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

 Today I managed to finish off the very tricky 'Gydena and Hrefni Cosmic Stone', which features the solar goddess and the raven storm-god standing on the two cosmic beasts who beget all the animal species in Gyldland cosmogony.  This was definitely the hardest one yet, given the relative size and the detail, and in the end I had to simplify a lot of it. It was also very hard to engrave as the surface wasn't smooth, but the shallowness of the line makes it look old and worn, which is helpful. I think this is the last one - five stones is probably enough unless I decide to render a fragment of something later on. I'll be on campus soon to look at the availability of glass-topped museum style display cases for the show, which will have to be discussed re: a) lighting conditions so the lights illuminate the engraved lines well enough but don't reflect off the top of the glass, and b) the ability of the case to support over 60kg of stone. So I may need two cases - or els

  Having not been home the last couple of days, I needed to get back into some of the 'heavy' work and managed to bash out this rather 'primitive' and 'amateur' rendering of the main character of the epic poem - evidently carved by a friend or colleague of hers, whether a fellow member of Greyfair clan or even one of the other characters mentioned in the text. I used a much wider chisel (in truth a ground-down screwdriver) and hammer, eschewing fine lines and going straight for the memorialization aspect, whilst encapsulating the essence of the character. Rustic, basic but inherently honest in its intentions - perhaps the essence of 'folk art'. I like how the thick, simple lines are also suggestive of the English chalk hill figures: The Cerne Abbas Giant and the Wilmington Long Man - hill figures which have fascinated me for over 30 years This was my first attempt at writing actual Gyldish runes, namely her name and title: "Womba Wislig" (Womba

 This afternoon brought part 2 of the Mægtha/Hretha stone to completion - thickening the outline on Mægtha's sickle and carving Hretha in their entirety, with a bit more improvisation in the spiral design work, creating a bit more symmetry and balance within Hretha's body to mirror Mægtha's: Hretha still has something of a bovine look to their head, which I kind of like, as it suggests a particular breed of goat which is unknown in our world - hinting again at the idea of species extinction and 'lost times' and 'lost worlds' (rather than just slightly wonky art drawn without reference). Tomorrow I'll likely be busy with other things all day and I need a break from physical work anyway. That will give me time to reflect on this and figure out if there is any need for further design elements, or if it should just be left as is? The slab will sit outside to let the elements get rid of the dust and the freshly-engraved look for the next few weeks. It would b

   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

  This slab is one of the smaller ones - about 30cm wide by 40cm high, weight about 7 kg. I tested all the earmarked stones with my old luggage trolley and it (just) managed to transport them all (one at a time) to the car - good to know for when these finally have to get installed in less than 2 months. As the sandstone is not strong, dropping and knocking these finished works will have to be avoided at all costs. Following on from the earlier 'scratch' work, I spent several hours outside today finishing it off  (the design looks better in reality but I had to compensate for strong and very bright lighting conditions). The sandstone is soft enough that no actual chisel work was required - in fact that's convenient, as any hammer work tends to chip away from the determined groove, causing flaking and diminishing the design. The only tools used were a small awl, a toothbrush (for cleaning out the dust) and a steel ruler for defining the spear lines (plus, of course, a face m

 Following on from the abortive attempt at carving the spear-maid/Gerthild design in wood earlier this week, I decided to try it on one of the smaller slabs of sandstone instead. About an hour or so later, I had a rough, usable outline to follow and chisel out deeper: The main problem was getting the image transferred onto the stone. For the first effort , black carbon paper did the trick - but not here. I had to redraw from scratch the loose design, in a 4H pencil, then carefully gouge the line with a small sharpened bradawl. No actual chiselling involved as the lines are too fine and fragile. This will be a problem for the more complex designs, such as the double portrait of Hretha and Maegtha , so I'll need to plan well in advance. The relentless gouging work, whilst saving my joints from impact, will cause a different range of pains and issues to my working hand so I need to limit my time spent on this over the coming weekend. As well as, I assume, consider how much of this kin

 First tutorial today of the third and final semester in the approach to the resolution of this final project. Great to talk about my ideas so far and proposed developments, as well as a few off-the-cuff ideas, the type of which invariably pop into the head during such sessions. I'll start piecing together these ideas and possible inspirations soon, and spent the rest of the afternoon scrounging around the yard and adjoining field for likely pieces of sandstone for new stoneworking pieces. My attempts at wood-carving were non-starters and are not even worth sharing here, which is disappointing - but the stone-seeking was productive and I found a few good slabs (I'll worry about how to get them into the art school much nearer the time, but I do have a plan for that).   The largest slab (on the right) weighs in at 27kg - the one on the left is about 22. Whilst thinking about what will be (tomorrow I'll start measuring up some of the other designs and get them traced on to the

 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

With a new 6" x 1/2" stone chisel on its way to me, today I earmarked a few good, flat stones for practice. The plan is simply to trace and then inscribe a few basic example designs representative of the 'later period' of civilisation in my world:   namely, a couple of the simpler, less cursive designs, such as the raven forms of Hrefni: I should also start to think about the form of writing which might be in use as well - despite some vague ideas of how the Gyldland runes might differ from real-world Norse and Saxon types, I've yet to come up witjh something resembling a developed alphabet or set of characters. I wonder if they should differ much at all? After all, the various futharks exist in several forms, and I do use a plethora of words derived not only from OE sources but Norse as well. However, the opportunity is there to come up with something distinctive and suggestive of the people and their character, rather than just straight copying what is in effe