An artist with a lifelong commitment of responding to and working with the natural and built environment

Wetter: The Waters Are Coming. IPCC estimates of max sea level rise this century are rising along with sea levels! 2m of water in #letherbygallery gives a feel for what's in store...
#sealevelrise #thewatersarecoming #Thegreenhouse @csm_news @climate_emergency_network @fine_art_csm @artandsciencecsm @aa2a @ordnajela_zenitram @artlabcps @ipcc ...

One door closes and..
Week 2 at Granary Square! The fountains are gone but now installing two installations at The Lethaby Gallery Greenhouse show opening tomorrow . Open 11 - 6.00 Tuesday to Sunday this week. All welcome. Opening breakfast Weds 9 to 10; book on eventbrite.
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Many ways to appreciate The Waters Are Coming in Granary Square. Last day tomorrow...
Thanks to my animator collaborator
@ordnajela_zenitram
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The Waters really are coming. Excited to be setting up this morning. With thanks to @kingscrossn1c @ual_postgrad_community - @ordnajela_zenitram and Damon #TheGreenHouse
It's been a long time coming!

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Window on Lindow - Day 31
Lindow Man was found in Compartment 8 of the Moss. Another preserved body was found in Compartment 3, first a head and later a number of body parts - now believed to be part of the same corpse. Lindow Man is exceptionally well preserved and rests in a rather neglected corner of the British Museum.
Many European bog bodies had suffered violent deaths and Lindow Man is no exception. Hit with a blunt instrument, garrotted and his throat cut, his death has been carbon dated to between BCE 2 and ACE 11 - in either the late Iron Age or early Romano-British period. There is speculation as to whether he was sacrificed or murdered. The former seems more likely. At the time of his death, the bog was in a wet phase and likely to have been treacherous. He was found in the deepest part of the bog and equidistant between two sandy ridges which would have provided firm standing for both him and his attackers.
This drawing shows a British Museum scanned image of Lindow Man’s remains surrounded by the peat in which he lay for almost 2,000 years. Pleasingly and appropriately, water from the drying peat intermingled with and partially obscured his outline in this work.
Out of respect for his memory, I left reference to the bog bodies in general and of Lindow Man in particular, to the last two days. There is much evidence that bogs were special places to local populations, and suggestion that in late Iron Age times they were an important site for rituals. Today as Lindow Moss takes its first steps back to a living ecosystem with the prospect of storing carbon from the atmosphere and of sustaining a diverse range of living beings, we can all have hope for the future. We give thanks to the many people who have contributed to the landscape we see today, including the local campaigners who managed to stop the peat cutting and supported a mechanism by which the restoration of the bog has begun.
May Lindow Man and all the other bog bodies rest in peace.
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#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
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Window on Lindow Day 30 and sort of appropriate for Good Friday...

As the month draws to a close, for the last two days I focus on what is probably best known to most people about Lindow Moss.

In August 1984 a human foot and lower leg was spotted on the peat conveyor by the peat cutters. The following day a flap of skin was found projecting from the peat cliff where they had been working. Archaeologists cut out the peat block containing the remains – which turned out to be the well-preserved body and head of a man from the waist up.

Hundreds if not thousands of preserved bodies have been found in bogs and mires across northern Europe over the centuries. Many of them, so called ‘paper bodies’, are only known of through surviving contemporaneous accounts or newspaper cuttings. But since the middle of the last century, increasing numbers have been found, studied, preserved and in some cases displayed in museums.

This drawing is based on the sites of seventy bodies which have been excavated from Ireland, through Wales, England, Holland, Germany, Denmark and Sweden. As many of the bodies still have the garments they were wearing when they died, it is made on a linen cloth soaked in wet peat.

450 x 380mm Posca paint pen on linen cloth soaked in peat in situ for 30 minutes

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Window on Lindow - Day 29

This drawing is a rumination as to how an amazing natural phenomenon, which developed into a self-sustaining system in the Cheshire landscape, has come to be tamed, exploited and left broken by humankind as the long process of restoration begins.

The manipulated satellite photo of the residual peat surface shows the mechanical geometry imposed upon it by peat cutting. But even in restoration of nature we need to own and constrain it. The photo shows parts of compartments 8 & 4 divided and named on the restoration plan.

Only the peat in the green background print retains a degree of random freedom...

295 x 206mm Manipulated arial photograph on ink and peat print on paper

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#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
#peatland #peatbog #peat #landscape #landscaperestoration #lowlandscape #lindowmoss #ecologicalart #ecoartist #artandscience #contemporaryart
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Way out West on Dingle Bay!

#lichin #dinglebay #wildatlanticway #iveraghpeninsula #ringofkerry #breezy ...

Window on Lindow. The exhibition may have closed, but the work lives on!

Day 28
As previously noted in the drawing for Day 7, the drainage of the remaining bog runs generally from east to west across the site, eventually discharging into Sugar Brook which forms the western boundary.

The bog formed in a hollow in the clay left behind by the ice sheet up to 1km thick which melted at the end of the last ice age around 10,000 years ago.

One theory is that the impermeable depression in which Lindow Moss sits was formed by a large block of residual ice whose weight pushed the underlying deposits downwards while the release of the weight of the adjacent melted ice caused the surrounding land to rise.

Today’s drawing, made on a printed green ground incorporating sand and peat fragments, shows the hollow within which the residual bog lies. The contour lines are 80cms apart with a fall of 4m across the site. The red ground is the highest, the yellow the lowest. The mound to the left is the sand intrusion into the bog – Compartment 2 – destined to form heathland in the restoration plans.

