THE ACTION - BACKGROUND TO THE STORY.
Why I want you to place a stone, photograph it and write about the experience, leaving the stone in place.
Why I want you to place a stone, photograph it and write about the experience, leaving the stone in place.
Stone axes are grouped according to petrological, mineralogical and textural criteria. Over 40 different axe groups are recognised from a total of 7625 axes found in Britain (of which only 3546 have been grouped) (Clough and Cummings, 1988). Just over 1000 axes are made of greenstone, of which 392 members (referred to a "Group 1") have been identified as being manufactured in west Cornwall and possibly originating from the Mount's Bay area (Figure 1), largely on the basis of the site of origin and the local presence of greenstone (Stone, 1951). Group 1 axes, originally catalogued in the 1940s (Keiller, 1941), are broadly described as uralitized gabbro with original pyroxene and feldspar, with the characteristic development of a uralitic fringe of blue and chlorite are common accessory minerals. Because this assemblage and texture is a very common feature of many Cornish greenstones, the actual outcrops, representing the stone age factories used by Neolithic man, have never been positively identified. However, the assumed manufacture from this area is still largely based on the apparent similarity between a petrographic examination of thin sections of greenstone axes and the outcrops in the Mount's Bay area. To date no definite match has been achieved, such that archaeologists have suggested that the outcrops are actually underwater and have yet to be sampled! (Evans, 1962)
The Gear Rock in The Mounts Bay is believed to be the source of the greenstone from which axe heads were carved.
The current action of conscienciously placing a Greenstone axe shaped pebble in a particularly selected location is my response to this extraordinary little story, when I call this collection of half verified facts and figures a story, I am alluding to the form at its most basic. I listened to some of these accounts as a child in my geography class at school where I interpreted it as a half formed romance without definite characters, without definite purpose and yet to this day still it continues to hold my obsession set among the oak pollen spores found among petrified tree stumps in the wet sands of the Mounts Bay shoreline. Subjected to Carbon 14 tests to verify the nature of the submerged woodland beneath the Mounts Bay tides by inconclusive research driven archaeologists. Gradually I came to appreciate the unique set of circumstances around my locality and the story of the Stone Axes. There are so many obscure commonalities that coexist with a reverence of greenstone and ceremonial axe heads, I simply could not move any further towards a conclusive outcome because of my paralysis in the face of this rich but isolated criteria: the axe heads being found all over Britain emanating from this one source made these objects valuable to someone but not necessarily valuable in terms of monetary value. It must be understood that when you or I look at a relic of a Stone Axe Head either in the British Museum or in any of those charming little town museums that are sadly in demise, the Axe Heads you see are not polished and one of the essential aspects of these types of stone was to polish them for many hours and let the extraordinary looking objects be a part or a voice that tells a tale, spins a yarn and amazes the onlooker. The large axe heads originating in the Italian Alps are quite shocking to see even when the onlooker gets around to considering how very old they are, there is something very odd about these objects.
Palingenesis in the mountains by Zuska Drobna
A stone from St.Michaels Mount is placed in a Slovakian castle by Zus.
.This picture was taken during a visit home to Slovakia.
This place is very special to me, because I was reborn here on 28th of July
2009. The day I took these pictures is the first time I have visited since the
accident happened.
The castle in Trencin was built during the Great Moravian
age, and stands upon the location of a settlement that dates back to the Iron
Age. The castle is a popular tourist destination, but is mostly not open to
public access due to reconstruction. However, the site is not very secure, and
it is possible to enter the restricted areas by squeezing through gaps in the
rock, or climbing over walls in some places. In this way you can get to areas
with no one else around, allowing you to experience the magic of the ancient
ruin.
The wall in the photos is the oldest wall of the abandoned
roundhouse built even before Great Moravian times. The wall can be accessed
from a nearby hilltop and the wall reaches 10m at its highest point. Below the
wall there is rocky ground on one side and forest on the other.
The view is incredible: you can see the White Karpats
mountains through the valley of Drietoma, the far away castle of Beckov and the
mountain range of Povazsky Inovec showing its peaks. If you look down, you see
the city of Trencin laid out below. When I was at school, I used to come here
in the afternoons to read a book or just to relax.
Once, I wanted to show the view to a friend. I took him up
there and told him that the best way to be surprised by the beautiful scenery
was to close his eyes. Then I realized it was too dangerous for him not to look
where he was standing, so I told him it would be best to keep them open. As he
opened his eyes his foot slipped and he fell off the wall. I wanted to save
him, so I reached out my arm, but I was not strong enough; I lost my balance
and I fell as well. We lay there for forty five minutes before someone found us
and brought help.
In the fall, my friend broke his pelvis and I somehow only
broke my nose. The doctors said we were very lucky to be alive, and that my
friend might never walk again.
