Creativity Found - an interview with Claire Waite Brown

I was delighted to join Claire Waite Brown recently to record an episode of her fabulous podcast "Creativity Found", which interviews people who find a creative path later in life: people just like me!

You can hear the interview at the link below:

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1386667/episodes/15970469-mark-clay-refilling-the-creative-cup

Find out how I started my artistic journey ten years ago at the age of 44 and came to be an award-winning artist showing and selling work in the UK and abroad via an opera company, fatherhood, a masters degree and a nature trail - and a close shave with a banjo!

Thank you so much to Claire for giving me this opportunity and for a wonderful discussion which I really loved and am proud to share!

Mark Clay and Claire Waite Brown (Creatvity Found Podcast) https://www.buzzsprout.com/1386667

“A Fragile structure” - Reflections on a process-based approach

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This is "A Fragile Structure", completed in September.

Returning at last to my long-standing interest in the disused railway line to Amlwch, on Anglesey, this pencil drawing returns to an idea I first had way back in 2019 but could not resolve. Well, it's taken me four years, but here it is at last. Many 6Bs gave their all for this piece.

My intention was to achieve a more organic treatment of the line of the railway line. I was thinking at first of the idea of "branch lines" and imagined I could achieve something tree-like: ever smaller branches sprouting from branches and so forth. In pursuit of that, I also included in my thinking, for the first time, the long-gone sub-branchline which ran from Pentreberw to Benllech/Red Wharf Bay. (The shorter "branch" running towards but not reaching the top right of the drawing.) It closed in 1930 and there is very little trace of it today.

The drawing takes information from the Ordnance Survey Landranger map of Anglesey. I imagined an accumulation of journeys taken by people on these railways lines: somebody travels from Amlwch to Llangefni to visit a friend, for example, or from Llangwyllog to Amlwch to see the sea. The railway lines enable but don't complete the journeys, of course. You have a walk, or somesuch, to and from the railways stations. I created enough of these to form a cumulative network or structure of interlocked imaginary journeys within which the railway lines form only the “trunks of the tree”.

The drawing is made by placing the tip of a nail into a nibholder and inscribing lines into the surface of the paper, rather in the manner of cutting a groove into a vinyl record. For me this feels like a process of setting down memories, just like the process of “cutting” a record with the information needed to produce the music recorded into its surface. I then went over it with a soft pencil to highlight the groove and make it visible as negative space. This is a process I have used before, though not in the context of the Amlwch railway line. 

Detail from “A Fragile Structure”. Copyright Mark Clay 2023.

What emerged was decidedly untreelike, but it was still organic and extremely fragile. If anything, it seemed to me as I worked, it was more like the growth of lichen or even the structures of coral. 

Coral grows when tiny, fragile creatures create a solid structure (calcium carbonate) around themselves to protect themselves. And it seemed to me that I was doing something similar with the "wrapping" of graphite that I was surrounding my grooved journeys with. In this way, the drawing becomes something about the fragility of memory, and gestures towards an attempt to preserve (save) it: since the Amlwch line stopped carrying passengers in the 1960s, those real journeys along the line are now passing out of living memory.

I also wanted to give this piece a ground, so that it appeared rooted or anchored. Just as a coral reef is anchored on bedrock, the Amlwch line is rooted on the (still operating) railway from Bangor to Holyhead. The profile of the solid graphite ground shows its path but also provides a strong contrast to the fragile network of the lines that radiate outwards from it. 

For me, this typifies the potential of processual drawing. I have spoken and written before about how the process teaches me something and helps me to resolve and understand what you are doing, sometimes a distance away from what I originally envisaged. For me it is really valuable to be responsive to that inherent quality of drawing. 

"Amfortas": Art, Music and Mythology

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This blog entry is written to accompany my Oxfordshire Artweeks 2023 exhibition, which features my artwork “Amfortas”:

"Amfortas", a long thin fragment of railway sleeper recovered from the Amlwch line, partially and tightly bound in red cotton thread around a section with a hole/slice in it, to emulate a bandaged wound.

“Amfortas” - copyright Mark Clay 2023

“Amfortas” originated as a broken splinter of railway sleeper which I retrieved (in September 2021) from the currently disused Amlwch railway line on Anglesey. It was the theme of my Masters degree in Fine Art, and has fascinated me for many years.

I picked up this small fragment (about 70cm long) and brought it home on instinct. I am something of a magpie when it comes to collecting materials from places that interest me. (Don’t look in my shed.) I knew I wanted to do something with it but I did not know what, at first. I was interested in the idea of portraying the materiality of the railway for those who neither knew nor visited it. Found materials from the line itself seemed the best way to achieve that. When I got home from Anglesey, I left it sitting on the window sill to dry out, uncertain what I should do with it. And there it stayed until May 2022.

Close by, a reel of bright red cotton thread had spent a similar period of time waiting for me to use it. I had been pondering using thread as a means of introducing colour to my work for a while - and indeed had already used thread in some of my previous pieces. Quite what the exact timing and impetus was for combining these two materials I can no longer recall. Sometimes things just emerge from a period of patience and reflection. You can’t force ideas - like smacking the bottom of a ketchup bottle. But it is probable that it was at least in part due to my listening to one of my favourite operas, “Parsifal” by Richard Wagner.

The sleeper fragment was found near this spot, not far from the village of Llanerchymedd, Anglesey,

The place where I found my sleeper fragment, not far from Llanerchymedd, Anglesey. Copyright Mark Clay 2021.

I was particularly interested in the little notch or hole in the sleeper fragment (see above) which is what had attracted me to this particular piece of sleeper. When the idea came to bind the area around the hole with red thread to make it resemble a wound, I knew that my idea had finally crystallised after those long months.

“Parsifal”, which I have blogged about previously as a source of inspiration in its own right (albeit still to emerge after several years!), features the character Amfortas. He suffers from a wound that never heals. With that, it seemed to me that I could make a meaningful connection between the outwardly dissimilar railway line and the operatic character: the railway line, too, could be said to be “wounded” beyond repair. And I realise only as I write this blog that there is even a pleasing semi-similarity in the names: Amlwch and Amfortas.

Wagner’s operas draw heavily on mythology in their texts and underlying ideas (Gods, knights, magic powers, love potions, etc.). The reasons for this are as huge and complex as the operas themselves, but it seems to me that part of the reason for this is to use the power of mythology to elevate the ideas and the music to something more timeless and eternal, and thereby to increase their power and impact. Without in any way wishing to put my art on the level of Wagner’s, it did seem to me that there was a similar potential in taking this sad fragment of a decaying railway and transforming it into a piece of art that carries ideas to people through exhibition and discussion, far beyond its genesis and location.

