Author: dominiquefcameron

Charcoal drawing.

A hurdy gurdy drone of wind sets scarlet poppies into a flutter. Green blue barley swells, rolls, swaggers across the field.

Ink drawing of a dead crow. I find it on the road, just beside the track that dives down into the field. Its heart is lying exposed, staining the tarmac, feathers flat from cars. The vulnerability of the life startles me when I had not expected it. Perhaps it is the heart that bothers me.

Monday morning. Early. A thick mist. Wet, grey, still. Across the field on the other side of the burn a small hill sits, oddly, in this landscape. It lies behind the recycling centre and judging by the sight of plastic and bits of metal emerging I am guessing it must have been the old rubbish tip before it was covered in a layer of topsoil and left for nature to try and recycle. I climbed it the other week. It does have a strange atmosphere, it is land, but not land. Everywhere, nettles, bindweed and giant hogweed. Blooming now, their stalks are taller than me, some almost seven feet tall, topped with a mop head of creamy white flowers – I am in Lilliput amongst cow parsley. The sense here is edgy, non- conformist, unlike the docile field below. This piece of land has its own laws. Yet, the trees are taking hold, pushing their roots through the layers of human crap and, bit by bit this new land declares its own agency.

I am sitting on the railway sleeper bridge at the confluence of the two burns in the corner of the field. Above me , goldfinches in a hawthorn tree. A heron camouflaged in the grey of the sky sweeps past as if rowing down a river. Birdsong and the burn. Swifts flit in between the beech trees, and the seed heads of grass nod heavily with raindrops. Time to draw.

Earthworks pock mark the woodland floor and high rise flats of foxglove flowers glow pink in the gloom, a flare path .

Oil on wood – 20 x 15 cm.

A dusty, skiddy child worn track dives, headlong into the rolling folds of green. They darken with the shadow of a crow, sending a skylark up, up, its song getting thinner, sweeter, higher. I watch how the land pitches, forever caught in mid-fall.

 

 

Oil on panel -25 x 20 cm.

 

Oil on panel -25 x 20 cm.

 

Stepping out into the light from the wood, stepping over the line, into the field. The wood, the field. The field, the wood – each have there own temporal planes, their own time zones. The field shrieks its haste, it knows its future is short, a season is all. The wood shrugs, knowing its own history, the stories, an unbroken line stretching away.  Its cycle is time-less. Crossing these planes of time is jolting, exhilirating. There has been no rain for weeks. I come back with dust from the field and mud from the wood on my boots.