Metafiction, Myth and Language: A World in Words (and Pictures)

Whilst editing of the text continues (the early chapters, having been derived from a long-abandoned prose work, need special amounts of attention), I also spent some time editing some of the design pieces for submission to the Masters showcase for this year. I doubt very much any of them will be accepted, but they will come in handy for the online degree show, which will be a very different form of presentation to the physical space:  I also decided to check with the art school print shop their options for binding hardback books - the 'thesis' style which I initially deemed "not quite what I'm looking for" some months ago, but which now seems wholly appropriate - being the traditional form of binding for academic, authoritative texts, an assumed status which is offset by the interior text in all its ambiguity and ambivalence. The print team also offered a choice of gold or silver lettering/design for the covers, which I found very interesting. I've never liked

 Trying to figure out exactly how the finished, printed book will look with very little actual time remaining (I reckon I'll need at least 3 weeks to allow for the printers getting the job done and delivered, depending upon 'the situation' out there), so this evening I cleaned up a couple of the character designs into .eps image format so they can be resized to any scale. The 'marching band' of Ulfhednar border design and the Gifli character turned out quite nicely:  I'm not sure how much of this kind of thing I want to use - or how I could use it - as one of the plans at the outset was to produce visual work with physical and material qualities in order to get away from any form of 'illustration'. Besides, there's plenty of great artists out there who can do this kind of Celtic design work ten times better than me with beautiful knotwork and so on, but what I can bring to the visuals is a certain individuality, I reckon.  But I did always see the Ul

 Friday afternoon, and I started to think ahead to the final public 'installation' concept - namely, one (or more, resources allowing) pieces of 'prehistoric wall art', most likely to be created here , at Auchmithie. I found some chunks of sandstone lying around the garden and ground them down. Research shows that a glutinous binding agent of some sort - like animal fat, egg white or some such, is what was probably used by actual prehistoric artists. I opted for water since it was readily available, and after scattering some of the finely-ground powder on a slab, was able to produce a decent-looking result using only a wet brush: In the right light (or with some subtle Photoshop manipulation) it could look pretty much like red ochre, the traditional medium of ancient artists. A trip to Arbroath in the coming days or weeks will be a nice break from stone grinding and donkey work.

   Continuing on from yesterday's post and thinking about land art and installing these images in landscape, yesterday evening I made an impromptu visit to one of the Carerthun hill forts near Edzell. I clambered up to the top of the White Caterthun with camera gear and the 7kg 'spear-maid' (stone #2) on my back - not an easy climb, but worth it for the view alone! The site has some personal significance as it was one of the main locations for my 2020 film 'The Wanderer and the Wish-maid' - itself based upon and inspired by the valkyrie figures of Norse mythology, forming a very tangible link from last year's undergrad work to this year's Master's work. The ready-made cairn was a gift for installing the stone - creating a natural axis point between sky and earth, the perfect embodiment for a character who inhabits that liminal space, whether as one who takes the spirits of the dead to the otherworld, or if the stone specifically represents Gerthild, Wo

 Apologies for the terrible title of today's post, but it made me smile. With the new chisel arriving this morning, I decided to get on straight away with the plan of making a first, tentative, small piece of inscription. I chose the schematic portrait of my storm-god Hrefni in his raven form: and sketched it onto a suitable sized piece of stone. Things began a bit heavy-handed as I've never handled a proper chisel in this way before, but it soon became clear that the relative softness of the stone (sandstone, I'm assuming, as it seems to be of a similar appearance to the local ancient monumental stones) allowed me to scratch quite heavily, using the edge of the chisel and no hammer, guidelines deep enough to allow the deeper hammered work to follow the correct path and not meander off on a journey of its own - which is what accounted for the very rough, jagged initial outlines:   I gave up on the double outline idea as there wasn't enough space (with a bigger stone an

 Following on from my earlier post , this was delivered earlier today (48 hour service!): NK Sandars - Prehistoric Art in Europe and after a lunchtime's worth of browsing, it has already pushed the visual side of this project in a whole new direction. Sanders' scholarship might be 60+ years old but it covers so much more than processes of dating and archaeological musings - the clue is in the title, and she addresses the ideas of these works as art in their own right as well, citing the likes of Gombrich on the way, as well as several detailed comparisons of prehistoric figuration to so-called 'civilised' Greek artistic forms. In terms of visual interest, a few beast/human hybrids caught my attention straight away: especially the 'sorceror' (beast-shaman?) figure at bottom right. This straightaway inspired a more 'primitive' rendering of this depiction of Hrefni, the raven storm-god: as this, re-imagined in a much earlier style: Herein the difference is

Having spent the last few months developing a distinctive 'native art form' for my mythical world, in which gods, mythical concepts and heroes are signified (rather than represented - following the Lévi-Strauss model of 'primitive art' whose aim is not imitation of the subject), a random bit of browsing overturned the notion of a unified art style . Schematics of the idol's multiple faces and design elements   The age and distinctive design work on this idol made me realise the importance of establishing an 'elder culture' which existed long before the present time in which the poem's narrative is set, in which the origins of the 'contemporary' forms could perhaps be traced. Having a single homogenous style of representation made me think of those old TV period dramas set in, say, Edwardian days, when all furniture, fashion and design featured is of that exact era - with nothing from the Victorian or Georgian periods still extant. Furniture, fab