Pattern

Helen Billinghurst

Description

Artists Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith offer a handbook for exploration, embodiment and art making in strange times. Uncovering a tattoo in the landscape, they describe the secrets of 'web-walking' and a journey of remarkable encounters.

Sujets

• Performance art
• Worship

Informations

• Publié par: Triarchy Press
• Date de parution: 01 août 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781911193906
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 15 Mo

Extrait

Published in this first edition in 2020 by:
Triarchy Press
Axminster, England
[e-mail]
www.triarchypress.net
Copyright Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith, 2020
The right of Helen Billinghurst and Phil Smith to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
All rights reserved
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design and cover image: Stuart Crewes
Typeset in Franklin Gothic
Printed by TJ International, Padstow, UK
Print ISBN: 978-1-911193-89-0
ePub ISBN: 978-1-911193-90-6
pdf ISBN: 978-1-911193-91-3
Ways To Read This Book
This is a handbook for walking, art making and using a map that has been left for us in the landscape. A codebook for living in a new/old mode; in which the barriers between humans and cosmos, and between subjective beings and objective spaces, begin to disappear. The book is also about mysterious gameboards and rules for old pastimes that we have made up. Games for you to play. There are ladders to climb and snakes to ride. An invitation to make a playful pilgrimage that is attentive to both new and ancient special places, webbed together around a tattoo that is in the earth and in the mind.
However you choose to use this book - solve its mystery, borrow a tactic or two, drill it for ideas - we will feel very happy. Particularly, if you change our work as you work it.
While The Pattern describes a model for art making, we did not start out with one. Instead, the model emerged from our hyper-sensitized walking in marginal and disregarded spaces and it has become a kind of web walking . The model continued to develop as we read our poems and performed actions at events, invited people to take us on walks, ran art making workshops and assembled an exhibition in Plymouth (UK) from which the threads ran out in many directions.
The Pattern is then the story of the places we found as we spun those threads wider.
It is also a fictioning (we adopted narratives and characters to find things out). There is a story to follow. This story snakes through the book, but it first snaked through us. Throughout The Pattern , through our alternative selves - the artists Crab Bee and the wandering Smoke Mirrors - the threads of the story are unwound; then gathered together into a quest to live in the new/old mode. We hope you will join your thread to it.
Helen Billinghurst Phil Smith
crabandbee.tumblr.com
plymouthlabyrinth.wordpress.com

Contents
Part One: The Edges
Part Two: The Pilgrimages
References:
Author Biographies
The Pattern
by Smoke Mirrors
Part One: The Edges
It is when we do not know our place that we best discover who we are not and who we are to become.
Labyrinths
Finding the Troytown labyrinth on St Agnes, Scilly Isles, we walked it quickly and then walked it back again. Wound up, and then unwound. Swift, small, quiet moments, stumbling over a rough coil of dirt; the effect of walking it continued to unwind over the days and weeks since. Even at the time of writing, months later, it carries on unfolding itself.
It was the furthest and most Westward point of our journey over a corner of the Atlantic, our going West ; any further and we would have fallen into the breakers below the rocks. A Viking labyrinth, consistent with a kind we had never heard of before: the coastal labyrinths common in Scandinavia. Walking such a cliff top labyrinth, on the edge of the island, you realise how it allows you, entering its landward opening, to continue your walk to the sea, beyond falling, drowning and dying, and yet remain dry and alive.
We had started our exploring together with an idea, taken from Olaf Nicolai and Jan Wenzel s Four Times Through The Labyrinth : that the labyrinth at Knossos was not an actual underground structure, but the myth by which small town Athenian visitors to Knossos interpreted a huge and bewildering city (similar to the fear and hatred of Babylon among early Christians). That the red thread of Ariadne, who knew the secrets of the Labyrinth s twists and turns and the hungers of her brother the Minotaur, was not for Theseus (or any other solo hero), but for all who are lost.
In our city, Plymouth (UK), we found an unremarked labyrinthine geography; winding paths around estuaries that enchanted and spun us, and folded us up in smaller dimensions. Winding and unwinding became part of our methodology of enchantment. It turns out it can happen on any scale. Once we realised this, we put it to work: cutting up our poems into single lines, spending hours curling each paper fragment. We threw them onto the floor for others to find in an exhibition. We were uneasy, at first, at the damage we had done, but soon a labyrinthine snakiness began to knit the parts back together and we began to wind out with them...
Southway
Smoke parked the car; reminding Mirrors how on our first walk things had gone far too well. We were like three weaving goddesses! she complained. We had conjured treasures at almost every step. The Birdman - ornithologist and dj Tony Whitehead - had been invited along and in the bright warm sunlight, reflecting off the water, he had magnified our efforts and radiated us with his own knowing.
We locked the car, heading for the damp drab suburban streets of Southway. We wanted to test for a labyrinth in the least mythical of circumstances. Turning off an anonymous residential street to follow a concrete path down to what turned out to be a children s play area with gallows-like play equipment, beside a tumbling stream. On the wall of an adjacent substation someone had written PAN in large chalk letters. Smoke took a piece of chalk, picked up during a walk on the Icknield Way, out of her pocket and handed it to Mirrors. He added his own PAN WAS EVERYWHERE chalk graffito and Smoke photographed it, fuzzily, with her malfunctioning camera. The rain fell. We followed the wrong side of the stream where there was no path: out of the play area, under tall trees, over the rusty remains of a trampled wire fence and climbed a scree slope, Mirrors pointing out to Smoke a leaning tree that seemed spiderish. Smoke had been talking about Arachne, about how the single red thread of Ariadne might be multiplied into a web, a cat s cradle or a string figure game.

