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    thickets / windthrow / aldbury nowers



    That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit’s thread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.


    The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino, 1957


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    works on/under paper, hertfordshire



    "I'd like to peek into the drawing room, where you sometimes see only an open door into yet another room beyond the drawing room."

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    Nikolai Gogol, The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol, 1835


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    frithsden beeches, hertfordshire



    To put a city in a book, to put the world on one sheet of paper - maps are the most condensed humanised spaces of all...

    They make the landscape fit indoors, make us masters of sights we can't see and spaces we can't cover.



    Robert Harbison, Eccentric Spaces, 1977

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    cleveland way / north yorkshire / 2016-2025



    I suppose it is submerged realities that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality.
    But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like,
    through which everything one sees in a dream seems, paradoxically, much clearer.
    ​A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert.

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    W.G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, 1995


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    tarns, time & tributaries / 14 days on whillan beck / eskdale



    Water hollows stone,

    wind scatters water,

    stone stops the wind.

    Water, wind, stone.



    Wind carves stone,

    stone’s a cup of water,

    water escapes and is wind.

    Stone, wind, water.



    Wind sings in its whirling,

    water murmurs going by,

    unmoving stone keeps still.

    Wind, water, stone.



    Each is another and no other:

    crossing and vanishing

    through their empty names:

    water, stone, wind.



    Octavio Paz, "Wind, Water, Stone”, The Collected Poems of Octavio Paz, 1957-1987.




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    A brown musically moving beauty, the earth’s fullness
    Slides towards the sea. An escape
    Of earth-serpent, with all its hoards, casting the land, like an old skin,
    Pulling its body from under the eye.


    Ted Hughes, Fairy Flood (River), 1983


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    photo sketches / hertfordshire



    We were picking apart a problem in linguistic history and, as it were, examining close up the peak period of glory in the history of a language; in minutes we had traced the path which had taken it several centuries. And I was powerfully gripped by the vision of transitoriness: the way before our eyes such a complex, ancient, venerable organism, slowly built up over many generations, reaches its highest point, which already contains the germ of decay, and the whole intelligently articulated structure begins to droop, to degenerate, to totter towards its doom.

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    Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943