"Such returns, where “pieces of past and present mesh”, have repeatedly recurred in Holt’s life"
Trail Markers:
A series of twenty photographs captured along the high moor of Dartmoor National Park in England, Trail Markers documents a subjective journey through the historic landscape. The camera angle is trained downwards, with each photograph featuring an orange mark—inviting us to assume the visual perspective of a traveler in pursuit of our path. Holt resists the panoramic, all-encompassing view, offering instead an experience of the landscape that is at once dynamic and myopic. The orange markers—created as a guide for hikers—highlight a human construct within a vast natural expanse, an insertion that guides our view even as it appears feeble in the context of its majestic surrounds.
It was recommended to me to look at the work of Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson, particularly Holt's work 'Trail Markers' by one of the tutors assessing my unit 2 blogs.
It was real jolt for me, seeing a photographic representation of some of the concepts I'm looking at.
Being in pursuit of a path.... we do this physically when walking, navigating, orientating
Pursuing a path within ourselves
Finding paths of memories - where do they lead us?
How are new paths trodden?
How to they overlap, weaken, strengthen, ebb and flow?
Why do we visit the same paths? What is it about treading familiar ground that centres us? Reassures us?
I've found over the years that the more I pursue the paths or visit places (physically) that I find freeing and that restore me - the less I have wanted to visit places that destabilise me or remind me of painful memories.
Now, I'm deliberately re routing onto paths long since avoided (Barton, memories of Fulbourn visits). Places I've not wanted to be for many years. I'm creating new paths by re treading the old ones, re writing neural and physical pathways - and my work is the physical embodiment of this. It's a sometimes confusing mix of the physical and psychological and I find myself wanting to pin down where the intersection is of how exactly these ideas collide and mirror one another. In my work, lines and marks fade and undulate, images are pressed over others, paper is torn and re aligned. As I think and work (or write about my work) I'm returning in thought to places that make me feel vulnerable and my instinct is to shut my eyes again and avert my thoughts elsewhere. And yet, I find new paths that are strengthening, experiencing things in the context of who I am now. My identity as a parent is a huge part of this. Bessel Van de Kolk writes of trauma being stuck in the brain, unable to be fully processed. How returning to the trauma in thought or word triggers a response in the brain as if the event is occurring all over again. The brain gets caught in a cycle of fight or flight.
It's curious being on this journey. How these old paths are experienced again, and are both weakening and strengthening. How the physical act of walking in particular leads me to 're visiting'. How this is heightened when walking in a place that is a burial ground not just of lived experience, but of people themselves. How the memories of one person from the past is combined with the weight of their absence in the present. How memories of them and of their own experiences become intrinsic to a place, but how this place is also where they now are.
Absence, trace, scars, cracks.