The world is probably still there when you don’t see it but you don’t know for sure. At night, when the owls call out to each other, the fog slowly fills the valley and in the morning you wake up in the clouds. Every morning I check on the boat and we wait together until the world starts to appear again, little bits at the time, the sound of church bells reaching us before the tower appears. Underneath the green, the boat is as blue as the sky on a sunny day, but it has soaked up the colour of the field it has been waiting in and matches the blades of grass.
Where did everybody go? Manolo left but his boat is still here, how many hands touched the stones of the walls in the building around the old oven? Who baked bread in there? Who planted the apple trees, who threw the fox skull in the well? Who waited for the fog to rise, like I do every morning?
The seeds resemble arrows when they are released, a two centimetre long shaft with an arrowhead, the seed proper. They have tiny feather-like protrusions so they can be carried through the air. As soon as they hit a surface they change shape, in a whirling movement the straight line becomes a spiral, and through this movement the arrow drills itself into the surface it has landed on.
“We called them the clock when we were children” somebody told me, “and we stuck them on our sweaters to see them twirl around like the hand of a clock. ”
I’ve been catching colours. They are in glass bottles and every colour is connected to the landscape and has a story behind it. The brightest ink, a pinkish red, is made from pokeweed berries, a plant that grows everywhere and people try to eradicate in vain these days. The Spanish named it after its colour, hierba carmín, carmine red. It was traditionally used to dye fabrics but also to paint fingernails. The faint green is made from lichen that grow on the drystone walls of the ruins. The black was made in summer, oak galls found on a walk were crushed and mixed with spring water, rusty nails from one of the abandoned houses and left in the sun for a week. Greater celandine gave a beautiful yellow. The colour of the plant, flower, berry, wall scrapings, tree parts, metal items —you can experiment with anything—isn’t always the colour you will get after you’ve processed it. Some colours that are most present in the landscape are the hardest to catch: green is hard to get, especially a bright or a dark green, and blue, blue is a dream. It is in the sky, in the water, it is on the doors and window frames of the houses where people once lived.
“Exercise in being here” is an installation in 3 parts that combines the past and the present, reality and imagination. It is about leaving, about what is left behind, about longing, dreaming, creating something new with what has been around for a long time, using local materials like plants and stones, stories from the local people and the history of the place; in a way mirroring what is happening in O Castro Art Village where a new story is being written, respecting the history and archeology of the village while breathing new life in it through art, attentiveness, a sharing of minds, a bringing together of people and ideas.
1. Ruin
* Carmine red plant stalks with paper boats folded out of an old account pad that was found in one of the old houses in O Castro.
* A business suit that was worn by the artist during her journey to O Castro and working process and got transformed by drawing a dry stone wall on the fabric, similar to the walls the ruined building is made from.
* A white shirt that was worn by the artist, dyed carmine red with berries from the pokeweed plant.
* Blue bucket with a paper boat
2. Gallery space
* Forest made out of carmine red plant stalks with paper boats folded out of an old account pad that was found in one of the old houses in O Castro, supported by stones covered with mosses and little plants.
* Drawings made with natural pokeberry ink (hierba carmín)
* Seeds laid out on paper sheets resembling a mysterious language
* Glass bottle with ink and materials that were used in the creation of the installation
* Polaroid photos
3. Geodesic dome
* Video of the seeds of the erodium cicutarium, sound installation
* Lichen carpet
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