WHISPERS IN THE WIND – WOODCUTS
Legend has it that the first bansuri flute was born when the wind whispered a song through a hole in a piece of bamboo that had been made by an insect. A story of interconnectivity and relationship where wind, bamboo and insect have come together in a beautiful act of creativity that enables the elemental whisper of the wind to be heard.
The conscious act of carving and shaping a woodblock is for me a search for that same elemental whisper of the wind. A whisper that can become a clear visual song when the darkness of the rolled-on ink meets the lightness of paper in conversation between seemingly opposing forces.
Legend also has it that the biblical character of Elijah who while on mountain side vision quest experienced a violent storm, an earthquake, and then a fire, all of which remained mute to the voice of God. Instead that still quiet voice came in the form of a whisper.
The deafening screech and impersonal cacophony of human induced noise, the relentless time demands of our exhausting age and the constant distraction of the digital era means even a ‘storm, earthquake or fire’ is incapable of getting our full attention today. We have effectively been made deaf to the whisper that is singing all around us.
The act of cutting a woodblock demands a silence and stillness that enables that whisper to take on visual form as compositional decisions are made in clarity and inventiveness that carving invokes. The invisible transient transparent weightlessness of air is forced into form through visual song of the carved edges of the woodblock.
Carving into the thin, soft veneer of the plywood is for me akin to cutting through the veneer that has been laid across our industrialised digitised world. A veneer that when seen against the backdrop of deep time is temporary, warped and increasingly diseased. A veneer that is starting to crack and peel away allowing the whisper break to through the concrete and noise in green shoots growing though. The powerful life force of nature sustained by water and light in forms of flowing, growing, flying crawling swimming and walking are all around breaking through the veneer and singing a song if we can hear. In cutting beyond the veneer of the woodblock, I am simultaneously drawn into something much deeper than myself in a quest to hear that whisper.
The times in my life when I have felt physically displaced and spiritually desolate, have always found belonging solace meaning and rest when I am outside in the natural world. The act of drawing on to a woodblock allows a conversation and deeper connection to be formed with the natural world , bridge into something much deeper, timeless, and profound than the thin veneer of our industrial digital age.
As I have grown older, I have increasingly questioned any notions of identity I may have as a white male European living in the 21st century, an identity that started to feel increasingly unrooted in our post enlightenment culture. A culture where the forces of dogmatic monotheistic religion and scientific rational materialism have separated large swathes of humanity from connection with natural world on which our lives ultimately depend. A culture that oversaw the colonial crushing of earth and people in the name of profit and superiority. A culture that has caused ecological collapse and mass extinction fuelled by our view of earth as inanimate resource for humanity to use and abuse for pleasure and profit. A culture where progress and the increasingly futile quest new are the only values we are told to strive for. A culture that for has effectively lost its roots and is doing so made me unsure of my own identity.
This search for, unearthing and unravelling of my European identity that I felt had been crushed silenced and shaped by science, church, and profit, led me to look before and beyond the European enlightenment, to other cultures times and people that were at one with the natural world, which for me is the only place I feel at peace and rooted. In Europe I found clues in the stones left behind by ancestors in the forms neolithic structures and in the rhymical interconnected content of Celtic and Pictish carved stones.
When I first moved to Shetland 25 years ago the straight angular lines of my urban backdrops dissipated and morphed into swirls circles and interconnected line as I picked upon the forms and shapes of nature around me. The flight of birds became rhythm.
Shapes carved into some of these stones reveal a people that that were in tune with nature, the rhythms of season, moon sun and tide. Timeless deep-rooted values and connections that for the most part our culture has lost with disastrous ecological consequences. The carvers and shapers of these stones teach us that all matter is animate, capable of whispering and singing through the arrangements, placements, swirls, and interconnected designs in the cut stone. In these carvers there is no veneer that tries to separate matter from spirit.
The Celtic peoples spoke about ‘thin places’ places where the veil or veneer that separates the elemental life-giving spirit from that which we can see feel touch is very thin. At times for me the act of cutting into a woodblock as hard wood creates resistance to sharp steel can be like attempting to cutting through the veil in search of the thin places.
The act of carving into a block me helps to reclaim a sense of lost identity that is strengthened by those carvers that went before me, carvers who understood that everything is connected to everything else as they tuned into the rhythms, cycles, seasons of the other than human world around.
I am reminded that when we wound one part of nature, we wound the other parts as well.