WANING MOON: geological dialogues
reading rocks, deep time encounters + printmaking with gathered pigments
This WANING MOON 1INKLINGS comes to you in the days after the CORN//DISPUTE FULL MOON. This time of the year around Lammas is traditionally focused on grain harvesting. Over many centuries, the Common Lands were used by folks, who did not own land but could participate in Grazing Rights and graze their livestock after the harvest. This was also a time of settling disputes between neighbours, gathering, feasting, and paying labourers for the service of growing and gathering the harvest.
In current times, if we grow or forage for food and plants, we will be the harvest and the places where this harvest has been scuppered. This year has been slug-central for vegetable growers here in the UK with so much rain and a warm winter.
As our harvest tables and fridges are filled with the food growers’ labour and nature’s abundance may we give thanks for the toil we do and don’t see.
Are you noticing any harvesting in your world? Are any projects coming to fruition? Any places where you have placed your attention and energy bearing fruit?
I thank you for your patience for the WAXING of this usual FULL MOON INKLINGS. This last fortnight I have been deep in reorganising and adding to the NATURAL INK. ink-making course that was begun in the early Spring weeks. It has meant that my wordy brain gave up being able to construct thoughts and sentences for a while so a pause was needed before posting. This time of bringing more attention to the natural creative seasons of this neurodivergent brain is proving fruitful, illuminating and challenging. Rebellious softness is required in the ebb and flow.
The ink-making course (now with added extras) is a humdinger of a piece of work that I am proud of and very much looking forward to finally sharing with you all. With much gratitude for the supportive tending of other folks who have helped this offering come into the world, and to the paths walked, rains felt and leaves watched while bringing it into being.
We are never doing this life alone.
START SAVING A FEW BERRIES FOR THE INK POT! If you are gathering Elderberries, Blackberries, Sloes, Rosehips for the winter preserves and crumbles, be sure to keep a handful to one side for ink-making.
If you are curious about learning more about online botanical ink-making and nurturing your seasonal creativity you can register your interest over here. This does not sign you up for the course. The course will be delivered online, alongside an ink-making starter kit posted to your door.
I have added a few questions to help me know more about what you are looking to learn and what hinders your making practices. If you have any questions you can get in touch at hello@kathrynjohn.co.uk
Now for a GRIND//GROUND update on the exciting earth-pigment work that is happening over here.
GRIND//GROUND: A Practice Journal
I have been learning about reading time in the rocks over recent weeks.
I have been thinking a lot about time for a while.
I have been reflecting for some time on the cyclic experience of life passing.
There is a lot of language in Geology that I am enjoying. Poetic and to-the-point words to describe lines and textures in ancient ground, explaining the causes of conditions that surpassed to leave behind this particular rock. But this not ancient like we view trees or spiritual paths, proverbs or medicinal plants. Ancient like 420 million years, all layered and formed and squashed for aeons before sliding, tilting and folding up to the surface for us to see and map and learn about this wild and alive ball of a planet we’re existing on.
As part of this Arts Council Wales funded project, I have the honour and delight of hanging out with and learning from Glacial Geologist Dr Morgan Jones from Aberystwyth University’s Earth Sciences department. Morgan has introduced me to reading the rocks at various spots along the Pembrokeshire coast: 420 million years of the earth’s history in slices and tilts from land to sea. The time scales are at once mind-melting and expanding. The geological language and images we are encountering are inspiring and enlivening.
Life and death assemblages.
Uncomformable and conformable time.
Glacial rock clusters.
River silts.
Volcanic ash.
Catastrophic events.
The tip of the iceberg, or protruding mountain peak, of geological reading
Our time together has been spent getting excited about super cool strata - see Marloes Sands ‘Three Chimneys’ - the colours of Paelosoil red meeting river silt soft blues - the above photo - and finding what appear to be the burrows of 2 metre-long millipedes that roamed the earth several hundred million years ago.
I will pause for a moment to let that sink in….
2 metre-long burrowing millipedes. Yoiks.
These beasts might be the rock-star headlines of the first geological tour, but what is beginning here is a whole new layer of relationship with the land where I was born, and raised and to which I have recently returned.
Where there is grinding and grounding.
