Fieldwalking – Groundlines
72 drawings inspired by walking the landscape where many of the flints were discovered.
For the exhibition Field Walking, currently on at the Corinium Museum in Cirencester (19 Sept – 20 Oct 2024), I made 72 Groundlines drawings inspired by the landscape where many of the flints were found.
I describe the process of making this work below and include some links to further reading, including a link to read the exhibition catalogue. Hope you enjoy the exhibition if you are able to visit.
Corinium Museum – Abbey Home Farm – Walking the Land CIC
Field Walking is an exhibition at the Corinium Museum, Cirencester, of fieldwalking finds from Abbey Home Farm and artwork inspired by the landscape.
It includes a selection of exhibits from Will Chester-Master’s museum of farm finds. Displayed alongside art inspired by walking the fields on the farm .
Prehistoric worked flints come up in the plough soils, along with shards of Roman pottery. Way back, this was Abbey land, is crossed by Roman roads, a disused 19th century railway line and was blasted through by a dual carriageway. Will is one of the custodians of a farm which carries traces of many thousands of years of history.
Artists Ruth Broadbent, Andy Freeman, Valerie Coffin Price and Caroline Morris have taken as their inspiration the layers of history on Abbey Home Farm land and created work to compliment the artefacts.
Archaeological research by Tabitha Grist Parker.
The idea of making Groundlines drawings (7x7cm, pencil on paper) for this exhibition came about in visits to the farm earlier this year. I felt the need to understand not only the layout of the farm itself, but also the processes of Will’s flint collecting and the way in which he orders, labels and presents them in the barn.
The map of the farm with its handwritten field names became integral to the project. For each drawing, I took inspiration from Will’s system of mapping and labelling, using the field names instead of exact geolocation (although I recorded the precise location, I did not include this on the drawings).
As the project progressed, I allowed for some fields having no drawings and others more, reflecting the full tins of flints for some fields and none for others. I also wanted to find a way to include the numbering system of hectares used on the map. I decided to include altitude for my system of numbering as a way to map the land where each drawing was made. As Will has handwritten names on the tins of flints, I made notes of what caught my eye on the back of each square: insects, a cairn, birdsong, swallows flying around the flints barn, shadows and lines of grass moving over the drawings, field and woodland flowers, and grasses.
With each month’s visit, the field names and my now worn paper map guided me each day. Some areas I passed through several times. Coneygars became a regular route, as did the old railway track: an access route to many areas of the farm, now a pedestrianised greenway but still a way from A to B and back again.
Whereas Coneygars has a lot of flint finds, my main ‘finds’ field became Downs Bank where I camped. Here I watched the full moon and the solstice sunset and sunrise. On another occasion, a large wave of mist swept across the farm, up towards the tent, then retreated back downhill. With the lower fields still damp the next morning, I looked for sunny dry areas to make drawings. A thunderstorm in Dancy’s Fancy soaked one square, embedding the ground in the drawing. On the back of this square I noted: “Paper tears and surface lifts. This one is mixed in with the field. Grasshoppers hopping everywhere as rain falls.”
I enjoyed the freedom to wander, occasionally meeting farm workers and hearing their stories of this landscape, their favourite areas and suggestions for routes into harder-to-find fields. I particularly liked the signage at the farm on being custodians of the land for future generations: ’The land is not ours but belongs to the future and it is our responsibility to leave it in good heart.’
As I walked further afield I experienced the sheer scale of the farm, growing increasingly familiar with the network of fields and their names. Walking down the hill from Pond Ground, searching for a way into Puzzlets (which remained an unsolved puzzle), I saw pylons I had visited previously stretching into the far distance. When I first camped here some years ago, I had no idea that the farm reached this far across the landscape.
During my July visit I explored the further reaches of the farm to the West. In walking these fields I noticed how some have a small corner on the other side of a busy dual carriageway that has sliced through the farm. As a place where so many well-used routes once spread from Corinium, these old ways (the Fosse, Akeman Street, Welsh Way and Whiteway) are now busy with traffic dominating other users of the land, public transport non-existent and a footpath across a dual carriageway a risky challenge.
As I neared the end of my August visit, my slow walking in the fields gave me the chance to pause, revisit some old favourites, and think about how I might present the work for this exhibition. Placing some of my ground drawings on the rusty ‘finds’ tray in the flint room during my June visit had led me to think about presenting them as ‘finds’ in a way that encouraged multiple ways of displaying, sifting, sorting, rearranging. The nature of all my Groundlines series, like a pack of cards, offers multiple ways of presenting them in different contexts. The ones made at Abbey Home Farm could be grouped by the month in which they were made, by altitude, by field, alphabetically, by visual layout, tone of pencil marks, as a grid or in neat piles or scattered amongst the flints. I have framed them here in the order in which they were walked.
The two drawings made in the flint barn (one on the floor of the flint room and one on the shelf in front of Pool Piece tin of flints) are the only two elevated from ground level, removed from that month’s walk into a frame of their own. Surrounded by flints, I felt connected to the ground up here with the swallows flying back and forth to their nests.
I use a simple toolkit of 7 x 7cm squares of paper and a range of pencils, contained in a small portable box that fits in my bag. Rather than creating an exact tracing of the ground, I am making a drawing that records the marks of my pencil as I engage with and try to understand what is beneath the paper. At times my pencil slips over the edge of an unseen stone leaving a mark, a kind of visual conversation between myself, the materials of graphite pencil and the ground. I use a range of B pencils, although often one becomes my preferred choice, this time it was an HB Staedtler which broke in half in my bag from being used so much.
