Lovely ploughing ground

I went to record rain today and it didn’t rain. I suppose I’ve practiced it now! 

More productively I went to the NI Ploughing Championships which was great. I sort of just soaked it all in, enjoyed chatting to “John” who was showing me pictures on his phone from the last ploughing match he went to and his highlights – different tractor models and reversible ploughs. Managing my kids, even just at the edges of the field before it got properly muddy, was taking up 95% of my attention, which was fine, but I did notice this guy who was obviously competing in the vintage category, adjusting parts of the plough with a spanner. And on the contemporary machines I was watching them making lots of adjustments and it occurred to me that a ploughed field is a technology. I was always imagining the ploughed field as the natural environment in contrast to a human technology like armour. But actually I’m looking at multiple technologies and that’s quite an interesting realisation.

I’ve had two fantastic conversations with members of the team at University of Atypical in Belfast – the kind of buzz you get at college after a really great tutorial. I’ve been thinking for a while about the way in which my work often involves multiple registers – so within one installation you might see something, hear something, read something and all of those mediums are trying to pull apart the same thing, or they’re passing it between them. And when I was writing an application for something a while ago I got excited about the potential of using that quality of the work to allow multiple different ways for people to experience it. And again with this project I’m recording audio, I’m making little bits of stamped text and all the miniature hobby experiments are so tactile, there’s so many really nice surfaces and textures, from static grass to rough soil. And when thinking about different avenues to develop the work this was the direction that excited me the most and felt most natural, exploring ways to allow people to engage and access the artwork and that that process would also actually just be the best way of making the work, if that makes sense. So I’m working on things that you can touch, that you can listen to, that you can read and look at.

I’ll leave you with a quote from the write ups of the year’s ploughing matches in the little printed programme which I really enjoyed reading:

“(on the first day) Both ploughmen had a lot of loose stubble to contend with. The second day took place on grassland, which was lovely ploughing ground.”*

Pete

*George Huey reporting on the World Ploughing Championship