Gothvos Stones & Memory Cairns.

Mick Kidds Cuthbert Way.

Mick Kidd is one of the creators,(along with his school pal Chris Garratt) of Biff since the mid-1970s. Chris Garratt creates the artwork - a mixture of collage, found images, tracings and original drawings, and Mick Kidd is responsible for the text. I first met both Mick and Chris in the Isles of Scilly where they undertook seasonal work during their studies and formative collaborations in text and image, I was a whining school-boy, creeping like a snail unwillingly towards oblivion, they were a breath of something electric with origins in a cosmopolitan otherness emanating from the evil empire on the Mainland. Since those early days they have created their astute observational strips juxtaposing the theories and practice of urban cultures into manifestations of our contradictory times with wit and urgency as well as a great many other artworks for over the last 30 years. In July 2013 Mick Kidd set out for St.Cuthberts Way, a four day walk from Melrose Abbey to the holy island of Lindisfarne, another Scillonian connection for Mick could have been St Cuthbert's friendship with seals, those mythical sirens beckoning the hapless mariner into perilous rocks and fogs of unknowing.
St Cuthbert's Way runs from Melrose Abbey in the Scottish Borders to the Holy Island of Lindisfarne off the coast of Northumberland in England. The route climbs over the fringes of the Eildon Hills before following stretches of the mighty River Tweed and the Roman Dere Street. It then passes Cessford Castle before a fine hill ridge is traversed en route to the attractive village of Kirk Yetholm. The route then skirts the northern edges of the Cheviot Hills to cross the border and descent to the fine old market town of Wooler. The final stretch crosses the Northumberland countryside for the dramatic finale across the causeway to Holy Island and its dramatic castle and ruined abbey.
 On this occasion a heat wave was a greater cause of any meteorological concern, it was not until reaching the Cheviots with a cool mantle of cloud cover and a granite landscape that a possible reaction was sensed and brought forth. The stone from  Mounts Bay, Penzance was positioned in a dip onto the fine grained surface of a semi exposed Cheviot boulder, there it was photographed and there it remained. 

Mick Kidds walk along St.Cuthberts Way

It wasn't until Mick had reached Lindisfarne that he sensed another similar reaction at the sight of another similar sized stone in the Holy Island Gardens, that the stone had the word "Phlox" scrawled upon it gave rise to a lot of potential metaphor, particularly as the castle and gardens are the location for Roman Polanski's 1966 film Cul De Sac: a causeway classic in living black and white, the sort of material that Mick and Chris would lovingly transform into a metaphor for some miracle of culture reduced or inflated to urban cliche. Phlox is a native american plant used by Americas original inhabitants as an eyewash and a blood purifier. The roots were also boiled to make preparations to heal venereal diseases. Mick's dilemma was met by taking a photograph of both stones whilst thinking "maybe I should have waited till I got to Lindisfarne before placing the stone so everyone would wonder about the name of a plant they had never heard of!"

Mick Kidds arrival on Holy Island after walking along the St Cuthberts Way.

    The Wild Blue Phlox (and other Phlox species) was one of the first native american wildflowers

to be collected by European explorers and exported to Europe. Because this plant

cultivated well in Europe, it became a very popular flower.

    In Victorian Britain, young women frequently carried bouquets of flowers, which commonly included Wild Blue Phlox. 

This flower symbolized a proposal of love and

a wish of pleasant dreams.

An empty space in which artists and audiences allow their imaginations to meet and make the impossible, possible.

Taylors Island, Carn Morval Scilly.
The journey between incidental and potential cairns: ephemeral markers purposefully lost or specifically found, the beginning of a cairn and the end of another. Walking defines the spectacle and the spectated. The body in the space taking hold of the potent object and placing it, displaces it in a unique composition, a tabula rasa or a hard-wired intuitive response to those forgotten piezoelectric sensitivities?. Either way, there is a decisive moment, a sensory phenomena to experience. The querents hand in touch with the stone, imbues it with warmth and so begins walking perhaps aware of other stones, cairns: a single placed stone or piles of stones heaped high and hundreds of metres wide at the base. Familiar sights, similar material and effecting similar responses. Could cairns attract less visible qualities like a magnet attracts metallic objects, via the hand that conjures them or the great time-span of their existence or the etymology of  cairn ? Is stone the basest of materiality or would stone dissolve and transfigure into something unknown, for example during the Earths eventual and inevitable meltdown. Twinkle twinkle... will erased gothvos stones finally burn their way into the atmosphere of some distant star, How I wonder what you are.

St.Warna's Well, St.Agnes, Isles of Scilly - taken from inside the well.

The ephermeral approach to cairn building is to start a new cairn with each placed stone, the stone inevitably proves to be a powerful attractant to the aimless peripatetic who will pick it up and examine it or move it or gaze upon it and in so doing enlarge a network of happenstance, they connect to the sunken Gear Rock as it marinates under the sea in the spirit of Carreckloes forest, the castle in the forest the submerged landscape, the mountains of Mylor Slate and fierce heat of the volcanic magma initiated by the Sun and the origins of our own matieriality.

Peninnis Head towards Buzza Hill.

Cairns are heaped structures, they invite both participation via contributory intervention with additional stones and via the physical sensation of ascending. etymologically cairn can be applied to any horn shaped structure, in particular Mountain tops where the piled up composition references the mountain with scale, the vertical dimension of the cairn contrasts and completes the horizontal direction of the pilgrims journey across the landscape over distance.

Ascending and Descending simply by walking up a hill or down a hill are seminal moments for the sensitized observer, in walking up the hill they become increasingly isolated from the familiar, they also begin to stand out from the crowd below. They stand at the top and signal to the crowd below, waving, everyone sees them, they are all spectating this one performance and this one performance is both a moment of revery for the performer and a moment of sharing for the spectators. The primal non verbal paralinguistic gesture: to point with the finger and to will those fellow spectators not to look at your finger but to trace your fingers direction and look up at the person waving on top of the cairn.
First there is a mountain then there is no mountain, then there is.

Zennor Hill from Zennor Head, West Penwith Cornwall.

Cairns, heaps and tumeli, we walk past them everyday. Piles of stone, sand and gravel. The construct, the deconstructed, utilitarian, devalued, sacred, profane and each unique pile of rubbish intended for some secular purpose, bulldozed stones at the edge of a field, a religious offering - can these be of any conceivable interest?
Three or Two stones are used to mark claimed but uncollected driftwood from the foreshore in the Isles of Scilly by the foreshore walker too laden to carry the booty of the sea, or too optimistic that there will be better stuff coming ashore further along the coast.

Porthcressa Bank, Isles of Scilly.

Mick Kidds walk along St.Cuthberts Way