Hidden Depths

Reflections on water and art

Photo © Michela Griffith 

Hello, and welcome.

It’s been a week of yet more rain so I have been leaf peeping from under a big umbrella. We had one gloriously sunny morning. Mostly I’ve been trying to inhale and absorb ‘Autumn’ before all the leaves are stolen by the wind. I also had a pleasant time yesterday sharing what I do with fellow creatives; greetings if you’ve come over to take a look, and thank you for your kind comments.

Earlier this year I spent time working with the wonderfully astute artist, coach and fellow water woman Samantha Clark of

The Life Boat

. At the outset I began trying to figure out what my recent work was about; I wanted to understand it. Was it about ‘something’, or subconsciously trying to tell me something, if I did but listen more closely?  The series that prompted my navel gazing was ‘Ephemeral’. 

For some months I’d had a collection of words pinned to a board on the wall.  They reflected (it’s hard to get away from watery words) what I thought was important, but thereafter they had sat there quietly until, as part of our ‘Quiet Coach’ Sam shared Mark Doty’s ‘Souls on Ice’ with me, as much for its introduction as the poem itself. By the time I had read half of the vibrant vivid prose, almost as alive as the fish had once been, it prompted me to run off and write something myself before the spark died. This is what I wrote.

The Quiet Words

I’ve written some notes.  Trying to distil into words the ‘why’ of it.  The fuel and feed for this consumption.

It’s not new.  I’ve written of it before… this pull that water exerts on me.

On my pin board the paper words have sat quietly.  If I’m honest I’ve looked at them infrequently, and I don’t know what I expected them to spark or say.

Around water they ripple out and around.

At the top I have place and, importantly, curiosity which has yet to kill this cat.  I realise that I missed repetition.

Trickling down are 

Still/calm

Flow

Marks

Details and textures.  The latter now strikes me as odd.  Perhaps I meant pattern.

On the flip side I have 

Reflection

Mirror

Distortion

And the tension of Soft / sharp

Do I look at the pools, or do they interrogate me?  They’ve changed the way that I see.  Perhaps they’ve changed me?  My window has become a trick mirror and as my vision has changed the water has absorbed and reflected back my own, myopic, way of seeing.

Intimate.  As in intimate landscape photography; we’re part of the scene.

We’ve become familiar. 

What do I want to intimate with this body of work?

Layers

Transparency

Ephemeral.  I started with ethereal, but lost it somewhere.  Evocation was important too.

As medium: the idea that water might not just be the message, though I’m still trying to decipher what it’s saying to me, or of me.  And what I want this asemic way of writing to communicate.

The last is vessel, now at a jaunty angle as if adrift on a rough sea.  Riding the waves.  At the time this was the last word to be birthed, but felt important.  I’m trying to recall why and I consult my dictionary.   “A container; a repository; a means of holding onto, or transporting something.”  I laugh now and ponder at “a person into whom some quality… is infused”.  Is the work the container, the means of transport, or am I?

Am I now the vassal of my muse, subordinate to and dependent on something that comes and goes, along with my energy?

Beyond seeing, I’m also learning a language, an honesty and an openness when I put pixel to page.  There doesn’t at this point seem any point in pretending to be someone else.  I inhale vapour and exhale what… ?

New worlds bubble to the surface.

It’s always felt instinctive, my relationship with this symbiotic, amniotic, twin.  The way I see – feel – the images.  Yet now a print feels inadequate.  It brings a machine-ness, a predictability into something that feels as if it should be evolved too.  

I keep cycling back to memory.  Perhaps this is where I need to dig?

And Sam has unearthed ambiguity.  

I’ve started to dwell on the linearity of the pools, of the track that they line, of my movement, of their flow.  Of time; of life.  I contemplate reflecting this (that word again) in the form of output – a concertina book (leporello if you’re posh), a scroll.  Mapping on GPS the scribble of my walking.  Overlaying this or a stream of words along with the images.  Mixing media as well as metaphors.

In writing this I realise there’s something else there too:  that this found beauty, these evocations, come yes from nature, but also from that which was man made.  From a long grassed, raspberry rippled and rushed berm cutting straight across the edge of the moss with on either side a ditch once dug.  Nature has waved her wand a little, and softened the lines.  I’m trying to do that too.  Leaf litter, lichen, birch branches and moss punctuate the now broken drains, the stuttering series of pools, but here is something built for utility, still used occasionally for the quad bike pheasant feeder refill run, but mostly left to the deer and red squirrels, the birds and the hares.  And me.  I very very rarely meet anyone else.  And that has an appeal too.

I’ve started to follow the deer paths through the pines, and to pause where the water lies at their feet after the wet.  Here is a new palette and I’ve found, made, a new softness in which, back home, I can make my own marks and watch as they in turn fade.  There it is again: transience, impermanence, and shape shifting memories. I was here, briefly.  

This slips me back to a blog post I wrote about ‘The Reflecting Pool’, and the ‘autumn knowingly stared’ of ‘Gold Dust’ by Tori Amos: 

Sights and sounds
Pull me back down another year
I was here
I was here

Another circle.  My progress as it is may be as convoluted as the lines of sunlight I transcribed from the River Dove and which haunt me still.

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Photo © Michela Griffith 

Now I’ve begun to accept that this - a rational, a reason, a context - isn’t a given, or an essential. That beauty, and curiosity, and intrinsic reward are reasons enough. That there are benefits to being creative that extend far beyond anything that results from our endeavours.  

While I choose my words carefully, photography and art are for me instinctive, an expressive emotional response to things that provoke my curiosity. I’m feeling my way towards an outcome as much as anything. Although grounded in place they are for me a way of slipping my earthly chains for a while and floating free. And when I return to this world I am refreshed.

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This week’s writing bubbled back up to the surface prompted by an excellent article and podcast by

Dr Victoria Powell

, a reflection on

the value of art for the maker, what goes on for the person who creates it. Sometimes I wonder whether that is actually the most valuable thing about art.

Art for Artists' Sake

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Thank you for reading FLOW. If my writing is new to you and you’d like to catch up with recent publications on Substack you’ll find them on my home page.

My photography and mixed media art live here.

Until next week, when I may be slightly less wordy,

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