Artwork description:

This etching explores a journey walked in the town of Belalcazar in the region of Cordoba in Spain. The image records the views and objects seen walking from the Convento de Santa Clara to the Castillo. The Castle (Castillo) shows evidence of cannon fire from Napoleon's troops during their conquest of Spain and recalls through time those ancestral voices calling to us from across time.

The surrounding landscape, the pathway walked and the flora and fauna seen is also recorded, each layered on top of one another, producing an image of the journey I walked one afternoon in Belalcazar, across the fields and through the town.

The image also responds to Samuel Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan. It responds to the passage:

Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,
And sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean;
And ’mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
Ancestral voices prophesying war!

This etching was chosen and exhibited as part of the anniversary of Samuel Coleridge who lived in the area of Taunton in the small village of Nether Stowey, where he was inspired to write this poem after a concoction of opium, bringing on a Vision in a Dream.

The etching is printed from a zinc plate, with handmade printing ink (printed lightly to symbolise memory/ faded past) and the use of red thread. The red thread symbolises the so-called 'red line' drawn on maps to mark out territory, in this case recording the walk I took as recorded by GPS and as a symbol of trying to thread the fragility of life together, to keep as one in a world that seems or appears to be ever more fractured in these times of constant conflict in the Middle Eastern states.

It is professionally framed in an ash lime wood frame.

Materials used:

Zinc Etching Plate, Iron III Chloride, Medium, Lamp Black Pigment, Fabriano Fibre Paper Stock, Ashed Lime Wood.

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