Five years later however, we are both fully recovered – although
my friend says that sometimes the bad weather reminds him of that day, when he
feels pain in his knee. And what about me? Well, I'm trying to be stronger so
that next time I can catch him!
My secret place saved us. I left the Gothvos stone on the wall
where I photographed it: to leave something behind so that my story is not
lost, and to say goodbye – maybe another adventurer will find it, or maybe it
will become just another stone in the earth as the castle wall slowly falls
apart and my story will remain.
Zuzana Drobna
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| Triganeeris Menhirs near Drift Cornwall |
This project moved into a more tangible realm when I decided to place the stones I found in places or situations that were equally as featureless but richly resonant as the curiously factual accounts I had inherited from my geography master. An interest in making long photographic exposures with prepared pinhole lenses took the perspective of these data riven tales into a non narrative area, where the moment was captured by placing the camera in a position that recorded everything connected to the stone I placed and the moment I had placed it, such a saturated exposure would surely absorb the reaction of the place to the stone, I inscribed the word Gothvos on each stone which I intended the finder (each stone is left in position) to challenge innately without the lingual qualification of knowing that Gothvos means Knowing in the language that had itself originated in the same whereabouts as the stone. The quest continues and broadens with the stones now being taken to locations by many different people telling many different stories.
Gothvos / Godhvos
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| Gothvos on a wooden post with westward running hedge above Lanyon Farm. Bartinney on the left with Boswenns Common on the right. 2007 all the photographs on this page were taken by Jonathan Polkest using a prepared camera. |
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| Looking towards Sancreed Beacon from Madron Carn. Part of Newbridge can be seen through the opening in the hedge on the right. |
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| Storr through The Storr Project Pinhole. I was a participating spectator to the Storr project on the Isle of Skye in 2005 and I wanted to position a Gothvos stone which I undertook in the darkness that only a stormy walk up a Scottish Mountain at Midnight could possibly have provided, thus having an adverse effect upon sustainable time lapse documentation. My intention was not to subvert such actions but to add another layer of significance without disengaging from the full spectacle that the Storr event instigated and without impacting on the vital moment. Storr was a very inspiring event, theatrical and poetic despite the meteorological challenges that almost cancelled that evenings performances. It isn't always practicable to position and photograph a Gothvos stone. |
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| Kestle Barton Rural Art Centre. Kestle Barton is situated near Manaccan-in-Meneage; In terms of Walking either as a part of investigating arts praxis or just for everyday adventures in a limnal landscape, Kestle Barton Gallery and Rural Centre is uniquely located and situated. Kestle Barton is a very old Cornish farmstead geographically positioned at the head of a mature forested valley leading down to the oyster beds of Helford Creek. The buildings and features which form the gallery, are comprised of accommodation with unobtrusive spaces using a mixture of non orthodox spatial features, old structures are arrested with traditional materials to compose and restore buildings that are ecologically and visually harmonious with the area. The horticultural innovations are based on the traditions of such a working farmstead with an exciting twist, nut orchards, aborica and raised flower and vegetable beds provide a steady stream of produce included in the galleries output or sold in one of the little "wayside shrine" that typify the locale. The sloping grounds vaguely contain sculptural exhibits which coexist among flowers and farm buildings. There is an anticipatory hiatus sensed in the spatial dynamics of the various garden areas, similar to that experienced in the Cornish Plan-An-Gwarry,or Medievil Playing Place theaters where previous performance have left a ghostly presence in the ley of the turf. To walk on the almost imperceptively sloping area feels like a hilltop and is the recipient of a full the open sky, of sun and articulated cloud shapes as well as pouncing squalls - guaranteed to connect the walker with the terrain and to bring a measure of gratitude for the nature of their arrival as well as their departure- which can be sudden. Grasses, willowy stems and Scuptural Automata all get cycled by wind and sun, everything is mobile and yet so very still, a dream like pause in borrowed nostalgia, lost and projecting up to an indifferent sky, I'll savour these moments until the next way-marking signpost contradicts my inner voice radio by jamming pietzoelectric mineral emissions. In more practical terms,particularly for walkers the Kestle Barton runs an oasis-like cafe The galleries position provides a pivotal launch site for a number of site specific actions, events and workshops. There are compatible makers nearby and individual practicing artists, writers and individuals,although the gallery runs internationally as well as locally based exhibitions. You wouldn't necessarily know it by glancing around but there is an extraordinarily diverse community just beyond the Elm bordered hedgerows and narrowest of lanes. The landscape itself continues to conceal and reveal some extraordinary terrestial and subterranean phenomenology, Manaccanite, or as it became known: Titanium was discovered here, in fact the Lizard area is of particular Geological importance internationally, giving some insight into the geological complexity of this part and indeed the whole of Cornwall. Quite unlike nieghbouring localities the mineral spectrum must in some way impose its footprint on the arch of the creek-side meadows and the meandering dark water marked shores that wind their way among inlets and tidal pathways.
