The Fertile Void with Lucy Hinton and Sarah Howes

You cannot see the white horse from the road. I can't see it from the hill, so I walk down a small footpath over the road to the top of dragon hill, a place where it is said that the youth would sit on a golden sheep skin through the night as a way of crossing the threshold into manhood. Still can't see it. I can make out a few of the contour lines-- thin gestures, from this angle, highlighting the curves of the hill. The only place to take the white horse fully in, to see it in it's swiftly frozen leap into the otherworld is from the perspective of the sun, or the low hanging haze that caresses the hills at each end of the day.

Certain places have an energy and a power of their own. Like a great artist on fire or a composer gliding through a melody with religious poise, this place moves and swirls in its own dimension. This soil has felt the feet and blood of man throughout the history of time and before-- before there were words to mark the passage of one deed to another. Before these times, there were pictures, spirits of the natural world brought forth upon a rock with blood and charcoal, or upon this landscape with the ghostly white chalk of which this system of hills spanning the East-West latitude of Britain is composed.

I am here to drop into "the Fertile Void" with Lucy Hinton and Sarah Howes in this place where dusk brings the fog falling quickly. Fog, a medium for spirits, mortal coils shuffled long ago, to move safely upon this warm earth. Fog, a being all its own, soaking up the night, distance, sound and light into one amorphous presence. We adventurers walk into the fields, heavy with blackberries and dew, to gather something to represent ourselves on this quest into the fertile void that we are setting off into.

I look and look. But I am looking with eyes looking for things. How do I walk into the world of voids-- of not-objects, of absences, holes. How often (always!) I am looking-- I am searching out objects, solid things, to grasp hold of-- even identities, occupations, actions, which have a distinct definition in the cultural lexicon. To define myself. To define my surroundings. To mark my route with markers and signposts? What would happen if I let go?

What happens when we walk into a void of seeing, of seeing the void, of empty places? How can I bring the Hoof Deep Imprint of Cow Walking back with me? How can I bring back, not this fallen, eaten dove, but the space within its breast? That pocket in which once it's lifeblood beat? How can I walk back holding the space that time and rot have hollowed from the center of this tree? How can anything new live where there is no space for it to grow? How can I carry this void within me--how can I walk with nothing? What does it mean to rest in these forgotten spaces, these non-places--in between what was alive and the life yet to be; to grow out of the rich humus of experience had and surrendered to the elements of becoming?