William Dyce , Pegwell Bay: Swimming Residency

The Dyce family is fully clothed.  The women shawled and heavy skirted, gather souvenirs and shells from the beach, beyond them the lowish chalk cliffs stand over a receded tide, above the whole scene, the distant tail of Donati's comet.  William Dyce's painting of Pegwell Bay[i] depicts an activity unchanged, and the bay itself, with its cliffs and strata, sweeps to the west towards Sandwich and the Stour Estuary.  Little moved over time, a site of ancient disembarkation and more recent travel by SR.N4 hovercraft.  Hoverlloyd (later Hoverspeed) operated cross channel services from Ramsgate to Calais until 1982; the modern archaeologist or dog walker can explore the remains of the hoverport where the ramps enter the bay with white markings still visible and where delineated parking zones are partially covered in scrub.  The SR.N4 cossetted in a great heavy skirt like the ladies in Dyce's painting, was powered by four Bristol Proteus engines, one of which is currently on display at Bristol M Shed museum.  These powerful but thirsty engines propelled the craft and also inflated the black skirt that acts as a cushion between hull and water and land.

Slipping into the sea below the West Cliff beside the harbour, some children were playing on the sand, occasionally running and paddling up to their wastes.   Here the water takes on a milkiness, chalk leaching a fine sediment that drifts with the current until a point some twenty yards out where it meets deeper bluer water, the whole mixing in swirls of khaki, white and cyan.  May sea temperatures are around ten or eleven degrees Celsius, offering a bearable first swim.

From Swimming Residency Club, 2015.  

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[i]  William Dyce (1858-60) Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of October 5th 1858.  Oil on canvas.  Tate Britain

Spike Open 2015

From The Cast Room

Mixed media

Dimensions variable

May, 2015

In 2012, I embarked upon a project that has been influenced by or makes reference to a variety of texts.  The project broadly looked at the workings of the inner and outer worlds of experience, landscape and the need for convalescence during and after a non visible illness.  The texts include Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, The Waste Land by T S Eliot, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson in England, 1969, Smithson's A Tour of The Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey, the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley and Patrick Keiller's The View From The Train.

The project has six parts, of which the one shown here at Spike Island Open 2015, is Part 5, a version of The Cast Room (Things To Do While Convalescing). Parts 1 and 6 are video works or brief films: Voyager, shot in Paris and Margate, Rollright/Silbury recorded at the stone circle in Oxfordshire and the earth mound in Wiltshire. The other parts are: Part 2, a text, Logbook, Part 3 Alpines and Part 4, a set of paintings made on card and art related publicity material.

Energy Drawing

Energy Drawing (Track 1)

pencil on paper

29x21 cm

2015

Slow down

Social participatory activity

Destroy all cars

Real world

Souvenir

Now

Warm city vents

S bahn to the Tiergarten

Steps to the sea, Penzance

Blaumeise blue tit

Things to do when convalescing

The burning of energy through oxygen,

a great fire that becomes consumptive

Priestley, Lavoisier, Sebald.

Rootballhead

Rootballhead  

digital photograph

2015

Oscillator

Oscillator  (2015) digital video, 1min 37 seconds, colour, mute

The Cast Room

The Cast Room: Display Table

mixed materials with plaster, wooden stand

dimensions variable

2014

The Cast Room: Thermur

plaster, wood, mdf

40x35x12cm

2014

Gulf of Corryvreckan

It is not much over half a mile wide, yet it is more than 300 feet deep over most of its width, except in one significant spot, where a huge conical rock is sunk only ninety feet beneath the surface.  It is called Cailleach, 'The Hag'.

Deakin, Roger. (2000). Waterlog. A Swimmer's Journey Through Britain.   London.  Vintage.  P249.

Cerf

Cerf

oil & paper on FT

257x175 mm

2014

Before American Night

duct tape & xerographic reproductions

dimensions variable

2014

Still Can Be

oil on exhibition pamphlet section

208x147 mm

2014

Rollright

oil on exhibition preview card

210x148 mm

2014

Roman Ondák: Measuring the Universe

Roman Ondák.  Measuring the Universe (2007), MoMA

As usual there was a long wait in the Ufficio Matricola, where prisoners go through all the ceremonies of admission and discharge.  A man ahead of us, brought in by the American Counter-Intelligence Corps, was being fingerprinted, and one realised, even in such a small detail as this, how barbarous the system is, and how clear was the intention that the prisoner must be made to realise that everything civilised had been left behind.  One of the office staff simply grabbed the man's hand, pressed the splayed-out fingers on to the inked pad, then on a form, then gestured to him to go and wipe his fingers on the wall.  

Lewis, Norman.  1983.  Naples '44.  London.  Eland.  Page 81.

First published 1978, William Collins.