The latest podcast from BBC’s ‘Scotland Outdoors’ features a fascinating half-hour of host Mark Stephen walking, talking and drawing with my good friend, the artist Tansy Lee Moir. Tansy mainly draws and paints trees – in a unique way that is as much an emotional response to movement through time, as creative rendering of forms observed in wood.
If you’re longing for a quiet moment of sanity in the mad train-wreck of our times, this could well be it…
Links below for various outlets, or simply search in your own preferred place of podding. 🙂
Are there particular gestures or ways of standing or moving about that you recognise as being ‘in your family’?
I feel we seem to carry a kind of inheritance of gestures: not all our gestures, but some for sure. Often it’s the people around us who spot us doing these first. Sometimes I can’t help seeing the shape of familiar (or should that be familial?)gestures – even in other things…
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waiting
ushering
greeting
conducting
breathing
dancing
sailing the sea of stories
our crazy fool tree
What is the CTGA of that raised eyebrow? What DNA says how so to stand, or defines a pinkie gently mouthed, cornered while listening, chin propped on a half-fist of possible answers?
You might wave to shift this hand aside, but it’s not just me. It’s my uncle mulling over when and what to cook, it’s Mum over-knuckling her sigh to shrug a smile – Who knows, maybe?
She’s there again in our skyline tree, its arms grown thrown-out akimbo – as photographed once mid-stride grin, hat on, jazz hands a-twinkle-o! My muscles lift a mirror-back so silvering her echo.
Archaeo-acoustics. You might never have heard of it before – I hadn’t!
As the parts of the word suggest, it is about the study of sound in the ancient past. There’s something almost defiantly hasn’t-that-horse-already-bolted? aboutthis as an idea. How can you investigate sound in the past, before the age of sound recording? Reading a New Scientist article recently, I began to understand that researchers are finding ways to add rigour to work that has sometimes seemed too subjective for scientific study. Their painstaking methods and technologies have gradually earned the right for the results of field studies to be taken seriously.
For prehistoric rock art sites a core idea to many acoustic archaeologists is that the majority of locations were selected in part because of unusual acoustic properties. Some sites are exceptionally resonant while others also have very long ‘sustain times’. Some have unusual sound reflecting characteristics that can instil the unnerving sensation of another presence.
When modern visitors go to see rock or cave art locations we are often speak in reverend whispers – as if in an art gallery, or even a church. Ironically this is not the best way to experience the acoustic of a space as early humans might have done. Whether with singing, drums, clapping, or flutes – that kind of experience is brought alive through making sound. It is almost as if there is an open secret within the space itself – an unexpectedly open door towards lives in our most distant past. To step through, we must break the silence, and be prepared to listen and experience what comes back.
Researchers working with replica instruments in ancient rock art sites report that ‘completing’ the instrument by playing in these spaces can give a somewhat ‘polite’ sound, like that of a bone flute, far more depth and volume – making a cave itself sing. Here is a mesmerising clip of flautist Anna Friedericke Potengowski playing a replica bone flute in the bone flute in the Hohle Fels cave –
Links to the New Scientist article by Benjamin Taub that I was reading, and recordings by Anna Friedericke Potengowski are given at the end of this post.
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I found all these ideas highly resonant. I made some visual art working with images from a video shoot for a poetry film a couple of years ago with dancer Suzi Cunningham. I felt Suzi’s movement had a ritualistic – almost shamanic quality that fitted well here. As well as rock art, I used another image of the surface of a remote highland lochan. For me that symbolises both a wave, like sound, propagating, but also a traditional kind of portal. A way to think into another.
Then I wrote the poem. It references the ideas above, and tries to fuse experiences of seeing and hearing at an ancient rock art site. There is a kind of synesthesia going on, where the colour and sounds intermingle to reveal something that may previously have remained hidden.
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Resonance
In darkness’s drum-struck umbers hand-clap herd-thrum, under-sky rolling.
In still ice flutes blue-bone green and splinter, a river seasoned through high cascades.
Coming to this under-cut cliff-face you must emancipate a shadow life –
stone-ghost vague in shallow light, an echo-self sketched from crimson beats.
Your reverent whisper pales to chime our galleries around, above, aloud and ochre.
Hold – strike a baritone, song-cast high in amber, sway and russet. Hear again and listening, see.
This wee poem was inspired by the photograph, which I took in the road outside where I live.
Many years ago, while Scots language lived around us, we were supposed not to think well of it, and certainly not to speak it. Nowadays, thankfully, that attitude has been consigned to the past.
stoury – dirty, grimy dub – a puddle doutsum – doubtful, ambiguous siver – a drain or gutter laund – land sleekit – sleek, smooth, also untrustworthy twinin’ – twisting craiter – creature, animal bonny – beautiful baith – both
Sometimes I sift through my (elephantine!) photographic archive just trying to figure out what on Earth I am at. Patterns of things that interest me emerge, and I come away knowing how I see things a little better – though generally feeling not very much the wiser!
The photographs here were taken over several years. Some of them are of individuals I photograph often, some I have visited only once. I feel they are all connected.
As ever, I hope these bring you joy..
(please tap to view full images)
Solitrees
Some of these are done with standing. Some lost limbs that’d shatter me, and sail on unperturbed. Some met once in distant places, some touch-stone regular, our own signs of life.
Getting on with growing. Getting on since before this breath, irrelevant acknowledgement – or admiration or pride at imagined poise, at such tight-grain stoicism. No – none of that, and none of these.
Each one as one alone, on hill or moor or burst from drystane boundaries. Some are down now, some still to dance slow-spun solos long after this passing glance, respect, remark – long after this moment’s photograph.
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If you’re interested in more of my ongoing photographic work, please have a look at these portfolio galleries I recently put on my website – let me know what you think in comments here.
sds 