The rocks of Pembrokeshire have excited the attention of geologists for many years. Around the magnificent cliffed coasts of the National Park there are exposures of immensely old rocks, and many complicated structures can be examined in detail.
Perhaps the most striking feature of the local geology is the amazing variety of rock types compressed into one small area.
The Geology of Pembrokeshire. Dr Brian S John2
“Colour is not that important in geological terms” stated Morgan part of the way into our first field trip day. I was surprised at this, and also curious about the other layers that we would uncover. Perhaps colour is the beautiful icing on the cake of rigorous scientific research. I’m here for that; the icing and the cake.3
In the coming weeks, I will be heading to the Earth Science department at Aberystwyth University for a lab visit. There are plans to look deeply into the rocks with microscopes and crush up what we have gathered, ready for me to turn them into paint.
The next stages beyond this slicing and crushing are in development.
As with the baking strata of matter that have developed over millennia before tilting and emerging to the skies, I am hesitant to unearth language to sense-make prematurely. There is time to be spent with hands meeting rocks and learning through touch, proximity and action.
Things take time.
I forget this. Every day with ADHD is a forgetting and remembering of this.
The molten core of a psychic and somatic geology. Of witnessing and listening to the dialogues between the thinking mind and feeling body.
In July I spent a weekend in Somerset at Dove Studios on a Mokuhanga4 printing workshop with Robin Frood. I have been looking for a non-toxic5 print-making technique that I can use with the processed earth pigments, and the use of porous plywood, starch paste (rice or cornflour) and thin but strong fibred Japanese papers makes this process a real winner. I will be spending some time in early September again with this process, diving in deep for a few days in the studio.
I am excited to find the nuts and bolts of a non-toxic process that has the potential to work well with the earth pigment paints, and hope to find a way to develop some interesting work. It is all largely an unknown and new element at the moment.
Here are a few images of my first experiments with this process from my weekend workshop. I began working with a deep red earth pigment that I had processed to a refined state, alongside the rich light blue pigment of processed copper verdigris from the ink-making pot.
The potential for chance and experimental mark-making within this process has me inspired. As with ink making and working with botanicals on the page, I am naturally drawn to that which process led, can be layered and responded to in the making. To that which welcomes learning and emergence.
Deep time is a hot, sexy topic in current science-art crossover lands, and I can see why. Geology rocks!6
Until next time, (alluvial7) colour fans,
KJ
*Footnotes below.
✺ g e n t l e a t t e n t i o n ✺
The wonderful Green Earth Awakening camp from Buddhafield is running again this year between 11th - 15th of September in the Blackdown Hills, Somerset.
Volunteering opportunities and tickets are available for this small and beautiful gathering.
Green Earth Awakening Camp is an intimate gathering at the turning of the summer season exploring community, ecology-based practice, land-based skills, green crafts, and creative ways to forge social and ecological resilience in a time of imminent ecological breakdown.
Inner work supports outer action in the world. Those following a path of inner spiritual development may forget to engage with social and ecological injustice, while activists may forget the inner work for fear of running out of time. We offer the Green Earth Awakening as an invitation, from Buddhists to all, to gather and cross-pollinate.
In these times of climate breakdown, increasing inequality, and with the abhorrent legacy of colonialism, we need a bold new conviction in compassion. The lens of Buddhism offers a view of the world that positions us as connected and integrated into the web of life. This view offers a route away from individualism, scarcity and separation, towards connection, abundance and solidarity.
We value a re-emergence of practices that unpick our sense of separation, allowing us to begin the work of opening up to a wider sense of self, an alliance with all beings, and a bold transformation of our global systems.
Waning, not Waxing… Doh.
No relation. (But probably, somewhere along the line. Pembrokeshire is small, after all.)
The layers chat is veering into Shrek and Donkey territory now…
This widely used print-making process is a starting point for practice research. I do not wish to claim this historical practice from Japan which I have no connection with as a white, Welsh person.
It is not accurate to claim that working with earth pigments is ‘all natural’ as depending on the make-up of the pigments, and where gathered from they can feature toxins, microplastics and other compounds.
Points for naming the 1990’s TV quote.
This is a geology pun. This is how I rock now. You’re welcome.
