ARTISTS TALKING

# 1 [3 April 2007]

I'm preparing for my first feast day in St Andrew's church, Wood Dalling. Before that, I think a small launch party will be in order after all the work that's gone into planning the project and securing Grants for the Arts funding. I'm thinking medieval sweetmeats and ale. Oh yes, definitely ale.

By the end of the year's residency I expect to know St Andrews' interior and exterior intimately - I might even have given individual names to the highly vocal ducks (and moorhens) who inhabit the large pond in front of the church. Not to mention the barn owl who seems to live somewhere round the back.

Already, Trevor and I cycle up to the church quite frequently and wander, breathing in the dust that dances in the sunlight; the cobwebs strung from pew to pew that festoon the poppyheads; significant moments in countless lives absorbed by the stone, flint, plaster and wood and continuously exhaled - a gentle exhalation.

# 2 [4 April 2007]

I've noticed that contemporary art often seems to highlight gritty urban themes, while rurally-based work seems to fall into a few well-worn areas like agriculture/science, nature/culture or botany/sex. I guess one of my aims for Festial is to do something different. I hope it will no less challenging or shocking than the grittiest urban art. But I'd also like it to be spare and thoughtful. Not dry or remote, not a historical re-enactment, not a worthy-but-predictable 'heritage' project. Can I do it? Watch this space!

One of the hazards of the journey will be the uncertainty I feel over how to handle the religious side of things. I hope I will discover how medieval Christianity and paganism interact and/or conflict with each other - and that will inevitably involve an exploration of my own views, beliefs, hopes and fears as much as an exploration of anything which might be objectified as being outside of the self.

Religion is still a difficult area, I know. Even in this secular society. Even after Tracey Emin's jaw-dropping lack of compromise, after Damien Hirst's cut-up animals, after Jake and Dinos Chapman's vision of hell, after that enormous portrait of Myra Hindley created from the handprints of children.

In 2005 I made an installation for the annual open application contemporary art exhibition at Salthouse Church in Norfolk. Hinting at the links between the Bronze Age barrow cemetery on the adjacent Salthouse Heath and the medieval church, I collected plant material and made 'incense', which I scattered in and around a censer which I placed on a pillowcase. In medieval times, incense would have been burned routinely in that very church. But when the vicar came round to vet the work (yes, the vicar, even though the church was to all intents and purposes a contemporary gallery for the duration), he baulked at the title incense. The work was allowed to stay, but was retitled rite, and the list of materials had to speak for itself.

I've shown the churchwardens examples of my previous work and they are happy to let me go ahead with the project. In fact, they seem keen. But do they really know what they are letting themselves in for? What if there are boundaries that I unwittingly transgress and then end up fuming that it is just 'ridiculous' (if only to myself and my long-suffering partner!) if the church people don't like it?

# 3 [6 April 2007]

John Mirk's Festial is an early fifteenth century collection of sermons for the major saints and festivals of the church year, for use by priests who were not learned or ambitious enough to find sermon materials for themselves. These sermons rely heavily on legends, exempla and popular tales.

Festial was a runaway bestseller and went through multiple editions.

With my project, I'm opening myself up to possibilities. I'm going to be hanging around in the church, fully receptive to interaction with the spirits of medieval people who might have enjoyed these down-to-earth sermons with their somewhat humorous, bawdy and gory dimensions.

In fact, to mark the start of the project (in advance of the celebratory imbibing of ale mentioned in a previous post, that is!) I intend to make a kind of vigil in the church. Just sitting there in meditation, being present to the space, without feeling I should be recording things or taking photographs or making anything. Just seeing what happens: something will.

# 4 [10 April 2007]

It's exactly a week now until my first mentoring session with Katie Walton, artistic programme manager for BCA in Bedford. My Arts Council proposal included a programme of mentoring for the year of my residency to help me shift my practice up a metaphorical gear or two. So Katie will be giving me advice on marketing/promotion  and getting the work out there. And Jo Clemence, gallery co-ordinator for the Babylon Gallery in Ely will be giving me critical feedback on work produced during Festial. I'm excited about this and anxious to make the most of the opportunity, but at the same time it's somewhat nerve-wracking, especially the 'critical feedback' bit!

At the moment the whole thing is gloriously fuzzy and abstract and full of potential. I don't need to know what I'm going to make in response to the site: that's the whole idea!! BUT .... what if there's nothing to offer Jo to criticise? What if there is, and she has to gently tell me I'm wasting my time (and worse still, hers)? I don't like the sound of either of these scenarios. But I know that the sort of work I do always involves risks of this kind.

Anyway, more positively, I'm looking ahead to my first date in the medieval calendar. Or make that three dates, as it's Rogationtide — the Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday before Ascension Day. Now, this really was a time of feasting, fun and letting your hair down in medieval times (not to mention sending those pesky demons flying over the boundary into the neighbouring parishes!) In my excellent resource on these matters 'The Stripping of the Altars' by Eamon Duffy, the entry drinkings in the index refers the reader straight back to the information about Rogationtide!! But more on all that later. For now, I'll just say that Trevor and I spent a lovely sunny Easter Sunday afternoon cycling around Wood Dalling investigating some of the places where you cross over the parish boundary ...

Oh yes, I've just realised I haven't yet mentioned quite an important feature of the project. I'm going to be keeping medieval time, instead of today's calendar. In pre-Reformation days, the Julian calendar was still in use, but adjustments made in the name of accuracy mean that we are now 13 days ahead. So, for example, St Andrew's Day is 30 November, but to experience it at the same time of year as medieval people did, I will have to keep it on 13 December.  Wood Dalling church is called St Andrew's and I've discovered that churches were actually named after saints' days rather than after the saints themselves — a subtle distinction.

