I Live Here Now

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Planning trips, looking for tickets, for timetables, was the regular punctuation of my life, but it was also a distraction and an anxiety. I made them on torn up strips of old life drawings from twenty years ago, that I did not want to throw away, regretting the waste of good quality paper.

In the café window on the street below there is a poster of the same bandstand, drawn by Leon Kossoff. Our host had led me to a cupboard on the first evening and pointed out a jar of deep orange, a suspension of berries. The old dilemmas about watching, bearing witness by writing down or taking photographs instead of running to try and save.Yet he pronounced the word oblepikha with the same relish as I did, and like me enjoyed listing the radiant disease defying properties that we had both been instructed in, the authority of this ancient lore. When I taped them to the wall in the spring, they seemed somehow to fit the awful circumstances in which they were now situated.

The professor talked happily of topology as we made our way along the shoreline, of Moëbius bands and the Klein bottle, those enigmatic, endlessly looping surfaces that seem to deflect a defining of inside or out, of solid boundaries keeping things apart on one side or another. There are Italian pines planted along the stone embankment that curves from this Scottish harbour towards the island, in spite of the inclement conditions of the north easterly climate. Walking the streets below after the first night of high winds, I noticed that the pavement was full of small green lumps, rounded shapes of soft springy moss, smaller and larger, like a processing army peopling the paving stones. She has had solo exhibitions of texts and images at Siobhan Davies Studios, the Royal Drawing School, London and Art Jericho, Oxford and curated a dance and live drawing performance within an installation of her drawings at Selfridges window space, London. It is huge, with a row of old houses on two edges, and the carved articulations of a municipal façade on another.

On a table outside there are plates of scones and sandwiches and slices of cake, covered over with flimsy cling film against bursts of rain. I’d been exploring the idea of sensory drawings and also drawing moving objects but I wanted to find a way to integrate my drawing and walking; to register through drawing the sensation of how I experienced the landscape when I walked, as opposed to making an observed drawing from a fixed point of view. The student painter is at her easel painting, and the other student, from India, is sitting at her desk in front of a screen.