Gothvos ha Tremadhevas

Morvah Well Gothvos

Gothvos in the Embodied Memory

The area of 'embodied memory'. According to Paul Connerton the body can also be seen as a container, or carrier of memory, of two different types of social practice; inscribing and incorporating. The former includes all activities which are helpful for storing and retrieving information: photographing, writing, taping, etc. The latter implies skilled performances which are sent by means of physical activity, like a spoken word or a handshake. These performances are accomplished by the individual in an unconscious manner, and one might suggest that this memory carried in gestures and habits, is more authentic than 'indirect' memory via inscribing.

The first conceptions of embodied memory, in which the past is 'situated' in the body of the individual, derive from late nineteenth century thoughts of evolutionists like Jean Baptiste Lamarck and Ernst Haeckel. Lamarck’s law of inheritance of acquired characteristics and Haeckel’s theory of ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny, suggested that the individual is a summation of the whole history that had preceded him or her. (However, neither of these concepts are accepted by current science.)

Gulfwell

Trevaylor Woods Stream, Gulfwell: History and Geography of Cornwall by the Rev. J.J.Daniell. Truro 1894.3rd edition published by Netherton and Worth, Truro.Parochial History. ST.GULVAL pp439 - St.Gulval -Deanery of Penwith, Pop 1623, acreage 4355.-Gulval was anciently called Lanestly. The church is architecturally one of the most interesting in Cornwall, or at least in Penwith. It is early English [sic] with perhaps some still older British walling, the remains of an ancient oratory. All the windows are filled with stained glass and there is a good organ.
Between the churches of Gulval and Madron a stone serves as a foot bridge called the Bleu Bridge bearing this inscription 'Cnegumi Fil Enans' Enans is said to have been the first king of Amorica.
In draining land between Marazion and Penzance there was dug up an earthen pot containing a thousand Roman coins of the emporers between A.D. 260 and 350.
In this parish is Gulfwell or the Hebrew Brook over which an old witch used to preside and divine things past, present and future by incantation of it waters.
Vebatim and not necessarily the views of anyone other than Rev.J.J.Daniells.

Descendant of the Sun-Goddess: Nao Nagai takes the stone to the mountain

The following story is retold via an unorthodox translation from a tour and heritage guide to Mount Kirishima in Japan where Nao Nagai, took the Gothvos stone to place at the foot of a sacred tree. A long time ago in mythical times the gods ruled the world, when the gods looked over into the lower world from a pontoon bridge from the  heavens, there was an unformed thing like an island in the sea showing dimly through fog. The Gods took a trident which became an emblem to the island. This is said to be the origins of the name Mount Kirishima.“A trident dropped down by the Gods piercing the top of the mountain”  An oracle was received from the Sun-Goddess (Amaterasu Oomikami from Takamagahara Field). Ninigi-no Mikoto descended on top of the Holy Mt. Takachiho-no-Mine. If you can believe a fantastic narrative regardless of the actual appearance of the Holy Mountain, and see the rusting three toothed trident " Ama-no-Sakahoko - Heavenly Upside  Down Trident " staked on top of the Mt. Takachiho-no-mine. You must believe this is not the devil's pitchfork.

This is a dangerous place to descend upon from Heaven. The Kirishima Mountain Range has 23 volcanoes, 15 craters and 10 caldera lakes. At the end of the Edo Period, on the second year of Keio, in 1866, Sakamoto Ryoma made the first honey moon trip in Japan to Satsuma. He climbed Mt.Takachiho-no-mine  with his wife Oryô and saw the Holy Hoko with his own eyes and touched it. He sent a humorous letter to his sister Otome writing about the details of the honey moon trip with some illustrations The trident lance " Amano Sakahoko " is rusted. It belongs to the gods and not human beings. The preservation of it is up to the gods. It is not a cultural heritage object which might exist in the pragmatic world. Mt. Takachiho is the major summit within the Kirishima mountain range.  The hike to the peak of Mt. Takachiho starts after you clear “Uma-no-se”.  On the way to the peak of Mt. Takachiho there is a shallow canyon called, “Senri-ga-tani” better known as, "Ama-no-gawara", but long ago it was called “Haimonkyu”.  It is said that, “Haimonkyu” was the site of “Setaogongenkyu” (former name of Kirishima Jingu Shrine) built about 1400 years ago.  Specific details of “Setaogongenkyu” are unknown, but it was destroyed during the eruption of Mt. Ohara and later rebuilt at the foothill of the mountain.

