Watching the water and “The Silver Darlings”

I am watching the river and the sea - still fascinated by their unending changing characters - colours, surfaces and movements, all within a hundred metres of each other. This morning I walk up to the new (ish) A9 bridge over the river mouth and look down at both waters moving towards each other. It is low tide and the wind blows from the North-West (I think) – lifting tiny waves on the surface of the bigger ones. It chases them the opposite way and they flee skittishly out to sea and towards the approaching sun.

The water is steel gray, purple, darkening blue towards the horizon a line so straight it could have been drawn with a ruler. Close to the shore the colours change, turquoise, pale yellow, pink and green and as I walk down the path to the beach the tide begins to turn. The slope here down to the sea is steeper and the waves pull the gravel and pebbles back with them after they crash down on them. The sun is a tiny sliver of molten orange bright and far away - the clouded sky has many layers in the sun’s light – trails wisps of pink and orange, huge washes of yellow ochre almost brown and back to the blues and the grays. Behind me the rain approaches, the sea changes again and although it is not rough I am reminded of the talk the night before last given by Tony Sinclair from Wick Heritage Society about herring fishing. We watched early films from the Johnston Collection which showed Wick in the days when it was a thriving part of the fishing industry. Some of the newer boats were powered by steam and some were still sail – but the most obvious difference was the sheer number of them – the sense of busyness, of hard labour, of noise – even though the films were silent. Men carrying huge weights of coal, of fish, women gutting herrings with cloths tied round their fingers to protect themselves from the knives and the salt. This work was piece work, the more you gutted the more you got. The herring were salted as they were unloaded by the men from the boats, salted again and then packed - belly up - in wooden barrels made by the cooper at the harbour. The herring were left to settle for a week or so and then more packed on top. Tony Sinclair then showed us a short but terrifying/wonderful film of a film on a Kinora home viewer. These worked on the same principle as a child’s flick book but were operated by turning a handle at the side, only one or two people could watch at a time. The film was of the lighthouse in the harbour being swamped by storm waves – and part was of a young boy standing at the end of the harbour wall. The mechanism of the Kinora was so smooth that the separate frames could not be seen – these images were also in colour.

I thought about all of this while looking at the sea, I thought about how frightened I would be if I was out in weather like that, I thought about how hard life can be, and is, and was, for some of us. I was woken from considering all of this by a warm nose snuffling at my hand – I turned and looked down and there was a light-eyed, brindled dog looking up at me and wagging its tail . . . time to go home for a hot cup of tea.

Sunday 15 January - Timespan-Third Stay

The weather was still cold when I came back on Wednesday this last week although it was not so intense - much of the snow had gone. When I looked through the photographs that I had taken here in Helmsdale before Christmas the light had a different quality then than it holds now.
In December I had said to Lorna, who works here, that what I loved about winter was the colours and yesterday we spoke again about the clarity of colour when there is snow and ice around. Violets and oranges, greens, blues and reds. Sometimes they are muted when there is mist or rain but when the sun shines and there is ice in the air they sing all around. Sing is the only word I can think of which speaks of the feeling they create- the colours resonate-resembling birdsong at dawn or robins at dusk.
Now, in January of the New Year, I am back by the River Helmsdale in the morning sun – warm and watching the water pass below the Telford Bridge. Under the arches the icicles have melted and the last of their drops rain down on the stones revealed by the ebbing tide. The resident crows take flight from the clock tower of the war memorial and clamour raucously as they swoop overhead, their wings flashing blue and black against the sky. A solitary heron beats its wings and trails its long legs behind on its way to the harbour.
At the harbour everything is quiet and still. I go to the Harbourmaster’s office and ask for tide tables so that I will know which way the water will be flowing – it is not always obvious. He comes downstairs and I mention the silent stillness. He has worked here for years and in that time the harbour has lost the last of its fishing boats because of the quotas imposed on Scottish fishermen by Europe. The restrictions have become tighter and tighter and are strangling the industry. At the moment the British public are taking more notice because of Hugh’s Fish Fighthttp://www.fishfight.net/, but how long will the impetus for change provided by celebrity input last? Jamie Oliver’s successes with the quality of school dinners have had the feet cut from under them by the latest chancellor’s spending economies.
Food – it concerns us all – not least because most people’s access to it is controlled by big business. Many people wouldn’t recognise an entire cod – still less know what to do with it once they had managed to catch it.

Wire Music- only 12 hours left to listen

I listened to this programme over the New Year break and thought of the wires stretching over the car park at the clearance village at Badbea which produce an eerie and lost sound that enters the body and emphasises the sense of loneliness around. I decided to learn more and looked at the Allan Lamb website http://wiredlab.org/participants/alan-lamb.
Definite material for thinking about art.

Snowbound - Lunar Eclipse at Winter Solstice

I am awake at 6.00 and listening to the news. I don't have to get up yet, I can stay cosy for a while. Then I hear the newsreader say that today's total Lunar Eclipse of the Full Moon at 7.40 am will be the first one to occur at the Winter Solstice for about 400 years. I have to get up . . .now. How did I not know about this? It wasn't on the news yesterday or if it was I missed it. I don't have my camera so I will paint draw, I have been watching the moon with regard to this residency at Helmsdale for almost 18 months now and I need to use colour because the more I watch the more colours I see. The colours flicker and change almost constantly - I know this is in response to the tiny movements that the eye makes and identifying the shifts is fascinating. So- not having the camera is good. It means the image in my memory will not be static. By the time I'm sorted at 6.30 and looking out of the upstairs window to the North-West the eclipse has started - a faint blurring at the left hand side of this huge full moon which has been so bright for the last few days. It's brilliance reflected back by the thick blanket of white snow and ice all around. I listen to the radio while I watch and hear Dr David Whitehouse talk about the moon - the solstice will be 15 hours after the eclipse he says and adds that when the Earth's shadow passes across the moon's face then some people will see it as red. This is because only light waves can bend around the earth reach the moon and they are primarily red. The moon reaches the horizon of the hill behind me so I do not see the Earth's red shadow moving away again. I go downstairs and I make my porridge - happy that I did not miss this moon.

Artist (Not Quite) in Residence

Although not quite in residence, I've been in Lybster for a 6 week mixed-media residency at North Lands Creative Glass and couldn't resist a few Helmsdale visits and even an undercover test project with Rocio Jungenfeld, about more of which later. Helmsdale is in my heart, in both a romantic and a Twin Peaks kind of a way. I shot a lot of film and thought you may like to see three images from my Double Exposure project with Emily Workman - a single roll of positive transparency slide film is exposed by each of us in different countries. These were shot in Caithness and in South Wales; we hope to exhibit them next year sometime. I'll be back in January so see you all very soon and have a wonderful Christmas!

Field Studies Review

Review of Field Studies exhibition written by Giles Sutherland - art critic for The Times - is available now on the Northings site. 'Part of Roberts success therefore must centre on her ability to encourage those who have deemed themselves ‘uncreative’ or ‘not artists’ to create work with depth, meaning and integrity.'

http://northings.com/2010/11/16/field-studies/

One of the final parts of the Field Studies project was to do a visit to the Pier Arts Centre, Stomness, an opportunity to compare and contrast. What a visit this was! 22 people got up at the crack of dawn to take the ferry and be part of a fascinating insight into the Pier Arts. We had people from the Board, the Arts and Heritage Committees, the Staff, the Knitting Group and Volunteers. It was a thought provoking trip, at the end of what has been a thought provoking project.

But of course it has to be fun, so the ferry trip home had a Field Studies Quiz! Here is one of the joint winners beavering away.....