A spell on the beach

Know anything about Runes?

To early people writing was a very serious thing - it was full of magical power.

In Europe our Germanic ancestors used a runic alphabet as their form of writing. They used it to identify their possessions - combs, brooches, shields, cattle, wives - help them to make calendars, encode secret messages, mark their sacred monuments and burial sites. They also used them to cast spells - make love charms, curse their enemies, cause their neighbours crops to fail, cure the pox. Usually the ceremony of writing the runes was accompanied by a chant or prayer and sometimes a curse to make the spell. They called this a rune as well, and the two runes combined – written and spoken - made the magic work.

They called it the ‘whispering, secret talk.’ I love that…the whispering, secret talk - it sounds so completely magical.

Ingwaz is the rune of harmony, approval, unity, agreement, love, peace. It’s an important rune, a powerful rune, a very positive rune. It was used to make fertility magic; magic for farming, growth, health, balance. It was the rune of the god Ing, and associated with Frey - god of the weather, generation and fertility - and it’s particularly potent at the time of the new moon.

I built this sculpture on Dinas Dinelle beach last summer – it’s the Ingwaz rune. I like to go there to watch the small planes at Caernarfon airport. They’re pleasure craft and go around and around in a ten mile circle, landing, taking off, then landing again. Don’t worry I’m not an airport freak, the airport is a really a landing strip and the planes are micro-lights, biplanes, and single engine Cesna’s…actually that does make me a plane freak doesn’t it.

It was a beautiful sunny day and the tide was out. The beach has a high pebble ridge along its length, falling away to firm sand at low tide. I found an old, rusty bike wheel, a broken branch and some polythene. I wanted to leave behind a statement about how beautiful the day was and how positive I felt on that day.

Yes, I’m bonkers - but you probably know that anyway, and if you need even more proof - here’s the whispering, secret talk I chanted to make the magic work.

Ingwaz
Rich dirt
My seed to grow
My hearth to simple burn
Rest godly laboured
Not worn in toil
Blessed by new life born

There you go, if you knew nothing about runes before, you know a little now… did the magic work?

Not so far I’m afraid.

Fish Circus...

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It’s a gloomy old day. Windy, wet, and cold - the sort of day for staying indoors or (if you’re bonkers like me) going for a walk on a beach somewhere. Still, it isn’t as gloomy as yesterday – I’ll try to be lighter today.

I love wrapping up warm (to quote Mothers everywhere), making ready to battle the wind and rain, and then sallying forth into the Weather (capital intentional). I enjoy the ‘struggle’ against the wind, rain, and whichever other elements are available in order to reach whatever goal takes my fancy (as long as the ‘struggle’ isn’t too struggley and the ‘goal’ has a nice warm fire at the end of it).

Yes, I like to sally forth.

‘Sallying forth’ – what a great term. It means ‘to set out in a sudden, energetic or violent manner often with an uncertain outcome’. Well, I’m not too sure about the sudden, energetic or violent part of the definition (I like to take my time when I’m sallying) but I love the idea of an uncertain outcome. Exciting isn’t it! Free in the wind and rain, a little unsure of where you are going or what you might find when you get there. It’s in that uncertainty that the anticipation and promise lays - or so I’m told. I won’t dwell on the uncertainty element though, it may take me off on a tangent.

Sometimes I sally forth along the beach at Porth Dinllaen towards the Ty Coch pub. The pub (which by the way is almost incidental to my sallying) is actually built on the beach in a beautiful little bay surrounded by mountains - it’s a great place for a pint (or two). We often sally there on New Years day. Once I found a long dried pipefish on the sand. I’ve kept it - it looks like a cross between a snake and a sea-horse. We’ve found a few pipe fish over the years - on various sallies along numerous Welsh beaches - and I’ve made them into a kind of sea sculpture (I really must post a photograph of it).

This brings me to what I set out to write about (at last)… Eileen Agar. God, I ramble sometimes!

Eileen Agar is number ten in my list of top ten surrealists, I’ll get around to them all eventually I expect, but let’s start with Eileen. She was a fervent beachcomber, often using the flotsam and jetsam she found washed up on the shore in her work. ‘Fish Circus’ features a real starfish that she found on a sally in 1939 near Toulon on the Mediterranean coast. She’s pinned it to the painting with a large blue drawing pin and painted and collaged other sea creatures along with some inevitable surrealist chequerboard patterns to the work. I don’t know what it is about surrealists and chequerboard – maybe it’s a perspective thing - perhaps they just like chequerboard.

She used ‘found objects’ in her sculptures as well. ‘Marine Object’ is one of my favourites, and yes, I know that it’s simple and anyone could have made it, but in the context of its time…

All in all, I think ‘Fish Circus’ and ‘Marine Object’ are lovely, light, whimsical works that on a grey day like today, and after a black day like yesterday, lift my spirits and make me want to sally forth along the nearest beach to see what I can find to ‘do’ something with.

How about you? Up for a sally? I’ve even arranged it so that you can do your sallying from the comfort of your own armchair…

- Here’s the Ty Coch webcam.
http://www.tycoch.co.uk/Java1.html

- And sally forth virtually along the beach at Porth Dinllaen on a sunny day.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/northwest/sites/walks/pages/porthdinllaen.shtml?1

Better still… sally forth along there sometime. It’s a great place in any weather and you never know what you may find.

Chin up! Summers just around the corner and I’m off to see Cirque du Soleil tonight which is a completely different kind of circus to Eileen's fishy one.

Dali's cat 2...

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You’ve probably noticed a surrealist theme emerging in my blog? Truth is - I guess I’ve always been a surrealist at heart. There is something about stumbling across the unusual in the usual, finding the the-out-of place in the in-place, seeing the slightly odd in the perfectly ordinary, that makes my imagination set alight.

André Breton was the major spokesman for the surrealist movement, he was a poet, and didn’t paint as far as I know. He wrote their manifesto. He said that Surrealism was a means of reuniting conscious and unconscious realms of experience so completely that the world of dream and fantasy would be joined to the everyday rational world in ‘an absolute reality - a surreality.’

Interesting…how often do you awake from a dream unsure if you are still dreaming? Could it be that just for that split second the world of dream is joined to the everyday rational world? Perhaps in that split second you truly are experiencing the surreal. What do you think?

People use the ‘surreal’ word a lot, usually out of context - I wish they wouldn’t. They use it to describe things that aren’t surreal at all. I once heard a friend describe a man walking along a busy high street in top hat and tails as surreal – ‘now that is SURREAL!’ he said. It wasn’t. It was just some man walking along a high street in top hat and tails probably on his way to a wedding. Now if his face had been devoid of any features, or he’d been floating in mid-air, or even if it’d been a sunny day and he hadn’t cast a shadow then he may have qualified. Another time I heard a chap in the pub call a packet of crisps 'surreal' because they were described as hedgehog flavour. Watch - my - lips.... Hedgehogs (even cooked hedgehogs that have been used to flavour crisps) are not surreal, they are just hedgehogs.

Anyway – here’s my Dali cat built from found stuff on the best wash-up beach in North Wales. I’ve been doodling Dali cats for a while now, but this is the first time I’ve built one.

Hope you like it.

Oh, and by the way - that funny little thing below is something that followed me out of a dream this morning and stuck around. I think that it might be Yves Tanguy’s pet mouse.

Beach Sculpture