# 5 [12 April 2007]

I know others have commented that it would be nice if a feedback mechanism could be built into this blogging thing. And I too find myself wondering whether anyone is actually out there apart from the bloggers themselves!

So, I now have an email address specifically for Festial — and I’d be happy to receive comments. Also, there’s now a Festial page on the World Tree website I share with my partner, and this will develop into a full project website when there’s a bit more to fill it with. It will be a means of showing work as it's made and I envisage it as a medium in its own right. My Grants for the Arts funding will enable me to buy a webcam ….

But first — perhaps tomorrow — the vigil.

festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk
http://www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html

# 6 [13 April 2007]

I decided to wait until next week for the vigil. This feels like a real luxury: to choose a day myself rather than being tied to a medieval feast date!

When first thinking about Festial, I planned to spend a day in Wood Dalling church each month, and of course I would choose a nice sunny day for it (medieval churches don't have central heating!). But now the idea of working with the actual feast dates has evolved it feels good to this rigorous conceptualist (too rigorous for my own good sometimes, believe me!) to have to take each day as it comes, no matter how inclement the weather.

But the vigil is different. The project proper hasn't started yet, and the vigil is just a way of trying to be open to whatever might be present - and I expect it to be a two-way process.

www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html

festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk

# 7 [16 April 2007]

Yesterday - another Sunday afternoon bike ride around Wood Dalling, stopping off at the church of course. This is a big village! Not that there are many houses, but they lie in little hamlets: 'Red Pits', 'Foundry Hill', 'Crabgate' and 'Norton Corner'. These are probably very old settlements. What they share is the sight of St Andrew's tower. In fact the parish boundary is like the rim of a wheel, with the church as the hub.

Last Sunday when we were out on the bikes, two seemingly identical black and white horses suddenly came into sight. A man and a woman, both hatless and with flowing hair, were riding bareback side-by-side across a field from the direction of a wood. Somehow an almost otherworldly vision - you felt they might disappear into mist.

Anyway, this week we saw the couple again; the woman was tending a gypsy caravan and they had wood sculpture for sale by the road. Wonder whether they and the other inhabitants of Wood Dalling will be interested in Festial? The church congregation is probably tiny so I'll need to find another way of letting local people know about the project.

festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk
www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html

# 8 [17 April 2007]

Today seemed like a good day for the vigil. Well, I say 'vigil' but it was never going to compete with the kind of thing medieval people did. It's recorded that parishes had to find money to supply beer and bread and fire for the people who kept watch from Good Friday to Easter Sunday each year. But I was pleased to realise that as the date of Easter varies (the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Spring Equinox; um ... how pagan is that?!) my vigil surely must have coincided with some of the medieval Easter Vigils.

In fact, I spent some of the time wandering around in the church taking photographs. Although I've been there lots of times with Trevor, it was actually the first time I'd been there alone. I found I could think there (and more to the point was getting ideas), which is good to know as I'll be spending time alone in the church when Festial begins 'for real'.

It was a lovely sunny afternoon and I started by walking around the graveyard, accompanied by a cacophony of cooing woodpigeons, loudly declaiming ducks and the constant 'caw caw' of rooks in their adjacent treetop rookopolis.

But inside, the church was COLD! Although it felt good to give myself time to listen to the mysteriously unidentifiable empty-church sounds and to watch the sunlight and shadows shifting, half an hour of sitting still was enough. I'm a bit worried - will I be hardy enough to spend extended periods of time 'just being there' in January??

# 9 [19 April 2007]

Spent the day in Cambridge yesterday and met with Katie, my mentor. I've realised how good it is to talk over aspects of the project and especially to be reassured that there really is something there that is worth sharing with an audience.

One thing Katie was keen on was that I spread the word amongst the inhabitants of Wood Dalling - something I was musing over in this blog a couple of days ago. As she says, if you're making contemporary art in an area where it may be little experienced, understood or appreciated, you almost owe it to contemporary artists as a community (however that may be defined!) to make the most of an opportunity like this. And on a practical note, it might just help to avoid embarrassment when I'm caught doing what will probably seem to be very strange things - it's ok, she's an artist!

# 10 [22 April 2007]

A local pottery is interested in becoming involved in Festial by supplying mugs and jugs, based on medieval originals, for the oft-mentioned ale! This is good news and will be great both from practical and promotional points of view. I've never done this kind of seeking-sponsorship thing before - the idea just came to me when I was washing up a mug and suddenly thought of contacting the pottery that had made it. It's a place up on the North Norfolk coast that attracts a lot of visitors so it will be great if the potters are interested in making info about my work available to people who visit their premises.

Another development is that I've started making work in the church. Wood Dalling church has 51 amazing wooden poppyheads (yes, I counted!) on the ends of the pews, all ideosyncratic and individual, and I'm going to make each of them a fitted cover from white bedsheets and pillowcases. This is a large undertaking! I experimented yesterday with making a pattern for one of them, and it worked, so, hey, only 50 more to make. Except that, as Trevor pointed out, although every one is different, some of them are similar enough so that they could share the pattern for their cover. Duh - why didn't I think of that?! Phew, that will cut the workload down substantially. The idea is to have a piece of work ready for our exhibition in early-mid June in Norwich. Slash07 will show the work of the eight artists in the artists' group that Trevor and I belong to. Coincidentally, it is to be held in a church - one that's hired out as a gallery - St Margaret's, St Benedict's Street, Norwich.

festial[at]world-tree[dot]co[dot]uk

http://www.world-tree.co.uk/festial.html