The land around here is an open, downland, sheepgrazing chalky soil, scattered through like plum pudding with quartz flints of all shapes and sizes. The earth is thin and poor, needing constant improvement if one wants to make a cultivated garden - but the grassy farmland has a nature and a character all of its own - from which I take inspiration.
I have written before of the transformative experience of seeing Henry Moore's sketchbooks and collections of natural objects from which he drew *his* inspiration - abundant within those objects were collections of flints, from which he developed his monumental Women.
He saw the shape of women within the sinuous curves of the stones and added his own inner genius to bring them to realisation as sculptures to be seen in the landscape. I find flints gathered from the land around me both beautiful in their own right and inspirational in their flowing forms - the shapes are driven by the elements of which they are formed - as the landscape itself evolves. The stones tell the story - not only of the material of the land, but of the land-scape itself - the vistas which are sculpted according to the underlying geology. Science and art combine beautifully to give us broader answers to the questions that the land throws out to us. Seeing from multiple perspectives, we can appreciate more deeply and live more richly, become more grounded ourselves - like the flints - within the very substance of our beautiful and infinitely complex planet.
Journal Prompt. Of what is YOUR land made? Go outside and look at your immediate environment. Bend down and touch the land…what can you feel between your fingers? Take a little while to find a geological map of your area, to have a background idea of local structure.. then go out for a walk, looking closely. Do you see rolling hills? Open heathland? Rocky cliffs and promontories? While you are out on the land - stop awhile and capture your thoughts. What can you see? Hear? Smell? How does the experience of being out on the land in the elements make you feel? Bring home one or two pieces of the land, in the form of rocks or pebbles. Use them to inspire you in a creative adventure - drawing…painting…sculpture?
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