Most of yesterday was spent making a new work table that folds down to form a door to the underbed storage. It is made or birch ply and supported on two hinged legs of 2×1 softwood that are located on the floor with velcro strips. It is really uplifting to have a space to spread out paper, photographs and thoughts… a proper station for serious work. The next practical task will involve book shelves.
A high spring tide washed over the sea purslane last night, carrying away dead leaves and laying their pale ochre, khaki and wan russet tints over deeper notes of mud. A discord of florescent yellow (N 50˚47.151′ W 001˚ 24.478′), turned out to be a small hand held drawing tool, which still functioned when tested.
Hundreds of thousands of blackberries are beginning to ripen along the path below the Egg Gateway. Evidence on the gatepost shows birds to be already feasting and I made my own modest collection for breakfast tomorrow.
The hot sun of late July and the first part of August bleached the egg exterior considerably, as I noted when the first of the protective foil panels was removed this week to reveal the original orange tinted condition of the wood beneath. Further panes exposed in coming months will create a calendar charting seasonal change.
Intense sunlight through the smaller shower window has had an opposite effect on the marine ply walls inside the Egg, where the timber darkened to pick out the paler ghostly afterimage of a large plastic shower bag recently removed.
The reused shower door has older and more distinguished patination from its former life as part of a garage, that contributes gravity to the Egg’s newer narratives.
A landing strip of white canvas is glowing beneath a pulsating false moon of mercury vapour light, visible from a great distance and sufficient to draw in in a large number and variety of Lower Exbury moths (in three hours my mothing mentors, Juliet and Richard counted over fifty different species without naming the micros present).
Small Fan-footed Waves, Large Yellow Underwing, Black Arches, Small Broad-bordered Yellow Underwings, Rosy and dingy Footmen, Sallow Kittens, Ruby Tigers and a host of other evocatively named characters spiralled in to join the party. Boris the puppy, triumphantly bagged a Brimstone before being hauled off early, much to his consternation and confusion.
I shall adapt the same principles of beguilement and attraction later in the month when I attempt to lead legions of lepidoptera toward the light in the entrance to the Egg.
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There are around seventy Canada Geese summering on the marsh and surrounding fields, and today I found a large goose feather on the foreshore which I made into a pen by shaping the hollow end with a sharp knife. Goose feathers were the scribes weapon of choice until the advent of steel nibs in the nineteenth century. Whilst penning these brief notes on a mac book pro, this writer still likes the feel of scratching over the surface of real paper and using an ink made in the traditional way from the surrounding Oaks. Whilst enjoying the best of the new, I would hate to forget, or lose, what endures in the traditional.
An imperious moon is rising in an uncontested night time sky, but continually redrawn by an incoming tide, rising with gravity to its invitation.
In the character of the Beaulieu Beadle, I intend a performative role which is both practical and poetic as a guardian of the foreshore and the ‘herald who makes aware’ in my personal parish around the Egg. I’d like to provide a voice for mute nature, to be amanuensis to the tides, the terns and the turnstones.
I needed a symbolic form that would evolve and change though time as it is bleached by the sun, scoured by the wind and rain and below the waterline accrues algae, worm and barnacles; an evolving form that echoes changes to the surrounding landscape itself and turns the egg into a natural calendar of the seasons.
Inside, my own journey will be catalogued in collections of digital imagery, found objects, drawings, maps and natural colour that are all derived from this particular estuary location. During the next twelve months the egg will evolve, until it becomes a sculptural element in a time based happening, integrating inside with outside in a creative archive that reduces the distance between people and nature.
Local colour made from sawdust created during the construction of the Egg at Battramsley Farm and used to paint interpretations of how the Egg might look when completed.
The Exbury Egg 