Performance installation commissioned by Newlyn Gallery, Cornwall. 2017, as part of their Transitions series.
Hermitage, or Taking My Own Advice was an installation in the immediate wake of submitting my PhD thesis. An installation that was based on going for a walk in order to find the things to make a shed in which to make a book about going for a walk to find the things to make a shed in which to make a book about going for a walk to…
Walking and talking and printing and writing have made up the bulk of the past five years of my life, during which I have been grappling with a practice-based PhD whose foundation was a long walk across Europe. A secular pilgrimage. And now the play goes on, elsewhere and after, you cannot rehearse a walk, every time you step out it is into a world made afresh again.
I undertook the walk in the bleak winds of February in search of material, both physical and otherwise, with which to construct a hermitage at Newlyn Gallery in Cornwall. I went for a walk so I could find the wood to build a shed in which I would make a book about going on a walk in order to find the wood to build a shed in which I would make a book. The book is now made, but here it rests, its first page pinned down; it is waiting for the summer, for the sun, when the hermitage will be laid to rest along St. Michael’s Way at Tremenheere Sculpture Garden in Cornwall, in the hermitage the book will finally be written, about going for a walk to find the stuff to build a shed in which to make the book in which to write about going for the walk…
In the beginning was the word, and the word was hermit, derived from the old French hermite and back from there into Latin eremita and back again to Greek, eremites, living in the desert, from eremia desert, from eremos: lonely.
To be alone then, to be, alone.
“It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back.” Ludwig Wittgenstein.