Bit of a Gap

 

Proposition cottage has been on the back-burner.  Slowly stewing  away like a good stock or slow cooked piece of meat, ready to drop off the bone. to melt in the mouth.  I've read the first two chapters of 'Arcadia for all' Dennis Hardy and Colin Ward sketch out the interwar years as a period of accidental development.  I am disappointed that Wards Anarchism didn't take center stage. I suppose that there is an element of been careful what we wish for. However much we love a ram-shackle shed we don't want them scattered willy-nilly across our country vistas and the gardens of stately homes.   There is a nice description of how unscrupulous country folk would create rolling boundaries .  They would plant thick bramble hedges to create a threshold then cut them back on the inside while letting them grow on the outside thus increasing the plot to which they had laid a tenuous claim. I also found a reference to 'rusty pork pies' which were the nick names of circular huts made form corrugated iron sheets.  There are no hits on a google search and no images I can find which is strangely reassuring to know. Perhaps the makeshift should vanish into eternity. 

I have also used AI to imagine proposition cottage.   I spent most of a day slightly changing my text descriptions.  Black ship-lap with yellow windows, Bi-fold doors opening onto patio, Derek Jarmen, prospect cottage, plans, and various different styles and positioning of commas.  

 

 

It resulted in lots of difference and lots of repetition and left me wondering if I was in danger of making a pastiche.  Perhaps this is the problem with images generated through AI, the intelligence chooses the things it can connect together, ideas such as death, wisdom and renewal cannot be wrapped into the overall and the altogether.  As I scrolled through the images they began to fill my minds eye with actualities where until that point there was speculation.  The more impossible ideas in relation to scale or cost became less achievable and the more practical assemblages became the flat reality of what is perhaps possible.

The question of why I have stepped away from writing and making is about practice, the building of a shed, workshop mausoleum, Walter Segal inspired, place to develop propositions is closely linked to my state of mind.  Most days recently it has felt pointless, a vanity project that does not deserve any investment.  I will find a line and follow a practice to lift myself from the sea like Baren Munchausen pulling myself up by my own hair or bootstraps.