A short meditation on chalk

Chalk. It's everywhere in this far South Easterly part of England. It has created the land I stand on. It forms the bed of the river I am studying. It is also in the dregs of my tea. It sucks the moisture from my skin. The dust here is white. It is unexpected, this complete submersion in Norfolk chalk.

I am an artist interested in time, materiality and ecology, and I am here, primarily, to expand my understanding and practice of making pigments. Pigments from the stones, trees, plants and traces of life held in the broader reaches of this remarkable river valley, shaped since the Ice Age, by this little chalk stream. Pigments that will, to my mind, distil time and place to represent the continuous tangle of life from the formation of the chalk itself, through the alders, aurochs, dragonflies, and dropworts, to the returning trout, and the toddler dipping her toes in the water today.

So this is what I do. I make pigments. Pigments from alder cones, broom flowers, old bricks, rotting tree stumps, oak galls, found sheep bones, concrete, nettles, sycamore flowers. And, of course chalk. Coming from mid Devon, an area renowned for its deep red clays, I can hardly believe that chalk, something I have only ever really previously encountered as powder in bags, or in sticks by a blackboard, just lies around here. Everywhere. From enormous chunks to tiny pebbles. Badgers impatiently dig the stuff up; humans quarry it…everyone is so used to it, no one really sees it. I collect the bits the badgers have discarded, and a large lump unearthed by a farmer. I pound it in the mortar, and it quickly reduces to a brilliant white dust. Most of my work is made on gesso covered panels. The gesso is made to a 14th century recipe using chalk and animal glue, applied in layers. At the end of long days in the studio here I am covered in it. It is all over my apron; in my hair; and smeared down the side of my cheek from when I answered the phone. It is all over my phone. When I wash up in the studio sink, chalky water pours from the tap and I realise I am rinsing chalk with chalk. I go inside to have a shower in chalk, and boil the pasta for my evening meal in chalk. This is not what I expected. I expected to make a work about this river; to think deeply about the multitude of lives and voices tumbling in and over and through the water, from a deep marine past to an uncertain future. A confluence of voices represented by the myriad colours I am producing in the studio…but what I find I am mainly wrestling with is chalk. Chalk is rising to the surface in everything I do. It covers every item in the workshop, and every item in the house. It determines the colours of my pigments on my panels; the feel of my skin; the taste of my food. I make white footprints wherever I go. When I dream of the river, I dream of a sinuous chalk line. Chalk has quite literally become the bedrock of my time here. After trying to resist it, it occurs to me that chalk now runs deeply through me as well. As it has flowed through all the myriad lives it has supported since its inception. I came here feeling like an outsider. Questioning my right to make a work about a stream I do not know, have not grown up with. And yet I find I have been embraced by the chalk. And just as it has contributed to the blood and bones of every living thing that has ever survived in the valley of the Nar since the Ice Age, it now contributes to my blood and bones as well. The river is running through me. And finally, I start to succumb. The chalk is not allowing me to make the work I thought I would. I have to throw away any preconceived ideas, and, perhaps for the first time in my life, truly allow the materials with which I’m working to not only dictate my process but the entire outcome. Eventually I accept it and I follow. I will not end up making the work I thought I would. I will listen instead to the silent voices of the endless billion lives that make up this glorious white stone, bedrock of life itself.