‘On a Hill‘, is from our walk down to the Tyne in early June. Blackberry and cotoneaster-dyed paper, animated with drying Tyne water and sycamore, is cut with birds taking advantage of early summer thermals. For months I have been piling the small rectangles of dipped papers up in the studio. Unsure of what to do with them and almost intimidated by their beauty, I had been worried I was going to ruin them and waste these pots of colour. I had started to log and catalogue them and store them and it was getting in the way of working-with them, and letting myself become-with them, something more, together.
In the August of this summer we were in Tonawanda, New York. Finally able to visit our family as a new family. We were staying a few hundred yards from where Phyllis had grown up, by the Erie Canal. In order to collect water from the canal to bring home, we had to cross Sweeney Street. Having to navigate the weight and power of a name – the heritage and the bloodline – in order to reach the water’s edge created a sense of profound irony within me. I was struggling to move beyond a significance I couldn’t quite explain.
Phyllis reminded me that names change, they are swapped and borrowed and shared all the time. Sweeney Street paves the way to the Erie Canal, and Phyllis’s queer heritage runs along Christopher Street in New York City. It is not only her surname, it is a street name that has become port in a storm for so many other people. It is multi-faceted, shared. The idea of a name becomes renewed, open, lighter.
We are so much water and it rushes, trickles, sloshes and soaks through us. So much of what we are is somewhere else now. Even when we are still, we are moving, leaving behind time’s tide marks; outlines of what we have contained and cradled and carried and shared and slowly lost or discarded, had taken, or given away.
Tyne river water in a yellow bucket, a Snapple bottle full of the Erie Canal, rain from puddles along Christopher Street, tap-drips from Manchester, tears cried on the metro to Monument, a breath exhaled whilst passing through Sunderland.
Suddenly everything seems possible. Sources are really re-sources flowing into and out of each other. Things are becoming a little clearer, lighter. I have been able to return to the walk we three did in June, down to the water.
to be two 