“Parsifal” is a great hymn to pity, compassion and redemption. At its close, Amfortas is in fact redeemed, and his wound is healed. Perhaps there is hope for a similar redemption and healing for the Amlwch railway line too, as the volunteers of Lein Amlwch strive to repair it to allow trains to run again. Let’s hope so.

"How Surely Gravity's Law"

In the autumn of 2021, I had been pondering the idea of making a very large drawing for at least year (partly as a lockdown project). Eventually, it developed into the idea of creating a homage to the tree canopy at the Hinksey Heights Nature Trail, where I am a proud volunteer and a director of a newly formed community interest company.

(You can see my new gallery of my evolving body of work inspired by the Trail here on my website: https://www.markrclay.co.uk/hinksey-heights-trail ).

Inspired by a passing comment from a fellow volunteer, the idea struck me to create a drawing that commemorated the arching tree canopy formed over parts of the trail boardwalk by ash trees. Many were falling victim to ash dieback disease and fast approaching the point where they needed to be cut down in order to avoid being a danger to visitors and volunteers alike. This gave me a reason to create something on a large scale as a way to convey the immersive and embracing quality of the trees that I had enjoyed so many times whilst on the trail, and commemorate them after they were gone.

Hinksey Heights Nature Trail, taken in winter 2021/2022.

(Photo: Nick Thorn.)

When I create drawings, or anything else for that matter, I want them to be “about” something. People sometimes ask “what is that a picture of?” and it makes me cringe. For me, this sells the power of drawing way too short, suggesting superficial pictorialism or even a childishness. (I don’t draw pictures, I make drawings!) And at this point, I still felt that my idea was not yet sufficiently “about” anything, and that my still partially formed idea needed further time to gestate. Sure enough, with time that missing ingredient came about in the shape of this poem by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875 - 1926):

How Surely Gravity's Law

How surely gravity’s law,
strong as an ocean current,
takes hold of the smallest thing
and pulls it toward the heart of the world.

​Each thing—
each stone, blossom, child —
is held in place.
Only we, in our arrogance,
push out beyond what we each belong to
for some empty freedom.

​If we surrendered
to earth’s intelligence
we could rise up rooted, like trees.

Instead we entangle ourselves
in knots of our own making
and struggle, lonely and confused.

So like children, we begin again
to learn from the things,
because they are in God’s heart;
they have never left him.

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

​by Rainer Maria Rilke

Translation credit and acknowledgement goes to: https://www.thepoetryexchange.co.uk/how-surely-gravitys-law

What struck me first of all was that first stanza. It seemed to convey that sense of the impending fall that the Trail’s ash trees would inevitably face, both succinctly and powerfully. The first reaction people invariably have when they hear that that these lovely trees are doomed to die, and imminently, is an instinctive sadness.

I had found my title.

But, as I read deeper, the poem yielded so much more invaluable thinking. I began to find comfort in it: the emergent idea that there is a natural order or rightness to the world that escapes and eludes our attempts to control it. The poem was telling me what we all knew on the Trail - that there was no human plan or remedy that would save these trees from death and the crashing embrace of gravity at the moment of their ultimate fall.

Rilke’s achievement in this poem is, I think, to make that sense of the fear of the fall into a comforting, even liberating thing. We should trust the process, and not seek to alter or avoid it. And that was what I thought the drawing needed, not just through its title but also the thinking process I went through during the 94 hours of the drawing’s creation. (You have a lot of time to think when you are making a large drawing like this.)

I started this drawing in October 2021 and finished it some two months later in the week before Christmas. It was too big to fit on my studio drawing board so I worked in the (unheated!) conservatory of our house, using a large sheet of plywood as a drawing board. Once it was done, I set off for the Trail with my camera to take some photos and maybe record a few thoughts for this blog entry. As it turned out, I was already too late. The trees were already being cut down, and the view that I had captured in the drawing was gone.

But this sad ending is not really the end of the story at all. The loss of the trees, whilst sad and not a little desolate at first sight, paves the way for the restoration of precious alkaline fenland (of which there are only 19 hectares or so in the entire UK). New trees will grow, new views and vistas have been opened up, and now that we are into the Spring of 2022, nature is playing its miraculous role of healing and renewal. Once again, Rilke put it best:

This is what the things can teach us:
to fall,
patiently to trust our heaviness.
Even a bird has to do that
before he can fly.

Tunnel Visions

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It is quite surprising to discover how many people are interested, like me, in the exploration of disused and abandoned railway lines, and there are numerous Facebook groups and YouTube channels catering for this interest, which I regularly enjoy delving into.

A chance encounter with the photograph posted below has taken me on the most wonderful journey into both darkness and illumination, giving rise to an initial series of drawings which I am now grouping as a collection entitled “Tunnel Visions”.

Abandoned railway tunnel, UK. Author: unknown.Please contact me if this is your photograph. I will be very happy to credit you.

Abandoned railway tunnel, UK. Author: unknown.

Please contact me if this is your photograph. I will be very happy to credit you.

There is so much to inspire me in this eerily beautiful photograph of a place most of us never see: the enticing perspective of the tunnel receding into darkness, the mark-making of the mineral leaching on the brickwork (calcites, in this case, I believe) and of course that amazing copper reflectivity of the spoil and water on the tunnel floor. I think this is a result of oxidisation, rendered gloriously copper-like when illuminated. (Many old tunnels contain dumped spoil and waste from other industrial sites such as mining or construction.)

Naturally, this also resonates perfectly with my current artistic practice: the exploration of Britain’s industrial heritage, an interest in the processes of decay and damage, my love of copper, and the delicate interface between remembering and forgetting.

There were plenty more amazing photographs to be inspired by, of course. In fact, my very first response to this new and enticing subject was inspired by a photograph taken looking vertically upwards through a tunnel ventilation shaft:

Mark Clay: “Standing in the place between forgetting and remembering.” (2021)

Ink on paper, H42cm square.

In this drawing I was using the strong sense of perspective as a way of thinking about time and processes of decay. As with its source photograph, it is a view from the position of the viewer on the tunnel floor looking up and out through the ventilation shaft as drops of water fall downwards from above. And, as a flat drawing, it can be read as movement in two directions: from the precise brickwork of the centre of the drawing outwards to increasing fragmentation and abstraction; or in the opposite direction. It is this quality of liminality, of things changing from one thing to another, that gave rise to the title of the piece, “Standing in the place between forgetting and remembering.”, because like so much of my work it is, fundamentally, about encounters with remembered things that stand on the cusp of being forgotten. That also plays out, I hope, in the equal sense of this being both a representational drawing and an abstract one, at the same time.

