Email Dispatch #5 January 15, 2008

Dear All-
Happy New Year! It is upon us! It crept up on me without me noticing, the sound of its feet muted by the rain and its form masked by the late dawn and early dusk of this Northern climate.

It is grey and rainy most of the time now and I miss sunrises and sunsets and the continually changing symphony of color that happens everyday in New Mexico. Most of the time I feel an internal glow generated by necessity to counteract the dismal weather. Solstice and yuletide celebrations make such sense to me now. They provide sustenance for body and soul at a time of need for inhabitants of this part of the globe. On the precipice of a New Year, the first few months of which promise half-light and rain, general merry-making of all kinds is in order here! I find myself sleeping more here. There is a societal need for hibernation.

Since the last e-novella I got through the second module intensive (Psychological Aesthetics – note emphasis on intensive) by the skin of my teeth, Chris arrived (yeah!), we dashed about on the tube in London, holidays happened, we hopped across the channel to Normandy and I resumed my studies again at college. That’s the short version. If you want the long version, read on……

The experiences and my impressions from the second module intensive are very different from the first. The module itself was packed with challenging exercises and experiences to tap into the unconscious, methods to approach work from a different angle etc. There was lots of time spent on the floor, interacting with objects in strange and poignant ways, writing about it, drawing the experience etc. “Object relations” it is called, I learned. I am still somewhat confused and unsure of how to approach the theme of the second module (Psychological Aesthetics and Ecology of Mind) in my work. While many formal psychological theories are unfamiliar to me, the idea of studying the mind, the psyche, its relationship to the body and to others etc. are concepts with which I am quite familiar. However the process of de-contextualizing and then re-contextualizing previous knowledge and then building on previous interests and knowledge through my art practice is no small task! The topics that are most familiar and of deepest significance are often the most difficult to approach, penetrate, and integrate. I was relieved to have a break for the holidays and now I am excited to get back to work. Although the way forward is not clear, somehow that’s okay and appropriate. At the moment the most important thing is to proceed until something feels right or breaks and then I go from there.

Despite deeply missing my family, friends and New Mexico at Christmas, Chris and I managed to have a lovely holiday season together. We had a bustling time in London with only one true city mishap. His arrival was fairly smooth with just a little snag in customs (officers questioning his three month stay and drilling into him that he shall not work). After less than two hours together as we were boarding for the last leg of the tube ride back to our flat the tube doors clamped shut between us and I was off down the tracks with part of his luggage and he was left there with his big pack on the platform. Fortunately he hopped on the next tube as I waited at our stop and rapped loudly on the window when I saw him looking dazed inside not knowing where to get off. Seeing me he threw his bag out of the door and made a dramatic exit. Reunion! We held hands as we were boarding the tube and “minding the gap” after that. Being tourists in London days before Christmas was an interesting experience in a city that even without approaching holidays is always on high speed. We went to several museums including the Natural history museum, strolled through lit streets trying to stay warm and spent lots of time searching for reasonably priced and yummy places to eat, a tricky business. At the end of our five busy days running around the city we were ready for some quiet time. I was happy to have a nice comfy room waiting for us on the other end of the train ride when we boarded our train at Paddington Station.

Totnes is festive at Christmas time with lots of mistletoe, holly, ivy and pine bows strewn about, lights twinkling etc. But there is still green grass, no snow and occasionally I stumble across a flowering plant of some sort. It’s an odd climate at a latitude equal to southern Canada and yet the temperature rarely drops much below freezing. But it certainly can feel cold! The Christmas holiday was filled with landlords' family – all very warm and interesting people. On Christmas day we had a massive dinner with friends from college. Two days after Christmas we went to Normandy France for a quick holiday with my friend, Becky and her family who has a house in a little town, La Savegere, an hour and a half inland from the coast. It was misty and beautifully green with lots of woodland and friendly country French folk, delicious bread, cheese, croissants, good company and a cozy open fire in the evenings. Staying with people who were familiar with the area was magical. They drove us to their favorite spots and took us on their favorite walks. We saw two chateaus; one from the 11th Century, ruins emerging from the mist and one from the 14th Century, extensively furnished from different eras. I won’t forget scrambling around on the ancient chateaus ruins in the thick mist, our imaginations running wild.

