Traces and Absences

The Earth is our home and we are making ourselves homeless. We are involved in a kind of lostness in which most people are participating more or less unconsciously in the destruction of the natural world, which is to say the source of our own lives."

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Every aesthetic trace, every footprint of an object, sparkles with absence… Sensual things are elegies to the disappearance of objects.’

Timothy Morton

I joined Sara Trillo from Crate Margate on her walk Search for Shuart, on the Isle of Thanet, a place once cut off by the Wantsum channel. Shuart is/was a deserted mediaeval village. Now known as a DMV.

In the view of Object Oriented Ontology, humans are not the centre of meaning and power. Although it was clear to me that many humans have passed this way and gone, the oysters and the seagulls remain.

I collected some little oyster shells from the beach below the monastery towers.

We walked on to Reculver. There was nothing at Shuart but definitely something at Reculver. We could see it for miles. What on earth was it? A space ship? An oil refinery? The extraordinary landmark with two towers, right by the sea turned out to be the ruins of a monastery, once significantly wealthy. However the waves encroached and though the towers remain as navigational aids the sea defences were abandoned by 1806.

I photographed as we walked: a wind-battered barn, an empty field, a beach deserted beach. We went to places once inhabited, lost, rediscovered and lost again. Traces of what happened there, in the stone age, bronze age – there had been structures, burial sites and later Roman habitation. Now just empty fields. Nothing there! The Black Death, the encroachment of the sea, the silting up of the Wantsum Channel obliterated all. Thriving trades in salt and in oysters (better than Whitstable’s) were gone too, apart from some mounds.

Video of ClayPlus workshop by Luming Lu and Yu Leng

Rosalind Krauss talks about Sculpture and the expanded field. On the walk I felt some association with Richard Long and Hamish Fulton as they used walking to create a new form of sculpture for their time. I made little objects as a sculptural addition to the use of my legs.

Back in London I found a clay workshop at the Story Garden behind the British Library, with Manqiao Fang from CSM. I copied one of the strange little oysters and added clay to the other oyster shells.

But I forgot the salt.

There are fossils of seashells high in the Himalayas, what was and what is are different things. Rebecca Solnit

Richard Long ' A Line made by Walking. Hamish Fulton. 40 years as a 'walking artist'