first thoughts

i wake up thinking about migration - the Arctic Tern making a bi-polar expedition each year. why all that effort? why that journey, flying from its Arctic breeding ground to the Antarctic and back again each year. perhaps it's for the daylight - the bird sees two summers each year. i'm thinking about the notion of 'everything changes' in relation to things repeating, cycling, having pattern. i like going back to the same places time and time again - each time i see more of it, i see it differently, and of course it is different. does the Arctic tern have this experience? - yes i imagine so. i heard from James M that warblers migrating to Africa go back to the very same bush every year, they are completely specific in their geography and sense of place.

in beginning to think about what the focus of my work will be, i know that i don't want to make live performance - i want to work instead with writing, image and sound primarily collected through walking.
i consider re-enacting my brother's 'burn-ups' in the 70s in his ford cortina at dunkerswell airfield, writing something in tyremarks on the expanse of concrete for the people in planes to see, or alien visitors, or migratory birds. i have other ideas too that don't feel right for this particular commission.

so i'm thinking about my work in Neroche both being about and in the landscape, and in relation to the other artists and the scheme's objectives, and also needing to fulfill the brief i have - to make something 'lasting'. my impulse is to move outwards from the landscape and to connect to it through 'elsewheres', through the moving elements of the place.

so i begin to think of Neroche being a place for me to map migration, to track what is passing through the landscape and to see this location as something porous, somewhere in conversation with other places and times. i also wonder if studying these transient elements might say something in relation to humans and our perception of place.