I find that the tactile and sensory aspect to making Groundlines through creative walking, pausing to closely observe the ground and listening to sounds, is quiet and contemplative. This gives me the opportunity to develop a relationship with a landscape and discover some of its visible and hidden layers.
I now have a better understanding of the farm and am able to navigate it using the field names and recollections of my visits to each field. These names drew me into the stories of this area. I assumed that Camp Ground was linked to the abundant Roman history of the area but was in fact the location of a wartime camp. Manitoba has an unknown history, maybe a wartime Canadian land girl or a farm worker. Sisters is probably linked to some sisters, and Barn due to a barn (having been) there. Not labelled on the map, Will told me his childhood recollections of the woodland named Rats Castle.
As well as its history, through regular visits and staying on the farm, walking both its past and present, I also discovered its archaeology, ecology and geology (flint is not a natural geological feature here). I noticed the field margins, discovered the tithe map, its connections to other places through its tracks and roads, and thought about enclosures and environmental issues in caring for the land today.
It was lovely to feel welcomed into this landscape and be able to take time to explore and understand and develop a relationship with it, spending time amongst the labelled tins of flint in the barn, and lose myself for hours wandering from field to field, musing over the various field names from Dancy’s Fancy and Happy Lands, to Barn Sisters and Hitchens Knowle. I made repeated visits to the mound of dag stone in Oxlays, enjoying this elemental trace of earth and water with its connection to the ocean floor, and its holes made by sea creatures when this area was long ago beneath sea level. This farm is full of stories, elemental and human. Reading my notes on the back of each square reminds me of my own story in relation to this area. A thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding project.
Background to Groundlines
Groundlines drawings are about connecting to the past, present and future of the tracks and lines, to consider place, people, history and environment. This mapping of the surface of the ground and a line of tracks is both subjective and objective, fluid and changing. As time passes the surface of the ground shifts, reflecting both human and climatic interactions and interventions.
Previous Groundlines include A Line Across England following a line of ancient tracks from Norfolk to Weymouth, An Island Line (a coastal loop of the Isle of Wight), Five Rivers Line (Germany).
A description of these journeys is on my website and in Living Maps Review, Spring 2022 edition (Mapworks), ‘Groundlines and Puddle Worlds: maps as records of real and imaginary worlds’.
These are some of the books and podcasts I read, listened to, and revisited, during the making of this work:
Arts & Ecology podcast (14 July 2023) Art and Activism: Acknowledging Complexity with Heather Ackroyd and Dan Harvey
Julia Blackburn – Time Song: Searching for Doggerland (Jonathan Cape, 2019)
Luce Choules (TSOEG) talking about artists and fieldwork, encounters and mapping, at WALC – Banyoles, Girona 1 July 2024
Helen Gordon – Notes from Deep Time (Profile Books Ltd, 2022)
Jim Leary (History Rage Podcast, 17 June 2024)
Jim Leary – Footmarks, A Journey into Our Restless Past (Icon Books, 2023). So many quotes that I could include from this book – here are a few:
“We discover ourselves through movement, and we make sense of the world, and all the things in it, by moving, by reaching, grabbing and grasping. It forms our basic perceptual system and structures our knowledge. As we journey through life, we continue to make sense of the world, to know it, by exploring it through movement.” (p21)
“When we walk down a path, as I did mine, we tend not to think about the stories embedded in them. But when we do think about it, a hidden history is revealed, and something of the experience of our predecessors comes alive to us.” (p33)
“The cadence [of a footfall] is written into the earth like a sentence or a song.” (p35)
Even the tiny dents of pattering rain drops could be seen – the shortest imaginable moments in time, captured and fossilised.” (p37)
I hope to continue field walking in some shape or form. This project has generated more ideas with each visit. Being an unfunded project inevitably means some compromises in terms of time, scale and materials which I would love to develop further at some point. In being able to camp on the farm I was nevertheless able to make a body of work that feels both complete and part of something wider.
Seeing the works that we made as artists alongside the flints found on the farm brought together in the museum gallery has generated new conversations and visual connections between art and archaeology, both amongst ourselves and a wider audience. As a legacy it would be great if this project could inspire future funded projects such as creative residencies and exhibitions on the Abbey Home Farm, connected landscapes and the Corinium Museum. There is so much potential in fieldwalking that it would be wonderful if it could be a stepping stone for future creative projects.
Click below to read a pdf about the exhibition, the farm, its flints and other finds, and artwork by Ruth Broadbent, Valerie Coffin Price, Andy Freedman, Caroline Morris.
Finally to finish, if you have made it this far, I particularly like this quote by Lesley Saunders Mood:
‘…grubbing in the grass
For particles of knowledge, nothing in themselves
But huge with meaning in the right place.’
(Saunders, L. (2018) Nominy-Dominy. Two Rivers Press, quoted by Valerie Coffin Price in her artist statement in the Field Walking exhibition catalogue, 2024).
Subscribe to be added to my mailing list for occasional updates on exhibitions, events, new artwork and workshops.
I will treat your privacy and personal data with respect . Your details will only be used to send occasional newsletters if you click the link in the confirmation email and you can unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the link at the bottom of the newsletter or sending me an email at ruth@ruthbroadbent.com