Cutting & Mark Making Workshop with the Solway Nature Explorers
Using the imagery captured during the photography composition workshop the Solway Nature Explorers then examined these images using a range of cutting and mark making techniques. The workshop introduced lino cutting and stencilling skills as a way of reproducing the images with an emphasis on creating bold shapes and lines resonant of the striking photos of peat cutting visible in the Aerofilm images of Glasson Moss and the Bowness-on-Solway area. Peat cutting took place on an industrial scale, and carved deep channels into the earth, many of these marks are still visible today.
Peat cutting, Glasson Moss, 1949 Image reference: EAW022871
Using clay and natural pigments the Solway Nature Explorers created a collective piece of wall art on the external wall of one of a barn at Campfield Marsh. The focus of this was to use the earth in order to create marks and patterns. Each Nature Explorer was given their own masked off strip of wall in order to make their own marks. The result is an abstract series of lines full of texture and detail that reveals itself the longer you look at each section. It makes reference to the abstract nature of many aerial photographs, which again reveal their detail and history the more they are viewed. Like the peat lines the clay and pigment will gradually fade and eventually disappear back into the landscape.