The data comes from a Digimap projection of the area.

150 x 295mm Watercolour on Digimap projection on ink and sand/peat print on paper

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#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
#peatland #peatbog #peat #landscape #landscaperestoration #lowlandscape #lindowmoss #ecologicalart #ecoartist #artandscience #contemporaryart
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Window on Lindow Day 27

Another departure today – the first time text has appeared in the drawings! I’ve been tempted before, but managed to avoid it. But I really couldn’t think of another way to demonstrate the diversity of life found on Lindow Moss in a Bio Blitz carried out last July. So here is the species list with latin and common name in each case.

The list is superimposed on a manipulated satellite photo of the Moss and surrounding area and is in turn superimposed by four cotton grass stems and seed heads I collected on my first visit and stored in my larger flower press.

You’ll find it just over half way down the first (blue) column! Blue for water and air; green for chlorophyll and moss.

Sadly, no water vole was reported, but they are notoriously shy. It is exciting that they are known to breed in Compartment 9 and wonderful that Ratty from Wind in the Willows is alive and well and living on Lindow!

420 x 295mm Cotton grass on manipulated photograph on paper

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#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
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#cheshire #wilmslow #climateamelioration
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#remembernature #iucnpeatlandprogramme ...

Window on Lindow: Day 26

A change of direction today, with a homage both to one of the early modernist painters and to the petrified pine on the surface of the peat. The former sought to create a “universal beauty”; the latter embodies a universal beauty.

The former’s work has lasted around 100 years since Piet Mondrian made his first “Neo Plastic” works in the early 1920s; the latter’s around 2,000 years since they were immersed and preserved in the peat of the raised bog. Now drying out and beginning to disintegrate after industrial turf cutting exposed them to the atmosphere once again, those pine trees remaining under the surface will, if restoration is successful, have the potential to survive in hidden universal beauty into the future for centuries if not millennia. Raising the prospect of their long outlasting Mondrian’s paintings should human societies break down.

The divisions in Mondrian’s painting recall for me the planned restoration compartments on Lindow Moss – red outside the site, blue to heath, yellow to fen and white to bog.

Time moves at different speeds, from the cosmic and geological time which led to the creation of the bog towards one end of the scale to the time taken to walk the dog on Lindow Moss or for me to pick up a piece of petrified pine from its surface towards the other…

340 x 265mm Ink prints of petrified pine on posca paint pens on paper

@wilmslowguild4559
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#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
#peatland #peatbog #peat #landscape #landscaperestoration #lowlandscape #lindowmoss #ecologicalart #ecoartist #artandscience #contemporaryart
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Window on Lindow
Last week! Last dhance to see! Exhibition closes on Friday.

Day 25
Another drawing based on the study of pollen in a peat core from Lindow Moss, this time superimposed on a print containing sand/ peat mix from the bog.

The column shows the most recent peat (c1800) at the top and the peat at the base of the bog at the bottom.

The graphs show the relative proportions of tree pollen found in the core. From left to right Pine (light green), Birch (blue), Alder (grey), Oak (dark green) and other species (yellow). Either the authors made a mistake or I didn’t fully understand, but in some samples the amount of pollen totalled more than 100%. Where this happened, I took the surplus off ‘Other’.

It is important to note that the pollen counts do not directly correlate with the trees in or immediately around the bog as pollen can travel considerable distances with the wind and on insects, birds and animals.

Again, it is possible to see periods of expanding agriculture when birch predominates and forest recovery when the bog got wetter and alder increases. The higher level of pine at the bottom of the column may well be from then the bog was first establishing around 2,000 years ago.

275 x 195mm Posca paint pen on paper on ink mixed with sand and peat on paper

@wilmslowguild4559
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#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
#peatland #peatbog #peat #landscape #landscaperestoration #lowlandscape #lindowmoss #ecologicalart #ecoartist #artandscience #contemporaryart
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Window on Lindow - Day 24

This drawing is taken from a 1965 scientific paper which analysed pollen in cores of peat taken from Holcroft Moss, Lancashire (around 12 miles north west of Lindow Moss) and Lindow Moss itself. It shows, in red, the amount of sphagnum pollen in the core, which was 3.3m deep, with the surface at the top of the drawing.

It clearly shows the early stages of bog formation below 2.0m with low levels of sphagnum and the peat will have been formed of silt and organic matter from earlier stages, with rushes and other water margin plants which will have given way to pioneer tree and shrub species such as birch and alder together with pine. Once sphagnum appears, the development of the raised bog begins, but it is interrupted at intervals by human disturbance, mostly arable agriculture.

Cross referencing this profile with another scientific paper, it is probable that the periods of lower sphagnum formation coincide with the Roman occupation when much forest was felled, the Norman Medieval Period and the early industrial revolution, with recovery taking place during the Black Death and the Hundred Years War.

The surface today is estimated to be peat formed at least 200 years ago, before more systematic and industrialised peat cutting began.

@wilmslowguild4559
@transitionwilmslow
@aa2aproject
@artlabcps
#windowonlindow #peatmoss #peat #draweverydayinmay #stillpointsketchers
#peatland #peatbog #peat #landscape #landscaperestoration #lowlandscape #lindowmoss #ecologicalart #ecoartist #artandscience #contemporaryart
#cheshire #wilmslow #climateamelioration
#drawingaday #repeat.earth
#remembernature #iucnpeatlandprogramme

275 x 195mm Posca paint pen on paper previously soaked in bog water ...