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Automatic writing exercise as part of the How Nature Builds Project with Modern Art Oxford and Wytham Woods.

Written at Modern Art Oxford on 25th February 2020, reflecting on the visit to Wytham Woods on 18th February 2020 where we left our marks in the landscape.

There was a compulsion to explore the texture of the environment. I wanted to make a mark in the mud but the mud was:

too dry,

too wet,

too sticky,

not sticky enough.

It had been a very wet so I looked for a big puddle.

Using my boots to create impressions, working round and round, into the edges of the puddle to create bootprints in a pattern.

Round and round.

Stamping.

Lightly pacing.

I felt the softness and squidginess of the mud.

I enjoyed the repetitive movement.

It was not a circle.

More like an oval.

I started looking at what my feet had created and what it felt like.

Then I started noticing the water in the middle of the puddle.

There were reflections of the trees and the clouds.

The trees were in the ground.

The clouds were in the ground.

The sky was in the ground.

I was walking in the sky.

I was walking in the trees.

I was walking in the mud.

I was going round and round.

I was going nowhere but somewhere.

If I had taken my boots off I would have felt the mud squidging beneath my feet.

And through my toes.

It would have been so cold.

And mucky.

And sticky.

And clingy.

And dark.

I could have gone into the puddle.

Into the world underneath.

Into the reflection.

Like seahenge.

And met the ancestors who had been in the wood before me.

Over thousands and thousands of years.

A.M Edward.