 As an Interventionist Object in Londons Cromwell Road/ Exhibition Road area. The ultimate equation manifesting a societal or community engagement with the landscape has got to be Performance, most notably Theatre because Theatre is a clustering great orchard full of sweet and sour fruits, some are rotting some are blossoms some are but little buds of promise. A favoured analogy is that of one person who exists in a landscape alone until a second person arrives arrives allowing each to measure distance, scale and so on until a small crowd of ten, twenty or thirty no one sees the individual any more until each one picks up a stone and places it on the heap, each stone is a component and the cairn is a place of memory. Our land is important not as property but because our land has properties. The virtues of being connected to the ground via the feet is extolled further as each potent object - is placed, grounded and photographed usually with a long exposure but this part of the ritual is waived in favour of maximising the participation. ABSOLUTE GENERALITY IN THE WEST.  The Island St.Ia. Known for its Tate of the West and the Artists Colony; St.Ives lugger marine construction was an industry that flourished and coexisted with seafood harvesting. There is a great deal of dialogue contrasting the virtues or lack thereof between St.Ives on the north coast and Newlyn on the south coast of West Penwith. Both have been the setting for distinctly differing Arts Colonies, both have developed very particular forms of working vessels which have both been subject to years of local development, one could construe that the mainline railway from Plymouth stops at St.Erth and one branch forks to St.Ives the other to Penzance thus extending the dichotomy, the St.Ives line is however a separate service. The Artists of Newlyn were largely figurative artists whose experiments and metaphor would be subletley guised in classical compositions ranging from pre raphealite literacy to the more romantic expressionism that capitalised colour, I'm thinking about the range of scope through Norman Garstons more formal work which his daughter Alethea Garston developed into a more naturalistic expressionism. There are many such comprable examples to occupy the restless workings of a contorted mind . St.Ives beholds a good outfall of Greenstone found in formations as you walk to Zennor along the coast, there are sizeable quarry workings and the remaining evidence of the existence of a Plan-An-Gwarry,open air theatre in St.Ives is recorded. The Tate has brought attention to the modernism of post war St.Ives although Penlee House Gallery in Penzance holds a torch for the Newlyn artworks of Walter Langley, Laura Knight and many more obscured by the eclipsing rise of Hepworth and Nicholsons St.Ives Colony borne on the wave of a growing post war media prior to which Newlyn received but a ripple. The Newlyn Gallery and the Penzance Exchange Gallery have brought that dynamic fully back into the foreground.  The Pilgrimage On The Road and Offroad. Writing about the Gothvos/Godhvos brings to mind the thought that Speaking and Writing has Consequences that internalised contemplation seems to suffer far less and yet please the individual more. Basho, The Narrow Road to the Interior.
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From Cape Cornwall to Cape Breton
Jack Kerouac April 1951: wrote the novel On The Road in three weeks, typing continuously onto a 120-foot roll of teletype paper. Although the story is true per se, the book was actually the result of a long creative process. Kerouac carried many notebooks, in which much of the text was written as the eventful span of road trips unfurled. He started working on the first of several versions of the novel as early as 1948, based on experiences during his first long road trip in 1947. However, he remained dissatisfied with the novel. Inspired by a thousand-word rambling letter from his friend Neal Cassady, Kerouac in 1950 outlined the "Essentials of Spontaneous Prose" and decided to tell the story of his years on the road with Cassady as if writing a letter to a friend in a form that reflected the improvisational fluidity of jazz.
The first draft of what was to become the published novel was written in three weeks in April 1951 while Kerouac lived with Joan Haverty, his second wife, at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan, New York. The manuscript was typed on what he called "the scroll"—a continuous, one hundred and twenty-foot scroll of tracing paper sheets that he cut to size and taped together. The roll was typed single-spaced, without margins or paragraph breaks. In the following years, Kerouac continued to revise this manuscript, deleting some sections (including some sexual depictions deemed pornographic in the 1950s) and adding smaller literary passages. Kerouac authored a number of inserts intended for On the Road between 1951 and 1952, before eventually omitting them from the manuscript and using them to form the basis of another work, Visions of Cody. On the Road was championed within Viking Press by Malcolm Cowley and was published by Viking in 1957, based on revisions of the 1951 manuscript. Besides differences in formatting, the published novel was shorter than the original scroll manuscript and used pseudonyms for all of the major characters.
The Old North Road to The North Inn Pendeen.
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