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

GODHVOS GOTHVOS

Riham Isaac's Gothvos 

Riham Isaac

I have been wondering where this precious stone should be placed until finally spontaneously I found its place. Today 9th of March 2014 I went to the Dead Sea in Palestine. It was raining softly but the weather was beautiful; I sat there in the sea on top of the mud for a few hours when I realized it is time to place the stone where I was sitting. I found a suitable spot where it fits the shape of the stone completely and decided to leave it and never know what will happen to it. Will it transform into mud? Will it drift away? Or will somebody find it? This symbolic meaning of its vague destiny meant a lot to me as I am in a moment in my life where I need to control less what happens in my future. I want to let go of my fear to love and be loved. I want to let go of my fears of unpredictable and uncertain future and rather embrace these changes. I want to let the waves shape the way and surrender for whatever possibilities it will draw me to. I want to place myself there in the middle of these great opportunities that life is giving me and be it!

http://electronicintifada.net/content/taking-you-home-palestinian-walks/7623

Emma Allegretti

Montale-Forse un mattino andando

Perhaps one morning walking in dry glassy air, I will turn, I will see the miracle complete: nothingness at my shoulder, the void behind me, with a drunkard’s terror. Then, as on a screen, trees houses hills will advance swiftly in familiar illusion, But it will be too late; and I will return, silently, to men who do not look back, with my secret.

Montale-Forse un mattino andando

Forse un mattino andando in un’aria di vetro, arida, rivolgendomi, vedrò compirsi il miracolo: il nulla alle mie spalle, il vuoto dietro di me, con un terrore di ubriaco.

Poi come s’uno schermo, s’accamperanno di gitto Alberi case colli per l’inganno consueto. Ma sarà troppo tardi; ed io me n’andrò zitto Tra gli uomini che non si voltano, col mio segreto.

From the submerged forest beneath St.Michaels Mount, Cornwall to high up in the Italian Alps, Emma Allegretti makes her reference to the Italian poet Montale describing intense thoughts on the nature of time and space, this was the voice that accompanied Emma's walk to such powerful and everlasting natural phenomena.

Two groups of quarries (Mont Viso and Mont Beigua, Italy) were the source of the Alpine axeheads that circulated throughout western Europe during the Neolithic. The quarries on Mont Viso (Oncino: Porco, Bulè and Milanese), discovered in 2003, have been radiocarbon-dated, and this has revealed that the exploitation of jadeites, omphacitites and eclogites at high altitude (2000—2400 m above sea level) seems to have reached its apogee in the centuries around 5000 BC. The products, in the form of small axe- and adze-heads, were distributed beyond the Alps from the beginning of the fifth millennium, a few being found as far away as the Paris Basin, 550 km from their source as the crow flies. However, it was not until the mid-fifth millennium BC that long axeheads from Mont Viso appeared in the hoards and monumental tombs of the Morbihan, 800 km from the quarries. Production continued until the beginning of the third millennium BC, but at this time the distribution of the products was less extensive, and the process of distribution operated in a different way: tools made from jadeite and eclogite are still found in the French Jura, but the extraction sites at the south-east foot of Mont Viso no longer seem to have been used. The variability in the geographical extent of the distribution at different times seems to be related to the social context of exploitation of the high-altitude quarries, which were only ever accessible for a few months each year. Bolzano is the final resting place of Otzi, the mummified 'iceman' who was found in a glacier on the Italian-Austrian border in 1991. 5300 years old and no grey hair - although he apparently suffered arthritis, worn teeth and had been mortally wounded by an arrow. There is a where the ancient one resides -  kept in a freezer. Alarms sound if the equipment malfunctions and an ER team relocates him to one of the three reserve coolers. When first discovered nobody presumed he was so old and precious. Apparently it is not uncommon for bodies of long-dead climbers to be spat out of glaciers. So Otzi was treated in a very rough and non-archaeological fashion when chipped and yanked from the ice. A jackhammer was used at one stage. It took three days before a forensic scientist spotted the bronze age axe. The rapidly thawing Otzi was snap-frozen and security stepped up to its current level.

From Tregaseal to Scilly

GASTON BACHELARD, in The Poetics of Space, invites recognition of the ways in which interior 

and imaginative landscapes, such as cupboards, houses, and forests, resonate in the 

phenomenological worlds of poets, novelists, explorers, and artists.

With my back turned away from the magnificent Carn Kenijack and the Tregaseal Stone Circle also behind me, the Gothvos Stone in the foreground leads the spectator across a verdent meadow of chemically enhanced grass, over St.Just, over the sea towards a present but invisible Isles of Scilly.

Porthenys - Mousehole.

"Famous" for christmas lighting and the Starry Gazey folk tales that fuel the winter processions and pub theatricalities there remain in Mousehole the workings of a fishing village albeit overshadowed by a partially immersed tourist industry invading the stone hearths and tidied houses rendering the pre and post Christmas holiday awash with the ghost of its former habitants.

In the microcosm crystalised particles of base minerals compress as they do elsewhere, here the Granite fountain urn between the Penzance Lido and the Yacht Inn conspire towards a scaled alignment, the Penlee Headland and the voided quarry being excavated - not for mineral extraction now but for development into property.

The Pinhole aperture in this modified lens helps to focus on the infinite detail and lack of optical distortion, theres a feeling that one is unfettered by the laws of scale or proportion, like childhood feelings of being dwarfed by the natural powers that impact on existence, like the revelatory moment when looking up into the milkyway on a clear starry night. 
The photograph above taken from the edge of a Penzance sited ornate granite fountain looking across the Gwavas Lake in the Mounts Bay to the Penlee Headland creating a montage into which a widening narrative is embedded. It is difficult to read the photograph for standardized scale and proportion, the small aperture and long exposure create a synoptic contrast, the granite dish of the fountain in the foreground looks like the rough terrain of another promontory, the plane of the water in the granite dish looks like a continuation of the seawater between the headland and the fountain. The curve of the fountain echoes the "curve" of the mounts bay. To the left of the palm tree is the Penlee Elvan Stone Quarry, a large void in the headlands natural slope. Further South lies the submerged Gear Stone - a thus far unsubstantiated source of Greenstone for ceremonial Axe heads. Latterly the quarry was the source of Elvan (greenstone) for Roadstone ballast in tarmacadam and concrete. The connections between the widely found Axe Heads and the many roads that lead out of Cornwall to everywhere else, the undocumented, mythological sea routes connecting stories - masking histories, human activities, physical and cerebral and dialogical    Film editing is an art that can be used in diverse ways. It can create sensually provocative montages; become a laboratory for experimental cinema; bring out the emotional truth in an actor's performance; create a point of view on otherwise obtuse events; guide the telling and pace of a story; create an illusion of danger where there is none; give emphasis to things that would not have otherwise been noted; and even create a vital subconscious emotional connection to the viewer, among many other possibilities.

 Towards Treen below the waterline.Stone Axe Head Stories