Spirit of Stones

I was driving into South Wales, to Newport Museum and Art Gallery, to see an exhibition of batik artworks by my friend, Annabel Carey. Batik is a process originating in Indonesia to create images for ceremonial and ritual purposes. It involves using wax resist applied with a spoon-like tool — ‘canting’ — and then adding dyes. It is usually done on cloth — cotton, linen, for example — though other surfaces can be used.

Annabel did a series of large batik landscapes depicting standing stones and circles from various locations around the British Isles. I was hugely impressed by the artistry — the design, the texture, the colouring. The works also appealed to my feeling for the past and prehistory.

Afterwards, I wrote a poem sharing the title of the exhibition, ‘Spirit of Stones’. In it I try to convey the experience of travelling not just in space, to and from and around the exhibition, but also in time, back to the images shown in the batiks, the distant past with all its mystery, the sort of journey which leaves you changed. I give you the poem here, and I illustrate it with my drawings in graphite based on Annabel’s original pictures.

Spirit of Stones         

after the
         insistence of
          tarmac    viscous          
in this heat    and
          the beat of traffic
          to come to rest
          in the gallery’s
          low-lit ambience
          is an arrival 

          noises still
          subsiding in my head
          I move from wall to wall                             

  Sunhoney
       Carreg Sampson
   Loanhead of Daviot
       Castlerigg
   poetry of stones    stones
       cloth-born    stones worked    
   through canted wax and dye 
       till the line’s questing
   and the weighted shape
       come with their own persuasion

          here is tolerant ground
          brindled    allowing shade
          massed air    lucent or
          weeping rain           

              and there    braced
              between plain and sky 
              the stones    rough-hewn
              or split by fire and dousing
striding avenues 
rings wheeling  

           from megalith scarred by time’s etch
and capstone lichen-licked 
the quiet admonition of cool stone                                                                                      

until   
from somewhere
beyond frame and fabric
    steals in
a luminescence
    slow-flickering
dividing shadows
    to open the circle
                                    where the entering
    is to be beckoned
to a dance of centuries
    and the grave dialectic
of now and elsewhere          

memory burns    surfaces coruscate
    while filaments of changing light
leap out    connecting rock
    to earth    to turning firmament                                                                                                             

here but not here    

in space weathered
and generous
I find myself   
where the altered
air is charitable
and departure is
no abandonment
but a returning
to another road
soundless and untravelled

                                                                                                                                                                                    
*****

Examples of Annabel Carey’s work can be found at

www.ctinternationalartists.com/annabel-carey.html