By whom it was staked ?  Presumably by God Ninigi-no Mikoto ! Once upon a time it was here that we received the oracle of the Sun-Goddess (Amaterasu Oomikami), and monkey Tabiko of seven God and guidance gives hand an order for three kinds of sacred treasures (sarutahikonomikoto), and grandchild God niniginomikoto gets down out of Japanese Olympus (takamagahara) on earth. When the Japanese founding of their country myth and the history began from Takachiho peak where they wrote down the first step of a "descendant of the Sun-Goddess advent" to be told that God once came down here to earth from heaven.

Nao Nagai works in visual and sonic references in live performance and is inspired by the "little" interesting things that happen in everyday life, i.e a man jumps out from nowhere in front of her while cycling and shouts “What time is it?”

Nao Nagai takes the Gothvos to the sacred tree

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Gôze Saner . Fiction & Non-fiction Gothvos in Pedasa

Contrasting images of the same Gothvos Stone placed among the stones of the Pedasa locale by Goze Saner,

The softly focussed Diana camera utilizes 120 rollfilm and 35 mm film. The camera uses a simple plastic meniscus lens, the Diana has been used to specifically take soft focus, impressionistic photographs somewhat reminiscent of the Pictorialist Period of photography, using contemporary themes and concepts, known as lomography. The low-quality plastic lens has been celebrated for its artistic effects in photographs, normally resulting in a slightly blurred composition that can evoke a 'dreamlike' quality and atmospheres not ordinarily encompassed in the detail of digital photography. Goze takes two photographs to prove the contrast between these differing media and two stories of the same situation in her walk in Pedasa Turkey.

An interest in the past, an interest in collective and individual memory, is extremely resonant to our contemporary thinking. Finding methods to articulate and express individual and collective identities, which find themselves under pressure, transition and dominated by consumer processes, all these considerations are becoming increasingly important. National, regional, religious and/or local cultural identities present today link back as consistent entities, today they may be observed as nothing more than actions, changes or conflicts usually associated with secularization, industrialization, globalization, migration, or many other political, economic, cultural and/or religious. From this position, culture is seen as shaped under the influence of processes that exist in constant mutual tension.

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Such processes referring to the term memory occupy a central role.

The Gothvos project aims to contribute to the study of cultural memory by unlocking narratives about the past (and their canonization), and to offer relevant critical observations on the manifestations of cultural memory that are not essentially ‘narratives’. This approach provides a kind of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary access to cultural memory taken from various perspectives.

Faced with the following questions: how do we recall, remember and forget? 

Which stories are ‘permitted’ and which are ‘forbidden’? 

How does the past determine the present and shape the future? 

How do the various discourses of the past determine the social and personal identities?

 How are our deepest emotions, desires and fantasies articulated in the present through the discursive space of memory?

 What are the relations between memory and monuments, archives and museums? 

How can we understand the dual nature of monuments: as tools of ideologically driven memory (fixed memory) and/or as constant sources of creative construction and opening up of memory?

 Does technological development influence the process of remembering the past? What are the implications of a digitalization of memory?

 What kind of history is created by the massive use of digital technologies (i.e., online archives that are encoding/decoding their users’ memories in virtual space)?

 How do the systems used for production affect the ways that use, protect and work with memory?

 In what ways is cultural tourism associated with memory? How does it reflect the local and global histories in terms of which narratives are being produced and consumed?

Gothvos in Iasi.     Genovel Investigating Geographical Spatial Histories

As a contained element of the space One’s body might be perceived as a modifier of the space being engaged in its continuous transformation.

At its own pace, one’s body moves writing the space, tracing shortcuts or building distances - reaching with clarity a spot or wandering through the labyrinth of the space.

Its driven energy, walks the body till the point where eventually stops in the intuited space.  

The particular space is now converted in a practiced one by the presence of ones body. The site becomes specific and framed by the presence of the released Gothvos stone.

Its constructed removal from the aboriginal place started weaving horizontal chromosomic expansions with the conscious land.

In its potency the signifier might become the consciousness of an alter-space in space, sharing its ancient Cornish alchemy with the fertile ruins of the mediaeval princely courts, bridging the city and the neogothic palace. 

The unpredictable site would now be exposed to an auspicious omen.

The body in its new state, nurtured by the performed action pauses for a moment then moves, leaving the space unpracticed until a new body that already started moving would practice it afresh.

The stone would stagnate for a moment too. The body in its consciousness would arrive, invited to unveil those vertical circular heights and depths raising its question. The question might dissolve into answers, which, at their turn would melt into more questions like a never fulfilling yet wholesome search.

Genovel Alexa

Iași (Romanian pronunciation: [jaʃʲ]; also historically referred to as Jassy or Iassy) is one of the largest cities and a municipality in Romania, Iași has traditionally been one of the leading centres of Romanian social, cultural, academic and artistic life.

"The Bard is often accused of anatopism -- that is, getting his geography wrong. Why else would he, in The Taming of the Shrew, put a sailmaker in Bergamo, a landlocked city in Italy, ask critics?"
D. Murali; Shakespeare, 'Literary Equivalent of an Electron'; The Hindu (Chennai, India); Dec 2, 2007.