As the rain began to fall heavily, we emerged from brambles onto a path which led to a ruined Tudor farmhouse, its garden full of overgrown shrubs, piles of cast iron railings and fallen ornamental masonry. An attempt to make a secret vegetable garden within the ruins had been abandoned. We followed the uncertain path back into the trees and past a quarry; under giant beech trees hugged by holly bushes. Then emerged into a wasteland, where acres of woodland had been felled and roots dug up and piled high like bodies on a battlefield. All this walled up behind the streets of suburbia. At the far end of the barren expanse, old cars rotted into ferns, and we were turned back by a tall metal fence. We took another path across the wasteland to leap across the higher reaches of the stream.
On the other side our information gathering changed into something quite different. Under the wet trees, rain dripping from the low branches, we stood and scryed the surface of a pool formed by the rain. A strange spontaneous thing for two people who don t do magic to do. But when done, we walked up the path and out of the trees, having no idea quite how different everything was about to get.

So, off we go, on a deeper quest, begun not by imitating ancient or esoteric rituals, but turning off an anonymous residential street to follow a concrete path. Jumping a stream to stare into a pool of rainwater gathering under the trees. That night, Smoke wrote a poem. It was a poem about the walk, the stream, about the Gods of the Earth, about being a woman. It was about all and none of this. Smoke was shocked and scared by the poem she wrote when she read it back. It seemed angry and spiteful but pragmatic and useful. It seemed related to her, but it felt other , as if it had written itself. It wouldn t be the last time that either Smoke or Mirrors wrote in this way.
But this was the first time, for us together, that the atmospheres or forces or whatever they are showed us that they had as much agency as we did and that, whatever we thought about the matter, they might have their own ideas about what needed to happen.
This is the poem:
Southway
i.
We were to sacrifice ourselves to a Labyrinth of brick and tarmac, but instead came into another Labyrinth: a green and watery fold invisibly inserted into the suburbs. Near the childrens gallows and the baptized shopping trolley, we saw the first sign of Pan.
The green fold contained hybrids: humans, myths, demons, gods, beasts, and detritus were spliced amongst the ruins. Much further on, we stared into the dark scrying pool.
Pan was everywhere. It rained and poured, and paper turned to pulp.
ii.
The myths are getting spliced, the myths are getting married.
Ariadne got tied up with Noah.
And she was called Arachne before she got hitched
before she got stitched
up
hanged in Southway
suspended by a thread
from the oak tree in the playground
by the rushing water in the bottom of the valley.
And when the rains came
Arachne, Pan and Minotaur,
those lovers, hybrids, all together
repaired the abandoned, unloved, broken boat
helped it to float.
And Arachne bound Theseus to the tree
and left him to the floods because of his heroic stupidity.

Refrain no. 7
We are all royal.
Blood Red Hunting Line
Hunter and hunted; the empathy of the wolf for its prey. The line that shifts from