Caput mortuum

For Guy Dickinson by Chris Thornhill

 

You must go on.

Gather the fragments so that nothing may be lost.

The stones that call to your body and its bones.

 

The dull weight of it.

 

The sutured ground, the cleaving sky.

In all things a dumb consent to distance.

 

Foulness. Furnace. Fescue. Feces.

This poverty is a promise.

 

Cormorants. Coccoliths. Glyphs of buried tide.

Lines traced between conjectural stations.

Harmonic cartographies of paling horizons.

Of slow exposures. Of your salt-cracked hands.

 

These ruins will bring forth rarer splendors.

Hidden since the foundation of the world

Three hours on the Broomway, Foulness

Everywhere I looked were pivot-points and fulcrums, symmetries
 and proliferations: the thorax points of a winged world. Sand mimicked water, water mimicked sand, and the air duplicated the textures of both. Hinged cuckoo-calls; razor shells and cockle shells; our own reflections; 
a profusion of suns; the glide of transparent over solid. When I think back to the outer miles of that walk, I now recall a strong disorder of perception that caused illusions of the spirit as well as of the eye. I recall thought becoming sensational; the substance of landscape so influencing the mind that mind’s own substance was altered.

Robert Macfarlane, The Old Ways, 2012

Eight hours on Beachy Head, East Sussex

It was a clear steel-blue day. The firmaments of air and sea were hardly separable in that all-pervading azure; only, the pensive air was transparently pure and soft…

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, 1851

Selected images and text plates from Guy’s Caput Mortuum series are shown below (Click to expand – best viewed on a large screen to explore the text plates)

PUBLICATIONS

If you’d like to own printed copies of these wonderful series, Guy has self-published them in two small books. More details and ordering are through his website here: tracingsilence.com/editions

 

ABOUT GUY DICKINSON

Born in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, Guy Dickinson trained as an Architect in London, winning the RIBA President’s Medal in 1993, and has been an associate at John Pawson since 2003. The seeds of his tracing silence project, established in 2011, were sown during a 14 day immersion in the Yorkshire Moors in 1992. Experimenting with methods of construction, weaving, stitching, thatching and casting, he created a series of simple shelters that sought to unearth the intrinsic nature of the places he inhabited.

Now utilising the mediums of photography and poetry, Guy’s work continues to explore place, but also the consonance between internal and external passage, the similitude between the passage of thoughts and the passage of the body. He scours, combs and sifts, eyes shifting from foreground to background, from details to horizons, looking to tease out some essence of how we perceive the world around us.

Recent work saunters from the sparse to the suffocating. Horizon, depth of field and perspective have been slowly relinquished in favour of texture, tone and surface. Developed through a cycling process of layering and distillation, these quietly cartographic fields invite us to look again at the landscape and the miry complexity of our place within it.

Website: tracingsilence.com
Twitter: @tracing_silence
Instagram: @tracing_silence

ABOUT CHRIS THORNHILL

Chris is a poet based in Nottinghamshire. His work proceeds from a joint regard for the natural world as a text, and for texts as natural phenomena. Drawing together remnants of mythologies, ruptured tomes of natural history, and reflective journals, his poems stand as intimations of a transmundane reality in which the fragments of the myriad texts of the world achieve coherence.

His poems have appeared in the journals Reliquiae (Corbel Stone Press), Alterity (Centre for Alterity Studies), and as handmade artists editions.

Twitter: @cj_thornhill
Instagram: @thornhill_cj

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