Exeter College Oxford - Floreat Exon.

Exeter College Oxford

"Homer may have taken some slight and temporary liberty with the facts, but it does not amount to the major anatopism that some commentators have found in it and should not be taken as evidence that Homer did not have firsthand knowledge of the area."
John Victor Luce; Celebrating Homer's Landscapes; Yale University Press; 1998.

Exeter College is the real life basis for the fictional Jordan College in Philip Pullman's novel trilogy His Dark Materials. The 2007 film version of the first novel, The Golden Compass, used the college for location filming.

Exeter College is the fourth oldest college of the Oxford University.

The college is located on Turl Street, the location where it was originally founded in 1314 by Walter de Stapeldon as a school to educate clergymen. From its foundation Exeter has been associated with a number of notable people, with one of the most notable being the novelist J.R.R. Tolkien.

Beyond the Sea, Beyond Brocade, Beyond Beyond.

http://www.arthousecoop.com/submissions/20643

HIERARCHAEOLOGY.

The word textile is from Latin texere which means "to weave", "to braid" or "to construct". It is important for me to reconsider the fact that Strands or Yarns were the predecessor of sheet's or bolts of fabricated textile. A good example of sheet textile art is felting, in which animal fibers are matted together using heat and moisture, but wether Felting preceded yarns is unlikely to be either defined or established here, in my order of things the strand came first, and binding must have been the earliest form of conjoining two separate elements with a third. Our forefathers were not averse to the use of leather strands: thongs, which require more basic processing than the vegetable originating fibres.  Textile Art occupies a very undervalued position in the fine art equation, requiring a Name to add value rather than the intrinsic value of its artful spin off, something in the order of a Warhol multiple or a Hirst Spot Rug. Although this value system is chronically flawed, I think it works in my favour regarding the range of idea's I'm most interested in.

Conceptualizing one of the social phenomena that I keep returning to, the process and action of Work/Shared industrial cooperative activity, certainly we see it modulating in the real world and more rapidly fluctuating now than in previous centuries, the idea of "Doing Together", organized or spontaniously making things in a distinct group of contributing individuals, there are many ideas as to why this general action is changing, the usual stereotypical propositions are plainly obvious chief among which the rise of the individual, particularly in Art.

Textile Art is made lesser simply by the substitution of the second word by the first. Primarily there is Art (fine art) and then there is Textile Art (craft work).The consensus being that Art is for mens dreams and Craft is for women's work.Art is refined as closely to an idea as possible, craft is simply getting the right material and forming it.....a bit.

Mengwytha Pendeen

 Stereotypically artists as we know/knew them are commonly male individuals. Art as we knew/know it is a physical manifestation of paint (oil) and canvas, that is the pinnacle in material terms. Artists were established in the Renaissence through sponsorship, often through religion or monarchy, they were paid for their extraordinary powerful figurations: visions which developed sleight of eye through Composition, Scale, Proportion and Perspective, standards of measuring physical logic. The Subversive Stitch They became superlative craftsmen but they called themselves Artists and their techniques or their craft was far outweighed by the phenomena of their artful visionary manifestations. 

 Crafts arise from  desirable proximities, amplified senses, climatic variations, geomorphic consequences, stuff found hanging around by people wanting to transcend their existence: presaging Art. These new superlative craftsmen: Artists considered themselves apart because everyday they were contemplating Life, The Universe and Death and everything, the more financially secure ones had assistants to do the craft leaving them to do the conceptualizing and any signature "dishes" in their repertoire. The Masses were all crafts people, they made stuff together, this is not to evoke some hovis platitudes I'm simply comparing the activity undertaken by an autonomous or autocratic group of persons all present in the same vicinity without the tyranny of a plethora of emails, relentless phone communication ordering stuff online, delivered by angry white van man out of cyber lorry park wilderness and into your collective life-style montage.

Like art, craft can have lowly beginnings in food chains and floral, faunal husbandry it is a direct consequence of the aspirations of the inhabitants of a particular habitat, craft is deployed in order to turn trees into baskets, rocks into car components. It was never intended to develop beyond the sacred psychotic visions of the lofty overlords, the hermits, the anchorites and kings but the part played by ornament and textiles to help establish rank, order and hierarchy was too seductive.
 Sometimes you just know you have to walk on real grass, I recently looked around St.Ives attempting to locate the site of the Fishing Net Looms from the old industry that my great, great grandfather (on my fathers side) would have known, the nets used to be made there but not because the net fibre materials were grown nearby,  Other factors came into play, the primary reason was the close proximity to the sea and the abundance of fish, with the mining industry attracting the railway being extended further southwest. Earlier this preceding century fishing nets were no longer locally manufactured in St.Ives, in fact local industrial textiles practically everywhere were priced out by the beginnings of globalism, they came from Spain and currently they for the most part come from China.

