I have spent the past few days at Top Shed. I tired myself out with my trip to Suffolk, so it took me a couple of days to recover. I have made a number of woodcuts using MDF and a Dremel to cut them. Some of them reproduce my handwriting and texts from the cards I brought. Others reproduce sketches I took from train windows. I have hundreds of these and always struggled to do anything with them, but I discovered they transfer well to woodcut. Most of the woodcuts are of the very simplest kind, where the lines are carved out of the board and are left white in the print. I did one ‘proper’ print (with the lines in relief), but nearly choked on all the MDF dust.
Today I started on some photographs in the landscape, of me walking away from the camera. I just set up the camera and set the self-timer and walked away from the camera. I don’t know if they are an interesting idea. I see them as anti-selfies (in that it is my back I have photographed), and as a kind of refusal (walking away). Ideas of pilgrimage and ‘being in the world’ in a Heideggarean sense might come into it. I could see them working as a series with the right setting.
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