I also wanted to imbue a sense of both precision and decay. A railway tunnel is a precise, engineered creation, a carefully calibrated tube of emptiness carved through the earth and bound by uncountable pieces of regular brickwork (or other materials in the modern day). I used a compass to capture that quality. But I also allow that rigour to decay and break down, through disrupting and reducing the lines, and through the use of a dip-pen and ink, with its associated risks of blots and smudges. Together, I think the two combine to make something quite dynamic and interesting.

A gallery of series will follow in due course as the series develops further.

Art and Music: Or The Drawing I Am Not Yet Ready To Draw

An aspect of my work that I have not considered for some time (or at least not since I began this website and blog) is my love of music. It has been a passion of mine all my life, predating my artistic journey by decades. You will often find me immersed in the rich landscapes of imagination, space and emotion that music conjures up in me; very similar, in fact, to my preoccupations and interests as a visual artist.

In classical music and opera in particular I find a world that really transports and delights me. Of all musical forms, opera has the capacity and range to do this par excellence (when done well - which is not always the case). It combines music, drama, design and stagecraft on even the grandest of scales, often taking in some of the biggest and most complex ideas and themes of human life: love, death, or power, for example.

 

“The Arrival of Judith”. Set model for Bela Bartok’s opera “Duke Bluebeard’s Castle”. Mark Clay (2017).

 

And there is no grander scale in opera than the work of Richard Wagner (1813-1883).

Time and again, I am drawn back to my favourite Wagner opera, “Parsifal” - his final work and a summation of a lifetime’s preoccupation with the combination of words, music and ideas. As a musical layman, little more than an enthusiastic if slightly informed amateur really, I can make no attempt to analyse such a vast and complex art work that will mean anything to anyone other than myself, so I will limit myself to saying that what entrances and interests me so much about ‘Parsifal’ (above and beyond the amazing, richly suggestive and often ethereal music) is its preoccupation with contrasting themes such as sin and redemption, and the inter-relation of time and space, particularly through music that seems to stop time in places, and move freely through both as if through air.

In Act 1 of the opera, Wagner inserts a famous and much admired passage titled “Verwandlungsmusik” - “Tranformation Music”. On a merely practical level, this is a musical interlude designed to allow a theatrical scene change, perhaps behind a temporarily lowered curtain. But what a scene change Wagner makes of it. After a few moments of explanation the Grail Knight Gurnemanz ushers Parsifal into the hidden realm of Monsalvat, the home and temple of the Knights of the Holy Grail:

 
 

Gurnemanz:“…No earthly path leads to it, and none could tread it whom the Grail has not itself guided.”

Parsifal:“I barely walk, and yet seem already to have travelled so far.”

Wagner excelled at conjuring up atmosphere and emotion in his music. Through complex, elusive harmonies and richly intertwined themes, we can hear the ground shift and alter under Parsifal’s feet as he leaves the lakeside and forest location of the first scene and arrives - somehow - in Montsalvat. The call of offstage trombones, the tolling of strange bells and the heavy march of the Grail’s approaching faithful signal his, and our, arrival in this new place seemingly beyond space and time. (The above YouTube recording runs on into the following scene, just because it’s so striking.)

It is this idea of “Tranformation"” and whether I can explore visually the effect that this amazing and powerful music has upon me, that has preoccupied me for many months. And yet I still do not feel ready to embark upon it yet. Like Parsifal in the opera that bears his name, I must wander in uncertainty and confusion for a time before I truly understand the task before me.

I will let you know when I am ready to return to Montsalvat.

Oxfordshire Artweeks (May 2021) - Invitation and booking information

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Dear Friends,

This is to extend a warm invitation to join me for my show for Oxfordshire Artweeks which opens on Saturday 8th May, here at our home in Botley.

Mark Clay, Oxfordshire Artweeks exhibition (May 2019)

In the last year, I have completed my Masters in Fine Art, and exhibited at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize and Modern Art Oxford. It's been an amazing year despite the huge challenges of the coronavirus, and I have completed a lot of new work. But I have very much missed being able to show it "in the flesh". So it will be doubly wonderful to welcome you all back to our mini-gallery at home. My garden studio will be open for visits too.You can find out more about the show over on the Artweeks website at:

https://www.artweeks.org/artist-profiles/2021/mark-clay-oas-woa

This year, in order to offer you a safe and secure visit, I am also running a very simple appointment booking system. Visits are offered in 30 minute slots but you are welcome to book longer if you wish. To book, simply visit this link:

Calendly - Mark Clay

I look forward to seeing you in May!

Mark

The Struggle

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“The Struggle”. Pencil on paper.

Drawn for yesterday's International Women's Day.

On International Women’s Day I can’t help feeling that only in a world completely messed up by men would it need to even be a thing. But it is still an important part of the slow journey towards the true equality that still eludes us. Furthermore, it seems to me that men are going to have to face some uncomfortable truths about the degree to which male supremacy is embedded in our culture and reflect individually on the degree of their own complicity.

I have been toying with the idea of working on my life drawing skills for a while, and this drawing came about from a moment of reflection while looking through an old sketchbook. I only rarely draw the human form, especially the female. It's not my strength, and I am uncomfortable about complicity in the Male Gaze, which I can't help but conclude is all but inescapable.

So why have I decided to make and share this sketch of women wrestlers, one seen and one invisible? Because it seems to me that part of a woman's struggle in this unequal society is to be seen: to be acknowledged and celebrated for her talents and powers whatever they may be, every day of the year; and to be free from the limiting roles and expectations that a patriarchal society imposes on them. It may not be my place even to express that, but perhaps I can express my allyship, for the sake of my daughters, my wife, my sister, my mother and all my female friends and relatives; at the same time as acknowledging that I have to do more. Keep fighting.

(I also note that this idea of the difference between the seen and the unseen is appearing in quite a lot of my work at the moment. Perhaps there is more to develop here - with care and thoughtfulness. )

In Dark Waters

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I have embarked on a new project in January 2021, a month in which I found myself reflecting on the damage that countries inflict upon themselves when arrogant and vainglorious men hold sway; the month of Brexit, and the violent, chaotic end of the gangster presidency of Donald Trump. I keenly felt the idea of “the ship of state” being sailed into treacherous waters; of wreckage, loss and waste.

In 1919, the huge natural harbour of Scapa Flow, Orkney, became the final resting place of the German High Seas Fleet. Built over the preceding twenty years or so by Kaiser Wilhelm II and Tirpitz. the fleet was intended as Germany’s challenge to the dominance of the British Navy, to be the guarantor of German imperial might, and the protector of its overseas possessions. And it was a proxy for the Kaiser’s own personal prestige in the twisted psychodramas and personal enmities of the intertwined British and German royal families. (Wilhelm was a grandchild of Queen Victoria, and an admiral of the Royal Navy.)