My grandmothers father was a naval officer on board H.M.S. Isis during the Boxer Rebellion, when foreigners to China were openly distrusted for their acquisitive actions and tendencies. The Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists, known by foreigners as the Boxers, or "Yihe Magic Boxing", was a secret society founded in the northern coastal province of Shandong consisting largely of people who had lost their livelihoods due to imperialism and natural disasters. The group originate from the Lí sect of the Ba gua religion group. Foreigners came to call the well-trained, athletic young men "Boxers" due to the martial arts and calisthenics they practiced. The Boxers' primary feature was spirit possession, which involved "the whirling of swords, violent prostrations, and chanting incantations to Taoist and Buddhist spirits. I was really touched that my grandmother left me two lacquer trays that her father had acquired in his time in China, she had noticed my adolescent interest in them. My grandmothers father left the royal navy and became the Revenue Man on the Isles of Scilly, (coastguard) not a desperately popular job among the Scillonian inhabitants although my grandmother was considered quite a catch for her Scillonian husband: my grandfather. Both of my Great grandfathers were separately active participants in attending the rescue of an Italian ship called the Isabo which wrecked one early evening on October 28th 1927. My grandmothers father received a signed (by Benito Mussolini) vellum and bronze medal now hanging in the Isles of Scilly Museum for his part, my grandfathers father was a hard hat diver as well as a fisherman who brought up the perished souls in their seized expressions of agony or begging forgiveness. As far as I know he was not recognised and his diving gear that was kept in a small banked shed that has recently become the Porthcressa Regenerated Tourist Centre wasted away in the dark.  This is a true story, there are few resonant links and there are scant archetypes the story is a text-isle.

With twisting or spinning and plying fibers to make yarn (called thread when it is very fine and rope when it is very heavy). The yarn is then knotted, looped, braided, or woven to make flexible fabric or cloth, and cloth can be used to make clothing and soft furnishings. All of these items – felt, yarn, fabric, and finished objects – are collectively referred to as textiles. Yarns are stories too, embroideries and strands of narrative that link and crossover, weave and bind, suture and marlin caulk are such an obvious connection with our common history of sea travel, domestic life, mythology and language.

The textile arts also include those techniques which are used to embellish or decorate textiles – dyeing and printing to add color and pattern; embroidery and other types of needlework; tablet weaving; and lace-making. Construction methods such as sewing, knitting,crochet, and tailoring, as well as the tools employed (looms and sewing needles), techniques employed (quilting and pleating) and the objects made (carpets, hooked rugs, and coverlets) all fall under the category of textile arts.

http://www.thebeetroottree.com/exhibitions.php

The exemplary fine artist, the maker of masterpieces even in his current guise can be traced back to cosmopolitan Florence, Venice or Rome - such a legacy informs the spawning ground of the salons, colleges or "schools" wether they embrace, subvert or react to the history of art as defined by the collectors, their vision of approved art is compiled by the success or failure of the markets upon which they depend.

Odysseus Adventures: The image of the Mounts Bay Lugger Mystery which sailed all the way from Newlyn Cornwall to Melbourne Australia 1854. stitched through a hard back of Odysseus with whipping twine crafting two stories together using physical actions and affordances to create a perspective by Jonathan Polkest.

As a model of a fiscal pyramid Fine Art is the pinnacle and totally dependent upon the second layer, the commodities, manufacturing, processing, refining and making.  Arrogantly sitting above the very source of its funding, every so often a craft will materialize in the artist category, an artist in clay, an artist in wood, an artist in paper. Sculpture is the eternal truant since it is made by artists using excessive amounts of crafting. Anyway, this is all pretty boring were it not for the fact that I need to address the cultural oddities of a place like St.Ives which has had a long heritage of industrialised crafts which transgressed from stone cutting, medievil theatre, shipbuilding, farming, fishing, manufacturing fishing gear etc etc into Artists Colony.

All those crafts were undertaken by men and women who avoided the mantle of Artist building the most artful ships, the envy of all including their Breton cousins who called the Cornish Lugger "The swallow of the seas".  At an earlier point the community staged Cornish Miracle Plays - written and performed, ship building on the beaches. The simple act of pushing Marlin (tarred cotton twine) between carvel planks with a wood chisel is a contributory act towards waterproofing a wooden structure, a sculptural attribute. Tying ropes, sewing sails, rigging tackle and fishing gear by picking up these techniques and materials of the crafters legacy and allowing the unfinished, "artless' material to express influences, communicate the exposure endured in its creation.

The Invention of Needles.