Orkney, 2023
Place: Ring of Brodgar, Orkney
In September, I travelled from London to Orkney, the northern edge of British land. For the first time I felt my gaze was different from the gaze of the people of this land. There are no unoccupied edges on this land; everything is in human time. They always look towards the sea. But my hometown is a small coastal town in southeastern China, and we have always been drawn to the inland. The edge on the other side of the land seemed unreachable.
In London, we have the impression that the sea is to the south or east. But Orkney's narrative exists in a circle, about comes and goes. I walked along the edge of the land guided by raw physical experience. But the Orkney waves confounded me, they came from all directions and crashed towards the land. Hearing the sound of the sea and walking towards the seaside can not help to identify the direction. And It was so windy and cold that standing and walking became a tiring task.
The love for Orkney is reflected in the way people name things.
'Bed'
The stones in the Ring of Brodgar once bore the name "Bed" and may have once lain underwater. Did they stand up to mean "Wake up"? The "beds" standing in the circle must be prepared for gatherings. They came from all over the Orkney Islands and were moved to the narrow strip of land between the two lakes. It may have been 60 evenly spaced stones, of which more than 20 are now left standing. Whether it is standing, falling, or broken, the vacancies still show their existence.
Standing in the Ring of Brodgar we encounter a stone, choosing a time to stay but always moving at our own pace. In the circle, we are not going to the past and future, we are going to meet and set off.
The imprint on this stone has a "Home scar" imprint, which was left by a creature called Limpet. They use mucus to anchor themselves to rocks, resisting strong winds and waves from washing them away. When the tide is high, they come down from the stone, and when the tide is low, they return to their fixed position along the mucus. Each limpet has its own circle. The shells they leave behind after death sometimes cover stones. People call such traces "Home scars". In Orkney, the tomb of Maeshowe may also have been built above homes.
During the residency, I placed the yellow clay from the Orkney coastline on the 'home scar', and let it dry on the radiator so that the participants of the residency could take it away.
'Waves and Rhythm'
During the residency, I found some white and black seaweed roots and some black man-made materials from the cracks of the rocks on the seaside. They had a rhythm of arrangement when placed on the table:
‘Waves ’
We need some rhythm
Collide
Cross
Create circle
Gathering energy
Otherwise we go with the flow
No wrong but safe
But we always long to meet.
The next day I found some red dots and red larvae on the tabletop in my studio, hiding in the gaps between the roots and the tabletop. When I removed the seaweed, they formed a ball. The resident archaeologist said they were the larvae of limpets. Without the gap, they died. I made a home for them by using the Orkney yellow clay. When I brought them back to London, their mouldy bodies covered themselves with a quilt.
We must have learned ways of living and building from the lives around us in the past. We used simple lines and circles to connect the surrounding environment to build homes, used boulders to gaze at the sun, moon and time, and used lines to mark directions. Humans strive to arrange history and summarise laws in the chaos and exhaustion. Gaps come from the time after alignment. We created “ seven days a week" from astronomical observations. But nowaday we are more familiar with the concepts of "Weekends" and "Workdays". We finally got a break over a cup of coffee.
written by October 2023