It was the High Seas Fleet that faced and outmatched the Royal Navy at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. Arguably it won a tactical victory in terms of men lost and ships sunk, but it lost the strategic battle and never made another aggressive move again. The Kaiser would no longer risk the annihilation of his precious fleet, even in the pursuit of victory.

The terms of the 1918 Armistice required the internship of the German Fleet under the watchful (yet neglectful) eyes of the Royal Navy, pending a decision by the victorious Allies on its fate. Some, like France and Italy, coveted the ships as war reparations, or additions to their own navies. Others, especially the British, wanted the fleet destroyed - it was still a potent threat to British naval supremacy. Thus, while never definitively defeated, the High Seas Fleet became a prisoner, its dwindling numbers of sailors neglected, malnourished and forgotten on decaying ships in a distant outpost, far from home. From being a symbol of national pride and prestige, the fleet in its surrendered, rusting state became a source of national shame.

Thus it was that in 1919, the remaining Germans scuttled (i.e. deliberately sank) their fleet, one last defiant gesture as the Allies bickered over the ships. You can read more about the incident here. Some of the ships were effectively brand new, only recently completed as part of the war effort and a culmination of the huge naval arms race begun when Britain launched the game-changing HMS Dreadnought just 13 years ago, in 1906.

I am forcibly struck by an enormous sense of waste and futility when I consider this whole remarkable and sad story. The labour, the materials, the expense and of course the terrible waste of human lives is staggering. This is what gives it such contemporary resonance for me today, just over one hundred years later.

I look forward to seeing where this new voyage takes me.

Drawing Place: A Talk with Drawing Projects UK

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What a pleasure it was to be invited by Anita Taylor of Drawing Projects UK and The Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize to take part in an online discussion about drawing place, alongside fellow shortlistee Peter Sutton. The video of the talk, including Peter Sutton’s wonderful talk too, will appear on the Drawing Projects UK soon. I’ll keep you posted.

The following is a transcript of that talk:

“Good evening everybody, I’m really delighted and grateful to be here tonight with Anita and Peter. Thank you for inviting me, Anita.

I am speaking to you from my studio at the end of my garden in Oxford, but I’d like to invite you to join me on an exploration of the wonderful island of Anglesey, a place rich with history, full of the remnants of past ages, fascinating landscapes (natural and manmade) and in particular an old railway line running 17 and a half miles from Gaerwen in the south, up through the middle of the island to the small harbour town of Amlwch on the north coast.  

I first encountered the line, during a family holiday to Anglesey in 2018, and since then it has exerted a powerful fascination for me, to the point that it became the subject of my recently completed MFA in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University. Exploration of landscape and industrial history is one of a number of personal interests that I have drawn into my art practise. I also find myself drawn to islands, too. I think it’s to do with that sense of marginality, escape and distancing from the centre; and I enjoy finding stories that are untold or overlooked, perhaps hiding in plain sight.

A little bit of history may be helpful to start with.

The line opened in the 1860s. It lost its passenger services during the “Beeching Cuts” of the 1960s, but freight trains continued to run up until 1992. Since then, it has fallen into disuse, but the tracks and infrastructure remain substantially in place, albeit subject to the passage of time and progressive reclamation by nature. A group of volunteers is now working to clear the line with a view to restoring it to use, advocating for its restoration as part of the current national debate about reopening old railway lines. It is a vibrant, sometimes fractious, debate. The line stands at a crossroads, or perhaps I should say a junction, right now because it has several different potential futures as well as a real sense of history to it.

So whilst on that family holiday in 2018, I was very intrigued see this old line meandering around the contours, settlements and lakes of Anglesey on maps at first, and then glimpsed on the landscape through trees and many weeds. I was struck by this idea that a map is just a snapshot or a representation of a place at a given moment in time. Maps don’t set out to record every  quality of a place, its atmosphere or history, or the ways in which places change over time -  that is not their purpose -  so I started to think about the railway line as existing in time too. It is, or was at the time of the drawing, 156 years old.

I started to think about the railway line as a drawing on a landscape and in time too. But I was always aware, from the very beginning, that my subject was an elusive one. Maps helped me to think about the obvious, literal quality of being a line that is inherent in a railway line , including on a map, and so it seemed to me that a drawing was the perfect way to think further about this.  I also wanted to think about the qualities of time, decay and endurance that I saw as important aspects of the place.

And really that is where the idea for “Timelines” originated.

It was completed in late 2019 and was one of my very first responses to the railway line. I made this drawing at home 200 miles away from Anglesey but this didn’t seem a problem to me because I was really thinking about those aspects of the line that are unseen and intangible.

To make the drawing, I had the idea to use the line’s mapped shape as a sort of motif and to use one line to represent one year in the life of the line from the beginnings of its construction in 1864 through to the present day. There is a strand in my work of the encoding and preserving of information, especially marginal information or information that is at risk of being lost or forgotten. I established a process for that too, a schematic plan on a spreadsheet so I could consistently and progressively move from softer to harder grades of pencil so that I could make the line become fainter as I worked left to right across the paper, to evoke a sense of a narrative of fading away or forgetting that is very apparent in the condition of the line today. I worked steadily ticking each line off on my plan as I went. And when I reached the line for the year 1992, when the trains stopped running, I swapped from a graphite pencil to a plastic stylus, so that I was making an even fainter mark; a trace, if you like, or a register of falling into stillness or silence, perhaps.

I should say also that the drawing is on tracing paper, which I chose for several reasons. Firstly, there was the purely practical reason that it allowed me to trace the line from the OS map. There is also something quite mundane or “low-status” about tracing paper. I felt that worked quite well for this rather unglamorous, overlooked railway line. But more than that, I really enjoy the way tracing paper responds to the pressure of a pencil tip by recording a clear indentation. It also has that quality of translucence, that captures or reflects light, in a different way to standard papers. This helps makes the multiple lines of this drawing create a visible sense of contour so that they appear to coalesce into their own sort of imagined landscape. Perhaps partly because we all recognise the convention of contour lines from maps, the eye reads the drawing as a having a topography of its own.  

Following on from this idea of topography and space, one of the reasons that drawing is so important in my practise is that it opens up a space for thinking, and I think that is true for many drawing artists. The drawing took about four hours so I had plenty of time for reflection as I worked. Thinking and making seem to go hand in hand when I’m drawing, and this was particularly the case for me with “Timelines”. The following are some examples of the thoughts that occurred to me as I worked:

  • The idea of systems, regularity and repetition that is typical of a railway line – trains going along the line, tracing and retracing the fixed route of the railway lines. The process of creating this drawing became, I found, a way of enacting something similar by making my own journeys down the line, as a train would, and really helped connect me to it.

