Cotton grass on raised coastal pasture, Shetland, 27 June 2016
….. a few days after the summer solstice.
fibre
Author: gs
Firth of Tay
Woven silk by Cally Booker. More to follow.
Fibres in design
West Ward Works, in Dundee, previously used for printing books and magazines, was the site of the first Dundee Design Festival, 25-28 May 2016. The Works is now a disused factory, vast space, tubes, wiring and old instructions on the walls.
The Works was one of those many places in Dundee and its surrounds that processed masses of natural product – flax and jute are other examples – usually extracted or grown elsewhere, but given greater value through manufacture and sale.
Silk, husk and glass
Several of the exhibits used natural fibre or other natural products. ‘Firth of Tay’ (shown among the images above) is a length of handwoven silk by Cally Booker. The notes say ‘Each block of pattern corresponds to (the) population profile in a local city, village or town’. It looks as if the patterns are based on a set of statistical distributions, e.g. perhaps number of people by age. (The subtlety of the colours is not well reproduced in the cellphone snaps above – her web site shows the original, link below).
Elsewhere, Barley waste from local brewing has been compressed and formed into a piece of furniture (a bar) by Beer52 with Design in Action and Aymeric Renoud.
And – though not using natural fibres in this invention – the firm Scot & Fyfe, establishd 1864 in Tayport to manufacture linen from flax, offered Alphashield – ‘A seamless glass textile ‘sock’ … fed into defective pipes deep underground and set in place with resin to repair the damage and create a new strong pipeline’. (But how do they get it to stick to the sides of the pipe?)
Further
Dundee Design Festival 2016 introduction and programme
Canmore report headed Dundee, Guthrie Street, West Ward Works
DC Thompson: West Ward Works to host first Dundee Design Festival
UNESCO Creative Cities Network
Exhibitors referred to above: Cally Booker, Aymeric Renoud, Scot & Fyfe.
On this site: Living Field web pages on Fibres, and Fiberoptic 1, 2 , 3 and 4.
Contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk
It was slavery days …
This weekend coming, 3 to 5 June 2016, sees the Haal Festival of folk music at Portsoy, Banffshire, at which among many events the singer Jimmy McBeath will be remembered. He worked as a farm labourer at that time before WW1, when the country depended on local production and the conditions were bad for farming labourers.
“But it was slavery days all the same. You workit the whole six months before you got money at all ” This quote is among the cover notes of a Topic Records LP of Jimmy McBeath’s songs. And it’s the songs rather than the privation that people today remember of Jimmy McBeath and other singers and musicians of his time. Much of what we know of the traditional music of the place comes from a few people like him and a few recordings like this. You might think it would all have gone with the memories, but no, the songs are still sung today in pubs and clubs and festivals… but mostly without the slavery.
Ps Thirty years later, at the closing stages of WW2, agriculture was still unable to feed people adequately, and still treated farm workers badly, but 20 years on from that, in the mid-1960s, food security was assured. Yet within a decade, the populace rejected local production in favour of cheaper or more exotic imports of bread, rice, pasta and maize.
…. it’s the songs that matter … there a few other links to the past.
Further
Article in the Scotsman byJim Gilchrist Portsoy’s Haal festival remembers folk legend Jimmy MacBeath
Bothyfolk web site page on Jimmy McBeath
Haal Festival 3-5 June 2016 at The Salmon Bothy, Portsoy Banffshire
The image is the cover of Wild Rover no more – Jimmy McBeath, LP (vinyl) by Topic Records 12T173, 1967 (author’s collection). Check the Topic website www.topicrecords.co.uk and search ‘Jimmy McBeath’ for digital releases.
Eaten from inside out
Plant power day (also known as the fascination of plants day!) is an annual joint venture between the University of Dundee and the James Hutton Institute which aims to engage members of the public and encourage exploration into the fascinating world of plant biology!
Held at the University Botanic Gardens, 17 May 2016, on what turned out to be quite the sunny Saturday, the event had a range of activities centred on plant biology with activities ranging from: DNA extraction from raspberries, exploring the plant-soil biome, an adventure trail which took the public on an educational journey through the wide diversity of plants housed at the Gardens and, our personal favourite, an exhibition of plant insect pests.
Our stall, as you can probably guess, was based on the insect pests of a range of economically and agriculturally important plants and the natural predators of these insects which form a diverse biological system. Primarily consisting of many wonderfully coloured – pink, green, purple, black and brown – aphids (all confusingly referred to collectively by visitors as ‘greenfly’) and the vine weevil, alongside the natural predators of aphids, including the ladybird (the overall star of the show) and parasitoid wasps (a hit with children who were fascinated by their lifecycle, the oviposition of an egg inside an aphid with the subsequent larvae eating the aphid from the inside out – imagine Alien 1979).
