John Clare, I hunted curious flowersโฆ
the varied colours in flat spreading fields checkered with closes of different tinted grains like the colors in a map the copper tinted colors of clover in blossom the sun tand green of the ripening hay the lighter hues of wheat & barley intermixd with the sunny glare of the yellow charlock & the sunset imitation of the scarlet head aches with the blue corn bottles crowding their splendid colors in large sheets over the land & troubling the cornfields with destroying beauty.
I hunted curious flowersโฆ
I recently finished reading Olivia Laingโs latest book/collection of essays, The Garden Against Time, In Search of a Common Paradise. The book followโs Laingโs recovery and restoration of a walled garden in Suffolk, originally designed and cultivated by Mark Rumary. The practical work of uncovering the garden is considered alongside an investigation into the ideas of Paradise, real and imagined, conceived and unearthed, communal and corrupt. Itโs a really wonderful bit of writing that points to case studies that explore how humans create and exclude others from beauty, peace, refuge and nature.
Paradise haunts gardens, and some gardens are paradises.
Derek Jarman1
Laing points to โthe peasant poet of Northamptonshireโ John Clare as someone else caught in a search for paradise. Clare was born in 1793 in an agricultural household, right around the time of the introduction of the Parliamentary Inclosure Acts. These acts formalised and legalised the โenclosureโ of what was open, accessible, common land and turning it into private property. Clareโs early writing was celebratory of the surrounding countryside, caught up in the abundance that was available to him. As he got older, his writing becomes more sorrowful and mournful at what has been disrupted and taken away.
The tone of Clareโs early writing has this knotty, intermingling quality that I really love (and feels a bit like Beaโs wonderful writing for our Piece of Turf project). Laing describes this uncultivated approach: โClare didnโt see nature as a shapeless mass and nor was he interested in discovering a lordly, sweeping, organising view. His preferred way of looking was belly-down in the grass, so that he could swim entranced into a microscopically detailed, teeming worldโ2.
Much like Donna Harawayโs proposition of Making Kin, Clareโs sense of the world noticed that, โKin is an assembling sort of word. All critters share a common โfleshโ, laterally, semiotically, and genealogically. Ancestors turn out to be very interesting strangers: kin are unfamiliar, uncanny, haunting, activeโฆโ3
Iโd like to get more familiar with Clareโs writing, but I wanted to capture something informed by the extract at the top of this post. Itโs interesting to think about agricultural crops of wheat and barley being interlaced with wildflowers throughout (whilst there is a move towards the benefits of biodiverse and regenerative farming practices, itโs still much more common to see monocultural fields of single crops). It feels like an odd symmetry with Clareโs life seen as whole. Someone who grew up in amongst the weeds, but found himself steadily unmoored by systems of power, efficiency and industry. I wanted to make something that felt like being both above and belly-down in the grass at the same time.
With regards to the specific flowers, my interpretation of the dialect is: by โyellow charlockโ heโs probably referring to field mustard (Rhamphospermum arvense), โscarlet head achesโ are likely to be some sort of hawkweed (Hieracium pilosella) and โblue corn bottlesโ are almost certainly cornflowers (Centaurea cyanus).
Process
Iโm on a bit of a Gelli printing kick at the moment, so the lead image is made up of an assemblage of a few individual prints. They each start with a loose sketch, which is then sat underneath the gel plate as a rough guide, ink painted directly onto the plate and the image then transferred onto paper. (I might do a more in-depth post on this in the future). Whilst I used the first prints for the lead image, thereโs something in the second (ghost) prints that I still like and wanted to share here.
The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
Who steals the common from the goose.
Part of The Goose and The Common, an anonymous, 18th Century poem4
Jarman, D. (1995) Derek Jarmanโs Garden. Thames & Hudson: London (p.40)
Laing, O. (2024) The Garden Against Time. Picador: London (p.87)
Haraway, D. (2016) Staying With the Trouble. Duke University Press: New York (p.103)