  • This enabled me to connect to the idea of memory in the drawing – memory of the line and also the memory of my mark-making itself.

  • This lead me to thinking about lines are recoding something: grooves on a record, or growth lines in stump of a felled tree, or sound waves which are of course other ways of storing and preserving information. So I found a sense of reverberation, resonance or echoes in the drawing, that made me think more about how the line was perhaps less silent and more resonant than I had first thought. (They could be geological or seismic movements, too – Anglesey is geologically very significant but that’s another story).

Thanks in large part to “Timelines”, all of these things were aspects of the railway line that I went on to explore in other work in the following year or more. I wasn’t consciously planning for these outcomes, but I discovered them in the process of thinking and making put together in the creation of this drawing. (I am a fan of the work of the anthropologist Tim Ingold, who writes very powerfully in this area, as well as on the subject of lines.)

But I think the drawing also enabled me to connect deeply with what I saw as the qualities of this place that I was exploring – not, here, in the sense of a visual representation of what the railway looks like, (though I have done that in other work) but in a way that connected with my reaction to its intangible, felt and unseen qualities. And when I was able to physically be near or on the line (which of course turned out to be much harder to achieve in 2020 than I expected) I felt able to connect to the railway through the thinking I had done in “Timelines”. And importantly, the line had opened out, if you like, leaving the map and acquiring  a real and rich sense of place, resonance and interest.

If you are interested in finding out a little bit more about my work in response to the Amlwch railway line, please visit my website which is www.markrclay.co.uk There is a gallery there of a my wider body of work including this other drawings but I have also written quite extensively on aspects of the railway line, and my exploration of it, in the blog that is also on the site.

Thank you very much for listening.

MFA in Fine Art: a reflection

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“We think place is about space, but in fact it is really about time.”[1]

Rebecca Solnit, The Faraway Nearby.

In developing my body of work “Seven Stations” ( “Saith Gorsaf”) over the last year or more, my initial line of enquiry was first informed by Tim Ingold’s anthropological eye for the interrelationship of the human and natural worlds. He inspired me to think about the way art can function as not just a process of making, but also of thinking. He encouraged me to experience, to experiment and to explore, a mantra I took with me to Anglesey. Later, I was also much influenced by Robert Smithson’s mysterious and enigmatic approach to the exploration of landscapes and by his site/non-site duality. I was excited to contrast the disused railway line (site) with a contemporary art exhibition (non-site).

Of course, this was all disrupted by the Covid-19 lockdown. For me, the “site” was suddenly both conceptually and physically closed off to me. (I was not able to return to Anglesey until mid-July, an interval of over four months).

Without access to site/subject, workshops, space and even some materials, I found myself reflecting in my small Oxford studio on what appeared to be a significant impediment. I no longer felt that I could authentically engage in the way that I had planned with the land, the railway line, and the people I had met. (e.g. Lein Amlwch, the volunteer group seeking to restore the line to use - they too had suspended all work on the line.) But, in time, this just became an opportunity to encounter the railway line in a different way. The cultivation of flexibility and resilience is time well spent for any artist, so, I turned to my own memories, records and research. Thus, the very themes of memory, remembering, and the often vanishingly thin line between remembering and forgetting (and restoration and loss) became more prevalent themes.

Memory became another key component of my conceptual approach, alongside place and time as described by Solnit:  my own memories, too, as well the social, historical and industrial memory I found on Anglesey; of which the railway line is such a potent emblem.

And also …. making and unmaking: several of my works seek to explore and occupy that liminal and ambivalent point. I have found many such juxtapositions arising out of my exploration of an industrial artefact that is, to a very great extent, dead or moribund, and yet I was fascinated to experience the way it became something more complex, nuanced and still, yet, very vital. It has suited that part of my practice in which I gather a selection of themes, ideas components and “clusters” of work and experiment with their combination, dissolution and recombination (e.g. Much Is Forgotten. (But Not All.)”)

I have come to understand the railway line as a sort of “drawing upon the landscape”. It engaged my fascination with drawing (in multiple forms, including writing) but also inspired me to go beyond it. So, a line became a shape (especially through the drawn pieces); and in turn it became a form, an experience, a sound, or a reflection, through wider applications.  In the end, I find my destination in this body of work has grown from the interplay between these different elements.

My work has been described as operating “between the systematic and the poetic”, a phrase I have found revelatory. Systematic or diagrammatic qualities associated with the construction and operation of railway lines, and the associated (and often marginal or arcane) information that comes with them, can be highly attractive for “railway enthusiasts” and historians of all stripes, and for those, like me, who are interested in the narrow delineation between remembering and forgetting of marginal things. But they also carry a wonderful potential to transform into something altogether more poetic, connected with time and memory, and with our industrial and social heritage; all of which is richly apparent in the landscape of Anglesey.

My work has also become a combination of something linear and finite (relating to a line - a journey delineated by a beginning and an end, just like a railway) with something cyclical and repetitive (implying a cycle of creation, decay and renewal, with the potential to repeat and return - an implication of return or repeated journeys). This is a more uncertain, and I think more poetic, space to occupy, and this ambivalence made my journey much richer and more interesting.

My subject has, in this way, taught me to place these and so many other dualities alongside each other and to facilitate dialogue between the two. There is value in presenting/revealing without the need to be authorial, or to force an interpretation or solution. This is particularly important learning where a subject has political and social overtones. (Railways, I have learnt, are very political things, having to do with economics, land and who gets to connect with whom.) The last thing the people of Anglesey need or want is to be told by an artist from Oxfordshire what to do or think about the railway line and its different potential futures. We see landscape and history through our own eyes, and make our own meaning from it, but must always be conscious that what we see is only our one view. There is always more, and so much is unseen yet hiding in plain sight.

On Anglesey, I found my practice and the path to explore it further beyond my MFA. I have found myself following not a journey to the death of a railway but, in fact, a journey to a transformation; perhaps even to a rebirth, linking back to my choice of title. This transformation also applies to me and my art practice, something I am overjoyed to discover in myself at a relatively late stage in my life. So much in life is about exploration and discovery and I am very much looking forward to continuing this journey.

[1] Solnit R, (2014), The Faraway Nearby. London, Granta.

 

Rhoddion stone. July 2020. Copyright: Mark Clay

Rhoddion stone. July 2020. Copyright: Mark Clay

YOU ARE HERE!

