that many of Buffalo Bill's "Cossacks" were in fact Georgians (Cossacks tend to be from further north around the Southern Steppe, though one can become a Cossack - it is arguably an endurance lifestyle and state of mind more than a geographical race). Needless to say the Georgians have picked up on this, and this great website tells you all about it and contains wonderful old photos.

Of Russian children's dreams

So it's a new year and whilst this blog was primarily set up to function as the news/diary section of my website I have decided to also use it as a more conventional blog to post the things that interest me and albeit sometimes in a random way influence my work.
I have never been to Russia but have a good friend I have written to for a long time in Moscow. Recently we were talking about memory and how certain seemingly inconsequential things you have forgotten in your childhood suddenly come back to you, maybe even triggered by something as simple as a smell or a sound, and now these objects, whether a book or a TV show, seem to represent so much more - that they now somehow contain the memories that surrounded them - that they are the key to unlocking an atmosphere or a state of mind. I am in love with classic children's books for this very reason - for me it is always The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge that does it every time - the small door she crawls through to her magical bedroom, the giant dog she can ride which is probably a lion and her friend Robin who lives in caves and trees. My friend was kind enough to compile a youtube list of Russian cartoons that have this effect on her. Some are naive and dreamlike, others psychedelic and truly surreal. Here is one that I really enjoyed with singing creatures, a Tsarist castle complete with egg wielding monarch and a singer songwriting drifter:

The list got more and more surreal. In this country my generation often jokes how programmes like The Magic Roundabout were obviously made by people taking a lot of drugs, but this cartoon takes LSD animation to a whole other level...


I was lucky as a child as Dad ran the first British satellite TV channel for kids in the '80s and got sent lots of amazing cartoons from all round the world - many of which he bought and were shown for the first and sadly the last time in this country... My favourite was a Czech series about a little mole (I think how the makers were more concerned with telling the story rather than the constraints of conventional timekeeping, therefore making each episode a different length, could be why it didn't make it elsewhere). Watching it now it's extraordinary how beautiful it is and in a bizarre way restores your faith in humanity. This is a grand statement I know, but watch and see what you think...

Serbian Adventures

So I am just back from Belgrade where I had a wonderful time and many strange adventures. Amongst my urban exploring and consuming of much coffee and beer I managed to fit in a reading of my work at a lovely cafe. The evening was organised by Dan who runs Treci Trg a great Serbian literary magazine (www.trecitrg.org.yu) so thank you to him, as well as extraordinary amounts of thank yous to a wonderful friend and poet Ana Seferovic who translated two extracts of my work in advance to read, as well as simultaneously translating the talk I gave about my work on the night. I mainly talked about the importance to me of creating an intuitive emotional response to prose, which is normally associated with visual art, music and poetry. I also talked about how memory relates to place in my work and explained some of the "and the ghosts so silver" projects. Some of my miniature books were also hidden around the cafe and I am looking forward to receiving these back (on that note thank you to the people who sent mini books back from Port Eliot - they were wonderful to read). I hope to go back next year and do a collaborative project with Ana.

Port Eliot lit fest

This weekend come down to the wonderful wild westcountry for the Port Eliot lit fest in St Germans, Cornwall. I'll be doing various things including miniature books and hidden stories, as well as a cabinet of story curiosities on display in the house containing the miniature books sent back to me so far. There are loads of amazing people there this year including Joe Boyd and William Dalrymple, who I am particularly excited about. Come come come! Also thank you to everyone who came down to the treasure trail last thursday.

Treasure Trail

As part of the North Kensington arts trail Intransit exhibition there will be an and the ghosts so silver treasure trail this Thursday 12th July. Starting point Westbourne Park tube station (Hammersmith and City line) and you can turn up any time between 1.30 and it being taken down at 10pm. Go to www.rbkc.gov.uk/intransit and click on treasure trail for a downloadable map of the route. Look out for miniature books, embroidered story mobiles, dioramas in shoe boxes, post-its, secret sound pads and tags all telling the secret stories of the area and leading you around the arts trail...

Journey of Exchange Opening

The Journey of Exchange exhibition opens at Oxford House in Bethnal Green on thursday (5th) and runs for the whole of July. I have a print and miniature books in the exhibition and will be doing a post-it trail. Here's the flyer - please come!


Also don't forget the story treasure trail next week www.rbkc.gov.uk/intransit as part of Kensington arts council intransit exhibition series of artist led walks and events. It will be based on discovering the secret history of how the area used to be and the echoes of its past residents. More details later...

Exhibition story.

So here is my story that will be split up into miniature books for the Journey of Exchange exhibition.

Tbilisi, Georgia.

The car twisted us high speed into the city I’d dreamt of since small. I’d never arrived here this way in my head – there I kind of drifted across ruined balconies and landed on one to gaze out over all the others as they spun along the water’s edge like wooden cobwebs.
We got out by an old bridge and watched the cars trying to keep the people on foot from passing through. It didn’t work though – people just walked across in front of the speeding traffic and it miraculously missed them in a mist of hooting horns. We got out and said goodbye to the guy who’d driven us here. Paid him back his border bribes and sat on a small wall by a new flash bar, as the city crumbled around us and a bride walked out of the bar to family cheers. It was easy to not notice this place was falling down it was so beautiful. That hadn’t changed from my preconceptions. I was finally stood amongst the buildings I’d stared at in books as a child.
The windows hung from the balconies like square bunches of glass grapes. I felt that if I raised my hand I could pick them they were so frail – that they might crumble in pieces into my fingers and I could filter through the dust to find the stories that this city was hiding from me. It was hiding something still.
I dragged my suitcase into a taxi up the steep hill to the hotel. Up some stairs and onto our new balcony that seemed to taunt the old ones with how well it stayed up. I hardly noticed though – was floating above a view I had seen many times before. The old Metekhi church rising out of the city and the trees around the hills that tried to hide the buildings. The domes of the sulphur baths burst like bubbles from the cobbled ground.
He turned and smiled at me and we sat on the swing seat and rocked gently, up a little higher to see if we could peer over the hilltops where Mother Georgia stood with her sword and stared in stone at the tall spike of the communications tower. Its red and white stripes reminded me of seaside life rings, and a giant Soviet shell of a building hovered next to it, staring over the city with no purpose other than that, or to remind people that it was still there, somewhere in the background of this changing city. There were many different histories struggling to be remembered here. I never thought that our history would join them. Hovering happily through the broken wood and pastel painted stone. I smiled and walked back inside the room.

Upcoming events.

I'm back from my adventures in the Caucasus and missing both Armenia and Georgia and the wonderful people me and William met very much... However it's inspired lots of new ideas and a new series of miniature books was hidden around Tbilisi (see below), and now it's time to throw myself back into work!

There are three big and the ghosts so silver events scheduled for July:

July 5th - Opening night, Journey of Exchange exhibition, Oxford House, Bethnal Green, London. This exhibition will run till the end of July and feature many hidden books and a post-it note story in the neighbourhood on the opening night. www.myspace.com/journeyofexchange

July 12th - Treasure trail as part of North Kensington Intransit exhibition arts trail. www.rbkc.gov.uk/intransit

July 20th-22nd - Port Eliot Literary Festival, St Germans, Cornwall. Treasure trail, miniature books and a cabinet of story curiosities. www.porteliotlitfest.com.

Please come and join in!

Tbilisi, Georgia...

Thank you to the wonderful Maka for the Georgian translations!