Cyrus Garden End & Beginning

Although the Cyrus Garden Project, as funded by the Arts Council, has officially ended, the visual research and inquisitiveness continues unabated. The initial points of interest and departure remain, although perhaps morphed or transmuted or diverted into new and different areas.  These new pockets of interest are connected by threads (perhaps silken, who knows) to the umbrella of WW2 and Persian Gardens. So much remains a continuing work in progress. And as ever, I have difficulty editing out these interests, so many are fascinating and perhaps distracting.

Perhaps a mini review is in order? A list of outcomes and shortcomings, such as those sent in the Arts Council report? Except I think that all these things are embedded within this scrapbook and there for all who care to delve into.

The end of the project calls into question the aims of this visual scrapbook now  - is this a natural conclusion or an arbitary deadline somewhat disconnected from the organic nature of the research process itself? This is, of course, one of the difficulties I experienced through all those months of creating the Afterlife -Docks Inventory book, trying to define the elements of a process whilst still in the midst of the process. (Incidentally, I am still working on different versions of the inventory, just as the research process has continued.) It is all a journey of discovery.

This image took my fancy today, not sure why.  It is a telephone in the Western Approaches Museum, Liverpool from The Touring Territories first research visit there.

Rendelsham Forest Traces Poster

As part of Satellite's Touring Territories Project for the Space Exchange exhibition at Aid & Abet, Nicola Naismith and I have produced this double-sided limited edition poster. It is in a pile at the gallery and free to take a copy away, until they're all gone. It's part of our East Anglian UFO Archive in Space Exchange. 

We journeyed on a day-tour around Suffolk, re-visiting Orford Ness, interviewing a witness to a UFO sighting  and  ending up in the woods. Stumbling around the dark interior of Rendlesham Forest is quite an enclosing, verging on claustrophobic, experience with rows of trees leading off in all directions. As we came out of the wooded area at twilight, with 5 minutes to spare before the gates were locked, we found the well-populated  and barbecue-smokey camp-site, which felt rather surreal.

Jersey bus timetable

Apart from losing my phone, I've been rounding off the travel arrangements for the research trip - 6 flights in total, all in tiny prop planes in which you can sit in the back and almost touch the pilot on the shoulder to offer him/her a mint. I think I've missed the boat so to speak in getting a Jersey bus timetable and a Guernsey Perry's Guide before departure. The trip makes me think of the whole journey as container for this research period. My thinking threads seem to trail through many distinct places and to physically take me to quite some destinations, albeit fairly close to home at this point. This map of Thomas Browne's environment, once he'd settled in Norfolk, captures this idea. It's from a leaflet about Browne in St. Peter Mancroft Church, Norwich, where (most of) Browne is buried. I cannot remember if his skull came back or not, it does tell you in the leaflet. Just checked, and it was re-interred in 1922 aged 317 years. The translation of the latin skull memorial begins, "O noble head lie safe in Peter's keeping,"

I might have an old bus timetable.