We all love to be by the seaside … walking in the soft
sand, if one is lucky, or dropping to one’s knees to pick up pebbles … we’ve
all come home with them … either with pockets filled up by the kids, or just by
‘us’ enamoured with a pebble’s charm …
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2012 The Garden ... sculptures
and plantings on the shingle |
I’m sure you’ll see this links with my recent posts
about Eastbourne with its shingle beach, engineered groynes, which while attempting
to stop the town flooding, curtail the easterly tidal drift … here’s yet
another of this eclectic non-series …
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| Selection of pebbles |
As I’m listening to the radio more in these lock-down
times … my thoughts wander off – and this programme was about pebbles … art,
gardens, geology, museums … so cometh this post!
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| Chicago's cuspate foreland |
The pebbles find their way eastwards to Dungeness, a
headland formed largely of a shingle beach in the form of a cuspate foreland,
created primarily by longshore drift.
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| Dungeness from the air |
There can be little development in that unstable coastal setting, but there is a
part- decommissioned Nuclear Power Station, an old runway, a necessary
intermittent railway terminus, subsequent limited housing, beach cottages for
the fishermen …
... and Prospect Cottage … the ecological site has protected and international
conservation status across a number of disciplines … including geomorphological … a place of natural
value to many a scientist …
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| Prospect Cottage - 2007 |
Derek Jarman (1942 – 1994), seriously ill with HIV, purchased
the cottage to escape London and set about creating a retreat, a shingle garden
…
... he was a talented film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener,
and author … this landscape offered him consolation during his latter years.
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| An earlier view in 2004 |
His home has recently been purchased by the Art Fund
so that the whole can be conserved and maintained for the future … the
building, its contents and garden …
During the ‘pebble radio programme’ a sedimentary
geologist discussed various rocks with resultant stones which find their way
into our world of today …
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| The book the radio programme was based on |
… one was a pebble surrounded by another aggregation …
it was mentioned that this had ‘popped out’ from an iceberg almost a billion
years ago … it wasn’t found in England! – but off the Alaskan/Canadian coast …
… that pebble is held in scientific splendour in Cambridge
- then mention was made of Jim Ede’s Kettle’s Yard ...
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Kettle's Yard - was four cottages ...
now with an extension to
hold Jim Ede's various collections
|
... described
as one of the country’s most intimate and spellbinding museums, the collection
of one man and his unerring eye; restorative, homely yet life-changing …
Jim Ede spent time in Cornwall collaborating with
artists in the studios at Newlyn and St Ives … after his work at the Tate
Gallery, London proved too tedious to carry on … ‘fighting the conservative establishment’
… he set out on his (professional) itinerant life …
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Alfred Wallis (1932)
The Hold House Port Mear Square Island
Port Mear beach |
I know that was another link-jump … to St Ives, Cornwall
and the naïve artist Alfred Wallis
(1855 – 1942), who worked all his life as a mariner, before turning fisherman-artist
… Jim Ede encouraged him, while collecting some of his works …
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| Alfred Wallis (1942) - Noah's Ark |
I have mentioned Wallis before when I wrote about
Cornwall … and when I set up an Easter family tour of art at the Towner Art
Gallery, Eastbourne, postponed til next year …
… I spotted that the gallery holds works by Alfred
Wallis … and so he is one of the artists I specified we would be shown.
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| Longshore drift showing spit build up |
Surprisingly this life of pebble art has come full
circle back to my home … after starting life billions of years ago, rolling
into an ocean, drifting with the tides …
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Blake's entry in his
Songs of Innocence and Experience
1794 collection of poems |
… to perhaps be found in a garden, as an art piece, a
photograph, or recorded in words … as the lines in Blake’s The Clod and the Pebble mete out:
‘But a Pebble
of the brook
Warbled out
these metres meet: …’
I have long wanted to visit Cambridge and almost went
before lock-down … so I will add Kettle’s Yard to my list … and see the
Cornish, Sussex connections with art …
May you roll gently on as the pebbles are doing in
this time of challenge …
Hilary Melton-Butcher
Positive Letters Inspirational Stories