We arrived back in Totnes on New Year’s Eve to a party in our house. Moments before midnight we joined the flood of people pouring out of the pubs into the Totnes Town Square where the count down took place and the hugging and kissing and shouting mayhem ensued. On New Years Day our Land Lords invited us to go with them to visit family who live on Dartmoor and out for a New Year’s dip in the Dart River. The cold plunge in the dark water was a perfect bit of invigorating insanity with which to start the New Year.

Happily the academic cogs have begun to turn in my head again despite my confusion about the recently introduced information from the second module. While Monday was the first official day back to college, I’ve been reading and pondering between day trips and brief excursions around Totnes and Chris has been looking around for tools and work and exploring the area in his own way. A few days ago at the "tip" (recycling center) he found some tools and I got an old singer sewing machine with a crank handle. Just the lovely wooden box with its old nail key is amazing let alone the gorgeous craftsmanship inside. I don't know what I'm going to do with it, but when Morris, our friend at the tip said it was headed for the true tip (the dump) I couldn’t help myself. So we lugged it up the hill back to 107 High St. Perhaps it will find a place in my art work somehow?

Since we got back to Totnes Chris has been on a mission to assemble a basic tool set and between the local tip, postings on freecycle, word of mouth and people’s generosity he’s done well. Chris has lots of hypothetical offers for work although he has yet to get a start date from anyone. In the meantime he is making some built-in furniture for our landlords. We’ve also made friends with an Aussie carpenter, Terry, who has lots of local connections and work possibilities for him. So we’ll see what happens with all this potential. Chris’s work as a wildland firefighter on a helitack crew is quite novel here and he loves chatting with people about it and showing people the slideshow that he created from the past year’s season in Wyoming. People are stunned by the mountains and wide-open spaces of the American West. Their response awakens in me a small yearning for these open spaces, a desire to witness the relationship of earth to sky. While I am not “homesick” I have begun to miss the land.

We’ve been taking lots of walks and exploring, mostly in the rain as we have no other choice. Last week we cycled to Beenleigh Farm, owned by one my tutors from my first module, and volunteered as hedgelayers for a day. Hedgerows are an important element of the English landscape, encompassing fields and lining roads. However the art of traditional hedgelaying is rarely practiced because it is extremely labor intensive and requires perpetual maintenance. When a hedge is properly “laid” (haha) it increases biodiversity within the fields, thickens the hedge and replaces the need for fences, barbed wire or electric to contain livestock. Most hedged are simply cut, but there is a particular technique that we hastily learned a sloppily practiced of cutting the blackthorn and hazel and other tree types in a hedge like a hinge and laying them over on their side. Magically over the next year the open wound sprouts new vertical growth and new branches sprout out all along the horizontal limb creating a base for a new generation of vertical growth. Through the years the process continues and the hedge as it is laid over on itself becomes thicker and thicker.

Another adventure through the rain took us 6 miles on foot out to Landmatters, a small community of people who have won “planning permission” to live in temporary structures (benders) on their 40 acres of farm and wood land. Planning permission is a precious thing here and is not acquired easily, especially for dwellings on land zoned for farming. The Landmatters community members won a precedent-setting court case granting them 3-years of living on their land in what are called “benders” which are large sweat-lodge like structures made of hazel, blankets and giant tarps all lashed to the ground. They have a well and a new timber-frame green oak barn that they built from wood felled from their woodland. Visiting them is to witness a pioneering community of motivated, idealistic folks determined to live on their land in a different way. Inspiring!

On the political front, U.S. politics, concern for the environment, the nuclear power debate, climate change and global warming are certainly hot topics here. I was disappointed to read a Moveon.org statistic today that said that out of 2,709 questions asked by the US media of presidential hopefuls in 2007, only 3 were about climate change (the same number as were asked about UFOs). What do you all think about that statistic? What do you think about the candidates? What’s going on locally in your communities that you’re excited about or frustrated with?

Now, it’s back to the grind for me. Reading, working, experimenting, brainstorming, manifesting, ideas, collaborating, planning, walking, writing, searching, drawing, listening, supporting, wishing, building, making, doing. That’s my plan for the next 2 months.

Much love and good wishes from your “mate”
-Claire

P.S. For the English phrase tabulation: I heard “jollygood” used in general speech today at the White Heart pub at Dartington Hall. Classic!