The rains have fallen well these days… the curative, fertilising elixirs of the sky descending with warmth and charge… risen from the atlantic ocean, softening the earth here… the thunderer impregnating the earth, greening these sacred isles.. the eaves drip… no need to fetch a pale from the lake… a different quality of water now for the daub.

Photo by Jo Hallington

Inside the walls are fresh, the floor changing shape, reforming and compacting with each foot print of an old folk dance circled around by teenage timidity and self consciousness.

Three amusing questions from Fridays school group “Has anyone ever told you that you look like Johnny Depp?”, “Do you ever brush your hair?”, “Do you have a television?”

“Small miracles” said Alex after witnessing some of the teenager’s transformations… She also spoke of Beuys and materials… a kinship smiled inside me… a social sculptural current… ancestral skills… …the man who fell from the sky… tradition and teachings… close to my heart and informing this work is a depth of spiritual practice… nature based spirituality, druidic, shamanic, gnostic, yogic… the truth cannot be known through words alone. The artists role is akin to the ‘cunning folk’ and ‘wise women’ of old… the shamanic individuals dwelling on the fringe of society yet their work impacting and breathing at its very heart… healing and therapeautic (though sometimes just for the artist), attempting to serve the whole.

Photo by Jo Hallington

Trina (forgive my spelling) spoke of Rabindranath Tragore’s houses in Calcutta (the place of Kali) of his seasonal structures… this solsticial dwelling, site specific, aligned to sun and stella significance is a perfect shell for the human sized hermit crab… the sun in the abstracted station of Cancer. This vitruvian house being measured by the proportions of my body, the wisdom of the flesh… never having read Vitruvious’ Ten Books of Architecture, but having a commitment to humbly studying the ever unfolding book of nature… a thought for the Kalahari Bushman, the Australian Aborigine and the North American Indian Scout… all advanced readers of nature’s book… when we learn text do we sacrifice this practice of dedicated nature awareness? When we learn to speak to we sacrifice the subtle arts of knowing? Indigenous African spirituality considers the use of language as a manifestation of our distance from the source… hmm so many words.. but we seem to thrive on them. Words contain power, they hurt and they heal… text too. Schopenhauer considered music to be the purest manifestation of the Will… then Architecture… then less pure forms as the means of expression move into spoken and written word and symbols, more complex and needing decoding.

Photo by Jo Hallington

…and they all lived together in a crooked little house…

its late
storytelling tomorrow
the work here is still ongoing… still refining and smoothing the walls, the floor and decorating the walls… there was encouraging and familiar thunder above when I finished the point of the cone of thatch… …this happened whilst put the top on to large round house at Barbury Castle last year… thunder, sky, fertility, affirmation… fare well for now