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I’m very pleased that my copper ink drawing “A Crack In The Record”, has been selected for a second exhibition this year, having recently appeared as part of FLOW at Modern Art Oxford (September - October 2020 but still visible online here.

It now also appears as part of the online exhibition “YOU ARE HERE”, organised by the @katmapped collaborative (artists James Stewart and Kate Trafeli). The exhibition explores how the concept of maps and mapping, internal and external, has informed living artists works and thoughts . 

YOU ARE HERE - websitehomepageimage

Mapping, and the use of maps as a way of thinking about place and being in place in both space and time, is of course key to “A Crack In The Record”, as I explain on the YOU ARE HERE website:

"This copper ink drawing explores a disused railway line on Anglesey. Its route operates as a silence/absence that explores memory as sound/silence through a form of mapmaking, designed to be displayed flat. Copper operates as a visual metaphor for Anglesey’s industrial heritage. I have experimented with ideas/methodologies of recording and preserving information: contours on map/landscape, yes, but also the groove on a record, or the lines on the stump of a felled tree."

Mark Clay. YOU ARE HERE, November 2020.

https://katmapped.org/now-on%3A-%22you-are-here%22

Image below: detail from “A Crack In The Record”, Mark Clay, 2020. H900mm X W1100mm, copper ink on paper. Image copyright: Mark Clay 2020.

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2020 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize - opened in Dundee

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Updated: 17 November 2020.

Things have been so busy in October and November that I’ve not even had to the time to mention the 2020 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition, which is now open and touring the UK and which, I am thrilled and honoured to say ,includes a drawing from my MFA body of work: “Timelines” inspired by the disused railway to Amlwch on the island of Anglesey (Ynys Mon).

Image: the artist with “Timelines”. at Drawing Projects UK, Trowbridge, part of the 2020 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition.

Image: the artist with “Timelines”. at Drawing Projects UK, Trowbridge, part of the 2020 Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize exhibition.

I’m honoured that my work has made it into the show alongside so many absolutely stunning examples of contemporary drawing from right across the UK and internationally. The photo shows me next to “Timelines” on the opening day of the show at the very wonderful Drawing Projects UK, in Trowbridge, Wiltshire, a mecca for contemporary drawing and practitioners and a place I firmly resolve to visit regularly from now on. The visit was a joy and an inspiration. It was so exciting to feel among my tribe and to meet Professor Anita Taylor, founder of Drawing Projects UK and leader of the TBWDP.

However, the Trowbridge iteration of the show has now closed and the exhibition has now moved to Scotland, opening on the 13 November and running right through to 19 December at the Cooper Gallery at the University of Dundee.

For full details of the exhibition touring programme, please visit: http://trinitybuoywharfdrawingprize.drawingprojects.uk/index.php/news

Above: Detail of “Timelines, showing how the tracing paper preserves “tracks” of the railway line to Amlwch, strongly suggesting contours in a landscape. Shown on a wooden surface for clarity. Copyright: Mark Clay 2020

Above: Detail of “Timelines, showing how the tracing paper preserves “tracks” of the railway line to Amlwch, strongly suggesting contours in a landscape. Shown on a wooden surface for clarity. Copyright: Mark Clay 2020

"Rhoddion". On Generosity - Part Three

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In July 2020, I was finally able to return to the island of Anglesey and the Amlwch railway line to complete “Rhoddion”, a project that has lain dormant during the long months of the coronavirus lockdown. It was the culmination of my reflection on the idea of generosity, as well as forming a part of my final body of work for my Masters in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University.

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As always, it was wonderful to be back on the island and to find the line once again. Though apparently little changed from the first time I had explored it in Autumn 2019, these visits have always emphasised to me the slow, relentless and largely invisible process of decay that is affecting much of the 17 miles of the route. It’s a process that never ceases, despite the valiant efforts of those seeking to restore it.

My job on this visit was to replace seven track ballast stones that I have gilded with copper leaf and kept with me at home all through the coronavirus lockdown. My plan was to replace them in locations along the whole length of the line, and to leave them to their fate - unmarked, unnamed and unexplained. Everything else apart from the simple act of returning the stones to the line - a simple, silent act of generosity, I hope - seemed unnecessary.

From this process, which took me approximately a day and a half to achieve, I generated a series of seven photographs as a documentary record, designed with my MFA final show in mind. They, along with some of my recorded thoughts, can be seen below:

Recording 1: Prelude (4mins 20s):

In which I introduce my project from a lonely overbridge not far from Gaerwen, and make something of false start.

Recording 2: Stone One (2mins 40s)

In which I find my way onto the railway line and place the first of my seven Rhoddion stones in the company of some indifferent sheep

“Rhoddion” - Stone no.1 - Mark Clay (2020)

Recording 3: The Rain and The Road (3mins 10s)

Once again, my attempt to place a stone comes to nothing, leaving me to contemplate the rain and the noise of roads.

Recording 4: Stone Two (2mins 50s)

The second “Rhoddion” Stone is put in place, despite water and warnings.

“Rhoddion” - Stone no.2 - Mark Clay (2020)

Recording 5: Stone Three (2mins 38s)

A silent and thought-provoking location for Stone Three, where I ponder ideas of access and trespass.

“Rhoddion” - Stone no.3 - Mark Clay (2020)

Recording 6: Stone Four (3mins 5s)

Resuming my series of little pilgrimages on the morning of day two, finding the path appears as difficult as finding the railway.

“Rhoddion” - Stone no.4 - Mark Clay (2020)

Recording 7: Stone Five (2mins 5s)

Gathering a few fragments of broken railway sleeper leads to a reflection on relics and their significance.

“Rhoddion” - Stone no.5 - Mark Clay (2020)

Recording 8: Stone Six (2mins)

Reflecting on how the railway, the roads and the paths of Anglesey dance around each other.

Recording 9: Stone Seven (2mins 45 s)

The end of the line, in every sense. At the end, there is nothing but the wind.

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Going with the 'Flow" - Modern Art Oxford

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Being involved in the online exhibition and collaboration ‘Flow’ at Modern Art Oxford has been both a joy and a revelation to me, particularly at a time when I had more or less written off 2020 as an exhibiting year.

It has been wonderful, too, to have a space in which to connect with other artists, even if this is still severely limited. There is so much to learn and enjoy from being able to talk about art with other artists and I do thank the team at Modern Art Oxford and all the participating curators and artists for bringing us all together and being generous and interested. I feel sure that this is a good source of reflection, development and future ideas for all of us.