We used ‘hands on’ digital microscopes, Dinocapture devices, to allow the visitors, mainly the kids, but a few adults gave it a go as well, to explore the insects we had brought along and see what cannot be seen with the naked eye (there are a few pictures below to whet your appetite). We also supplied interesting plant and insect activity and fact sheets for the visitors to take away, the insect mini-factsheet and the factsheet on plant defence were winners with kids eager to take these to show and tell on Monday.
Overall there was a good attitude towards the event and some engaging questions about the work that goes on at the University and the JHI, we even provided impromptu pest-control advice to gardeners struggling with ‘greenfly’ infestation (diluted washing up liquid rubbed onto infested leaves/stems works well). To conclude – A good day was had by all!
Daniel Leybourne & Jenny Slater
Images above show adults and nymphs of the different varieties of aphid on display (top left clockwise): the Rose-Grain aphid Metapolophium dhordum, the Bird-Cherry Oat aphid Rhopalosiphum padi, pea aphid Acrythosiphon pisum and a second pea aphid biotype (images taken at the James Hutton Institute).
Lesley Harrison
Lesley Harrison – poems, projects, writing.
The Tay Estuary Forum was doing its job in April of bringing people together from different backgrounds but with a shared interest in land, waterways and sea. Artist Jean Duncan introduced poet and writer Lesley Harrison who had her own exhibit on Mapping the Edge.
Lesley kindly agreed to send some examples of her poems and writing for the Living Field web site ….. beginning with …..
Extracts from Auchmithie Calendar Twelve Haiku
January
winter comets.
our village is ice-bound,
the ground strewn with stars.
May
cod – saithe – ling
net and line
unraveled at high tide.
Poem Postcards
Birds of the North Sea. Lesley writes: These boards are part of the dune stabilisation east of the mouth of the Dichty. The boards have weathered beautifully – they are now lovely shades of silver, with patterns and sworls appearing that echo the flow patterns of the river through sand or waterweed. [See the links below to Making Space for water.]
Lesley Harrison lives on the north-east coast of Scotland. In her writing she explores how we locate ourselves inside our landscape; how residual layers of historical and cultural data, along with light, language, memory and/or our collective unconscious overlap and merge to form our sense of place. Much of her poetry uses the east coast as case study.
Her pamphlet ‘Upstream’ (2013) was the outcome of Making Space for Water, an arts/science collaboration funded by Creative Scotland and Scottish Natural Heritage, investigating the hidden urban rivers of Dundee and Aberdeen. The poems sequence ‘Beyond the Map’ (2012) explores our residual folk memory of Dundee’s 19th century whaling industry.
She is currently developing a collection which explores the poetics of the North Sea coast.
Links
Lesley’s web: Lesley Harrison poetry and auchmithiecalendar.wordpress.com
A pocket book of 12 drawings and haiku recording a year in the village. Drawings by Sarah Maclean.
To buy 12 Haiku and other works, see Lesley’s web site and mail her at auchmithiecalendar@gmail.com
Making Space for Water makingspaceforwater.wordpress.com
[last updates 2 June 2016; 31 May 2023 to add new links]
Mercury in transit
On 9 May 2016, image by Ken Kennedy.
More than landscape (2)
Slovenian countryside, hay-racks, the artist Vida Fakin
Travelling through the countryside of Slovenia, through the intimate patchwork of fields and enclosures, attention is repeatedly drawn to the hay-racks that stand sometimes isolated in pasture and sometimes clustered around farmsteads.
These hay racks embody a very direct and very local chain from soil to plant to beast to field. Hay is cut from meadows and grassy places, collected and hung over horizontal wooden poles to dry, then fed to farm animals when the natural pasture is out of season.
The hay-racks take on a range of forms, from two simple concrete posts spanned by a corrugated iron roofing strip to two-storied structures having the wooden poles along the side, rooms above, partly open at least on one side, and a place below for farm machinery (images below).
So it was good fortune to meet the daughter (Mojca Suklje) and granddaughter (Helena Suklje) of the artist Vida Fakin whose interests, among many, were the ikons of the Slovenia countryside and in particular its hay-racks and scarecrows set against a backdrop of mountain pasture and rocky hills.
And it was even better when Mojca and Helena agreed to provide material about Vida and her art for the Living Field web site.
We will begin with the notes for an exhibition of Vida Fakin’s works held in 2015 at the Josef Stefan Institute Ljubljana.
