"Dartmoor’s landscape is steeped in magic and mystery and it is home to many artists whose work is inspired by mythic themes. Widdershins showcases the work of those who live on Dartmoor (or have local connections) Widdershins explores local legends, world myth, folklore and faery tales in diverse, surprising ways... and although it all starts ‘Once Upon a Time’, it is definitely not for children only."
I feel a real connection with the land out here but the myths and legends out here are either still set in European landscapes or they are Aboriginal law and to create with those is appropriation.
How do I work with Myth, Legend and the spirit of the land I live in without being disrespectful to the people that were here long before? How do I work with my cultural heritage when living and connecting with a land that is so vastly removed?
I can make up new stuff on my own, I know, but there is something about working with legends and myth that goes back thousands of years, that other people connect with and have connected with.
I sit here in this ghost town of a gold village and I spin yarn from wool straight off a sheep. I embroider artworks with needle and cloth. I light my fire and sit by it's warmth. These things were done by women in this spot since the 1850s. These slow ways of being, of creating, of living are something that connects me to the history of this place but I want to create art based on the spirits of this place, on the mix of landscape and imagination that brings the place to life.
Water here is precious. Sun is plentiful and in summer it is dangerous. Summer is not the warm, pleasant, plentiful time of joy that it often is in England where I was born. Winter isn't ice and snow and a baron land.
This village, at 850m above sea level and the other side of the Great Dividing Range from the coast is the closest I come to the weather and plant life I was born in to in Easbourne, Sussex, England.
We have milder summers and much colder winters than the coast. We have lots of European trees planted in the village. We actually get a proper Autumn here where all the leaves change.
Within a short walking distance though it's back to Gum trees and Wattle, which I love, but it is green all year round, or at least our version of green witch is really fairly grey. Summer is drought and heat and storms. It's fire and floods and sun that burns everything brown and grey and brittle. It's full of flies and mosquitoes, snakes and spiders. It's certainly not a green and plentiful time.
We get a few days a year of 40c. Much less than we did on the coast but still awful. We get some winter nights at -6c. Much colder than the coast but we've only had one decent snow fall where it stuck. And even that was gone by morning.
We get less water and more floods. This land is a harsh and dangerous paradise. It's hard work and red dust and wide open spaces. It's coal and steel and gold. It's sheep and cattle and kangaroos that well outnumber the people. It is beautiful and harsh and so very, very old but at the same time it's brand new.
I want to make art to reflect that, to connect to this land that lives and breaths with me. To show others the savage beauty and the things you can't always see. The things that were and the things that weren't and the things that are.
I have been considering paintings that show European myths and legends in an Australian landscape and how out of place they look.
I want to go and sit out in the bush and take photos and draw the things I don't see. I want to needle felt creatures that fit within our landscape but don't exist and the ones that do.
In a less literal sense I want to spin wool dyed with the plants and ochres of where I live.
Now to find the time, space and money to make a start on this. Not sure I have enough of any of those to get much done any time soon though. I have only the space of my arm chair and the small amount of time when my health lets me think and do at the same time. Money is even more scarce at the moment.
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