The exhibition continues at Modern Art Oxford until 11 October but will continue on their website beyond that date. This blog entry is to pull together all the different strands of my contribution and all the activity around the exhibition as a whole:

You can visit “Flow” at Modern Art Oxford here: https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/flow-online/

Laura Cumming’s review in The Observer (20 Sept 2020) can be read at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/sep/20/danh-vo-chicxulub-white-cube-bermondsey-review-flow-modern-art-oxford

Video extracts of my interview with Flow Co-Curator Jack Carrera:

"Different Tracks" - A Found Poem

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This is a “found poem”, if such a thing exists. It is derived from sketchbook working notes made on September 12, 2020, as I reflected and recorded the filmed material (both video and sound) that I have compiled for a work in progress, also to be called “Different Tracks”. I have re-ordered and recomposed the fragments, much as I have done with the original material, and from this I reach something that might be considered a poem.

The images and screengrabs come from my original material.

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“Different Tracks”

Oxford to Didcot: a train in urgent flight southwards.

The engine smooths out a hurrying time. Looking down

towards the trackbed, colours, forms and structures become a blur.

Some seem to hang in the vision, in swooping flight.

But most are lost.

On foot, I walk along abandoned sidings: there was once a factory in Amlwch.

There are no trains now. The rails are broken. And rusted.

There is a profusion of nature and decay.

Between the twin tracks, buddleia abound.

The wind grabs at me.

Near Didcot, slower now, the blur coalesces and

breaks down, an infinite series of momentary landscapes.

Nothing changes and everything changes.

Didcot, aboard a departing steam train:

a genial amble of sound and motion.

Track ballast falls behind contentedly.

The running board comes with me on this tiny voyage.

Gentler music. Accelerando and rallentando.

Ugly locomotive in a siding. Its diesel engine ticks as it cools:

a clock marking out the seconds of its stopping;

a railway platform clock awaiting an arrival of another train.

Nothing without time.

 A train passing at speed.

In the midst of silence, its coming and going, like a long, sung note.

Crescendo and decrescendo.

Respectful silence of the concert hall, before and after, .

The remembering of old steam trains.

Percussive beats and long breaths of steam.

Songs from the past, not quite yet forgotten.

I walk along old lines. Wind and walking in duet.

Sleepers pass by underfoot, measuring my pace.

Time to think and absorb.

The interjections of others, on their own journeys.

Behind the silence roars the passing world.

Yet around the line, voices remain to be heard:

our voices; and of wheels, engines, brakes and birds.

An enduring stopping and starting.

 Didcot to Oxford. Huge northbound skies glowering

over dashing woodlands.

We are back to the speed of blurred moments barely seen.

There must be a return journey.

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"FLOW" - a collaborative online exhibition

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The art world is beginning to open up once again after the coronavirus lockdown. I’ve used the time to try and be proactive about what might come after my MFA, and make some proactive applications to competitions and collaborations.

So, I’m especially excited that my drawing “A Crack In The Record” will be a part of a collaborative online exhibition called “Flow”, led by Modern Art Oxford and Oxford Brookes University, and I’m delighted to see it featured in part on MAO’s webpage. The show will open as an online exhibition running from 4 September to 11 October.

Click here to visit the MAO website: https://www.modernartoxford.org.uk/event/flow-online/

Image: Screengrab from the Modern Art Oxford website, showing details of “A Crack In The Record”. (July 2020)

Image: Screengrab from the Modern Art Oxford website, showing details of “A Crack In The Record”. (July 2020)

The title “Flow” refers to the immersive, focused and productive state of mind which many people seek to cultivate as a means of being at their most productive, effective or creative,. It applies equally to sportspeople, those in business or academia, and of course to those in creative or artistic endeavours: musicians, writers, visual artists… the list goes on.

“A Crack in the Record” was the perfect piece to submit to a collaboration such as this, because it sits at the centre of a many of the conceptual and practical ideas in my ongoing MA project, the disused railway line to Amlwch, on Anglesey; and also because it works as a telling visual metaphor of the idea of “creative flow” itself. The process of making a large ink drawing by drawing approximately 150 concentric lines itself also opened up a highly absorbing and reflective space in which I could think deeply about what I was doing, and why, as I worked, and to witness that happening in real time throughout the process of creating this piece, which took place across five days. One has a lot of time to think in five days and it was highly beneficial and rewarding.

I’ll be exploring this more with my collaborative partners during the course of “Flow” and writing some more of my thoughts and experiences here on this blog.

Stay tuned!

An Uncertain Journey

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As my MFA in Fine Art approaches its conclusion, I am emerging from a period of enthusiastic investigation of the possibilities and potential of typeface and typewriters. And I have been asking myself how can I push this yet further.

It has seemed to me that, in the context of my current project, a typewriter has given me a tool to access and investigate the following:

  • Mechanical, repetitive process (and sound)

  • A parallel and complimentary form of “old” technology that was once cutting edge but now carries a sense of nostalgia and, perhaps, eccentricity; the same can be said of railways, too, I think – especially disused or lost ones. (And yet, as my projects seek to argue, there is also richness and value and potential in them nonetheless!)

  • A limited set of options (compared to modern word processing, computing and digital printing technology) – something stripped back to basics, simple and rather “retro” – that quality of older technology again.

  • Something decidedly analogue and physical (compared to the digital and the electronic) that again chimes nicely with railways and, critically, their construction, preservation and restoring. It’s all done by hand (manual labour)  in both cases (typewriting, working to clear the Amlwch line).

These are all valuable things to investigate, as I believe I have done. So, how can I now take this further? How can I start to mix these “typewriter” qualities with other strands of my work. How can I think it deeper and further?

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A wander around some of the old railway sites of Oxford took me recently to Grandpont Bridge (above), on the Thames. It used to carry railway lines to a long-gone gasworks and other industrial sites. No trains have passed over it for many a year. It may even date back to the days of Brunel’s broad gauge.  It is now a rather over-engineered pedestrian bridge, but still very grand and imposing.

Again, I was struck by ideas of the mechanical and the repetitive, this time as I pondered the thousands of rivets inserted in the great Victoria girders. I was also struck by the rust and patina. It struck me as the very slowest form of decay and dissolution that I felt I could imagine in a human time frame.

How could I apply this sense of dissolution in the context of typewritten work? I wanted to think about whether I could simultaneously point to decay in thinking about typewriting. It seemed right to try to balance the two, since my work seems so full of these dichotomies (I am tempted to say parallel tracks).

These thoughts percolated through to beginning to think about dots: tiny fragments of line, if you will, that also point to dust, smoke, sand and particles – things falling to bits/dissolving, or perhaps things falling together/coming back into focus. It seemed fitting that it all seemed so loose, ill-defined and hard to grasp.

As is so often the case, I needed to think this through with a drawing.

