ARTIST IN RESIDENCE 2024-25 , NATUR AM BYTH
T I M E usually
passes. Time. passing
and gazing *
Dear S
I hope you like the poem. I had read it first as time passing and grazing, not gazing, though gaze it does. To answer your question, the stars on the map mark where the beetle was sighted in 2016 following 52 hours of searching on Yr Wyddfa, the highest mountain in Wales. I found the maps in an Evidence Report online. Beetles were looked for by visual searches of the foodplant and by turning over stones within the vicinity of thyme during daylight hours. I started thinking about evidence and the words that might surround it like perceptible, clear, obvious or apparent. The thing is, a beetle that is glimmering, will be changing all the time in our eyes, as the sun brightens and hides behind a cloud, illuminating form. Different rainbow versions of a thing.
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C
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‘Can you feel your receptivity? … I’m training for a feeling that I don’t have yet’
Lauren Berlant – Poisonality 2023
"If each plant has a particular role and is interconnected with the lives of humans, how do we come to know what that role is? How do you use that plant in accordance to its gifts? The legacy of traditional ecological knowledge , the intellectual twin to science, has been handed down in the oral tradition for countless generations. It passes from grandmother to granddaughter gathering together in the meadows"
-The Web of Reciprocity: Indigenous uses of moss, Robin Wall Kimmerer.
Dear S
This is going to be a short letter, but a place to begin. It occurred to me this morning, that no matter how far away I am from the project, [TIME], geographically I mean or when I am stuck - how to proceed- -or present - that the beetle in all its secrecy and temporality, glimmering and redirecting wavelengths of light, sits with me on my shoulder. It's like the creative life of the world is always happening whether we can see it or not. What do you think?
C
Dear S
After reading your e-mail I started to imagine some of them in the dark: Rosy Saxifrage and Alpine Mouse-Ear, resting and dreaming under Ara and Orion, forming constellations - mirroring - and voicing themselves out into the nighttime. Is this a bit like the happening that happens when the imagination works towards something that is temporarily not visible? I love the idea of inviting people to speak out into dark air.
C