Fragments III
I have had a busy few months so I’ve been struggling to write much, but here are a few snippets from my notebook...
/
Recently I came across the painting Seven Sisters Dreaming by the Indigenous Australian artist Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi. Initially I was drawn in by the way the Seven Sisters, were painted so vibrantly in their ochre and red against the blue, the constellation of stars in the inky-blue sky. In the West we know these stars as the Pleiades, and I fell down an internet rabbit hole reading the stories told about this tiny constellation across the world. The connection of land, water, sky and space feels woven into this painting, as well as this connection of people throughout the ages looking at the land and the sky and telling each other stories.
/
Climbing in Albarracin last month, we were high up enough to be climbing alongside Map Lichen, so called because it looks like a map of a city, with its road networks branching out, or the patchwork of fields. I like how the same lichen that evokes an aerial view was the one chosen to spend ten days in space.
/
The most recent full moon, the Beaver Moon, was so bright and large I could make out some of the features on its surface. The names of its craters and seas such as the Sea of Clouds or the Ocean of Storms bring to mind a map from a fantasy tale.
/
I have been collecting local or folk names for things. I like how you can make a map of the UK with names for woodlice (in Cornwall they call them Grammersows and my Mum said this is what they called the Grammar School students when she grew up in Penwith). It is similar with cleavers, which I grew up calling goosegrass, but I also like sticky willy or robin-run-the-hedge. On Dartmoor, near where I grew up, they call Cup Lichen ‘Dartmoor Matchsticks’.
/
This is all fascinating, thankyou for sharing!