Choosing a piece of tracing paper, for no other reason than that it has been a common feature in my work and also adds to the idea of “tracing” a disappearing thing (and a surface with its own contingency, fragility, translucency) I sat down to draw with no real sense of where I was going. Just a basic idea of turning type to dust.

First steps: tracing the seven railway stations of the Amlwch line. A route to follow, or to search for. I used fibre tip marker pens of varying sizes between 0.05cm and 0.8cm.

First steps: tracing the seven railway stations of the Amlwch line. A route to follow, or to search for. I used fibre tip marker pens of varying sizes between 0.05cm and 0.8cm.

I thought I might use pencil or charcoal but I felt it was too messy and imprecise, even though they are really “dust” (soot, carbon). I didn’t want to lose control to that extent. I drew on, tracing on the typed letters imperfectly (to suggest imperfect processes and gradual dissolution) and then worked to build a “cloud” of dots around the frail and failing text to make it even more contingent and on the point of dissolution. I laid down more and more dots to reinforce this, eventually going much further with this than I originally imagined, in order to make the legibility of the typeface even more uncertain.

That really was my only impulse other than to see how the drawing turned out.  I was still not sure where I was going with this, or whether I even liked what was emerging. I felt like I should just surrender to the process and allow the drawing to be what it would be.

However, there came a point where I finally understood what I was doing, as if the dots were coalescing into an independent idea beyond my own agency. This is the final, completed piece:

“Uncertain Journey”

Completed 10 July 2020. Pen on tracing paper. H263 mm x W410mm

"Uncertain Journey" (Mark Clay, July 2020.)

So what is this then?

As I drew, around a dozen potential titles for this piece came to me as it began to resolve itself in the making, and I jotted them down for consideration at the end. It was a way of indexing my thinking and my reactions to what I was doing, I believe. Other titles, each resonating with some aspect of my continuing research and emerging body of work, were:

  • “Every journey is made of a million tiny steps”

  • Make/Unmake/Remake

  • Coming Apart/Coming Together

  • A Million Small Acts

  • A Miliion Tiny Acts of Remembrance

  • Don’t Forget to Remember

  • Uncertain Destinations

I finally chose “Uncertain Journey” , a title that reflects both the outcome and the journey of this piece.

The process of laying down the dots (once the lettering was done) was instinctual and implied a real sense of surrender to the mechanical, rhythmic and repetitive process of the dotmaking. It felt, again, like the process of riveting in its obsessive repetition; albeit on a quieter and less industrial scale. And it felt as though the shapes and textures were finding their own form, independent of me. This was a highly mindful and thought-provoking piece to do. Isn’t the act of drawing so often like that?

There is, in the final drawing, a pleasing ambivalence about its nature, which I enjoy and value. Speaking to others for their reaction on what it is (always stipulating there I felt there was no single right answer), I was struck by the following principal reactions:

  • wind on sand at low tide

  • tides of the water

  • steam, smoke or dust

  • tree roots, trunk, branches and leave

  • the murmurations of starlings

I particularly like that these are all natural phenomena and that they are perceived beyond or above the lettering which seems no longer the central premise of the work – a nice visual metaphor for forgetting, and for the gradual reclamation of the line by nature, perhaps.

I feel sure that this piece is, not for the first time, about being on the fine line between forgetting and remembering; and that something as concrete and humanly regulated as a journey down a railway line becomes something as complex, uncertain as these phenomena beyond human regulation (but nonetheless regulated according to the rigorous system of physics).

That all fits quite nicely with my overall approach to this project as I consider it in July 2020, nearly four months after the coronavirus made this project, too, into another kind of uncertain journey.

The Fallibility of Human Memory

In my MFA work based on Anglesey’s disused Amlwch railway line, I have reached a point where I am interested in the idea of memory and its subjectivity; and in the presentation and preservation of remembered information. My subject meditates on the past and nostalgia, and reflects upon the fragile distinction between remembering and forgetting.

Memories can grow, change, alter and be lost. My most recent experiments have brought me towards this awareness of the subjectivity and fallibility of memory. Certain methods (especially ink drawing with a dip pen) seem well suited to that because of the scratchy and uncertain nature of the line they can produce at times.

Using as my information sources from a booklet and fundraising poster produced by Amlwch Central Railways, I have found the following information, which I now wish to consider:

  • The gradient profile of the line (its ups and downs along its route) across the island of Anglesey.

  • Numbers of railway wagons that each station yard can accommodate.

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The image above is an extract that acts as a record of the drawing’s planning (calculating scales and positions), and also its execution: (random dip pen strokes recording my sometimes fraught attempts to get the ink flowing to my satisfaction after each reloading of the nib from the ink bottle). So there is a co-mingling of planning, process and performance in this record of my own preparations.

There always seems to be other work behind a work. For me, drawing is the perfect way to explore that, both art historically and practically.

Is this important or valuable information? Who is to say? For me, it is valuable information precisely because it is so marginal. At risk. It could easily fall completely out of human memory. This fragility and contingency is what interests me most about it. How can I attempt to remember it?

Working on the piece in response to this:

When I started this piece, I did not bargain for the process of using a dip pen in a compass to be quite so tricky, uncertain and even messy:

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In my mind, I was initially imagining something cleaner and more precise; perhaps the use of a “draughtsmanlike” tool such as compass prompted me in this direction. (I briefly wanted to be a draughtsman when I was younger, back in the day when the profession still existed). I was prepared for the scratchiness of the line but not for the occasional huge blot.

My initial reaction to these blots was that they they made the drawing a failure, but then I thought again and pushed onwards. What if these ink blots exemplify that very fragility, mutability and uncertainty that I was considering. I decide to work through them and finish the drawing. (There are also occasional such blots and missteps in my copper ink drawing “A Crack In The Record”.)

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In this above photo, you can see the trace of the railway gradient profile line, pierced with a needle in advance so that I can stitch the copper thread into it. Copper remains a “leitmotif” material in this project. (“Leitmotif” is a musical term: on the path ahead I am thinking about musical notation – and of course music, both as text and sound.)

Some of the circle sets are finer and clearer than others, as I warm to the task and become more settled in my process, but there are always blots, always elements of “information” that are clearer or better executed than others.

I feel like allowing elements of chance into the drawing take it into something more than just a piece of “illustrative” draughtsmanship or an (encoded) infographic. In other words, the drawing is a record of its own hesitant development. I like that “in progress” quality in this piece. I think it chimes with the “in progress”, “about the journey as much as the destination”, “start and see how it goes” nature of the railway preservation/restoration effort itself. I think back to Tim Ingold, and the method of learning by doing and not the other way around.

Final Piece. “The Fallibility of Human Memory”.

Ink and copper thread on paper, H400mm X W800mm

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