The black and white images above were taken by the editor in the Bohinj area of Slovenia, around Studor and on higher pasture.
The image at the top of the page is the front cover of Monografija / Vida Fakin – Ljubljana: Enotnost 1994.
Living Field page on Vida Fakin. Also More than landscape and Hay-racks.
More than landscape
Vida Fakin: cover of Monografija 1994 Zalozba Enotnost.
More …
Dust bowl ballads
“On the 14th day of April / Of 1935, there struck / The worst of dust storms / That ever filled the sky. “
Reports suggesting the infamous 1930s north american dust bowl could happen again have been circulating in recent years (links below). Recent analysis suggests that it could be worse this time due to higher temperatures! … on which more to follow.
The singer Woody Guthrie had first hand experience of the dust and its destruction of the means to produce food and earn a living.
Science argued then that the dust bowl was of man’s own making. True to form, the record label Folkways did not shy away from the environmental and political.
Dust bowl ballads by Woody Guthrie
Woody Guthrie wrote a set of songs on life in the US dust bowl. His performances were published by Folkways Records as a vinyl long-playing record (LP).
The record cover (right, scanned from editor’s own copy) is a photograph of a group of three people, a man and two children, walking past a shack and posts that are being buried in dust. Not credited on the LP, but by Arthur Rothstein, taken 1936, it is one of many images commissioned to record the story of the dust bowl.
Guthrie and Folkways included a paper insert of comments by the performer, the words of the songs, some further images and an extract from a book The Story of Plants by John Asch published in 1948.
Woody Guthrie’s notes were dated ‘later days of May, 1950’. He writes: “I just beat my way from NYC to L.A. and then back home again to Coney Island.”
“I rolled a ways with experts of every kind. I stood a while, I rode a while, I talked a mite with young and old weather birds, about too much or not enough water, too much wind or not enough wind, too much mud or not enough mud, too much work or not enough work, too much money or not enough money, too much of everything and not enough of nothing. ”
“I heard folks talk and cry about the dust storms all out across our 16 middlewest states. I saw that lost gone look on their faces when they told me the government didn’t follow the plan of FDR and so our land is still a dustbowl hit by dust-storms and the duststorms are getting higher and wilder and meaner, and the hearts of the people are sickly worried.
“No job, low pay, high prices, higher taxes, bum houses, slummy houses. Great diseases are running and great sores are spreading down across our map and the duststorms and the cyclone and the dirty winds and the twisters ride high and wide, low across our whole land. Government experts tell me these dusters will get a lot worse.”
“The old dustbowl is still there, and that high dirt-wind is still there. the government didn’t fix that and the Congress couldn’t put a stop to it. Nobody tried very hard.”
[FDR is Franklin D Roosevelt who not long into his presidency initiated a plan for rehabilitation of the dust bowl lands.]
Notes on soil erosion by John Asch
The insert had this extract on soil erosion from a book The Story of Plants by John Asch published 1948.
Sources, references, links
Dust Bowl Ballads by Woody Guthrie was originally published by Folkways Records, Album No FH5212, 1964. Reissued as a CD and download, and available from Smithsonian Folkways http://www.folkways.si.edu.
John Asch. 1948. The story of plants. Illustrated by Tabea Hofmann. Publisher: Putnam’s Sons, 407 pages or thereabouts.
Images reproduced here are scanned directly from an LP bought and owned by GS.
“My good gal sings the dust pneumonee blues / my good gal sings the dust pneumonee blues / she loves me cos she’s got the dust pneumonee too.”
Further
Nature Conservancy (US based) article When the dust settled with images and slideshow of the dustbowl, opening with some of Woody Guthrie’s best lines.
The Dust Bowl – a film by Ken Burns: highly informative web site – perhaps begin with Photo gallery and Legacy.
Steinbeck J. 1939. The grapes of wrath. (A novel about a family’s experiences and losses in the dust bowl.
Bennett HH, Chapline WR. 1928. Soil erosion a national menace. Circular No. 33, United States Department of Agriculture. [A technical article warning on erosion in the USA before the main dust bowl years. Available online as a downloadable pdf: search ‘Bennett’ + ‘soil erosion’ + ‘1928’]
Hugh Hammond Bennett and the Creation of the Soil Erosion Service at the USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Examples of recent reports of a new dust bowl
Smithsonion.com: Are we headed for another dust bowl?
National Geographic: Parched: a new dust bowl forms in the heartland
Yale Climate Connections: Avoiding a second dust bowl across the UK.
Author/contact: geoff.squire@hutton.ac.uk