Time

The Past: Time without a ticking clock. A place where paths and roads are measured in years.

The Present: a place where the clock ticks but always only for a second. Where, upon those same paths and roads we continue, for that second, with our existence.

Lines

"Frontiers are lines. Millions of men are dead because of these lines. Thousands of men are dead because they didn't manage to cross them. "

Georges Perec - Species of Spaces and Other Pieces

"Human beings also leave reductive traces in the landscape, through frequent movement along the same route."

Tim Ingold - Lines, A Brief History

Paths

"For paths run through people as surely as they run through places."

Robert MacFarlane - The Old Ways

"And what a dynamic, handsome object is a path! How precise the familiar hill paths remain for our muscular consciousness!"

Gaston Bachelard - The Poetics of Space

Ghosts

"There at dusk he fell in with a man who appeared to be following the same path, a man who might easily be mistaken for Thomas himself: 'a lean, indefinite man; half his life lay behind him like a corpse, so he said, and half was before him like a ghost'."

Matthew Hollis - Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas

Landscape

"Landscape was here long before we were even dreamed. It watched us arrive."

Robert MacFarlane - The Wild Places

"The real voyage of discovery consists in not seeking new landscapes, but having new eyes."

Marcel Proust

Memory

"Thought, like memory, inhabits external things as much as the inner regions of the human brain. When the physical correspondents of thought disappear, then thought, or its possibility, is also lost. When woods and trees are destroyed – incidentally, deliberately – imagination and memory go with them."

Robert MacFarlane - The Wild Places

Stars

"As physicists have pointed out, it is no accident that we see stars in our sky, for stars are a necessary part of any universe capable of generating us. Again, this does not imply that stars exist in order to make us. It is just that without stars there would be no atoms heavier than lithium in the periodic table, and a chemistry of only three elements is too impoverished to support life. Seeing is the kind of activity that can go on only in the kind of universe where what you see is stars."

Richard Dawkins - The Ancestor's Tale

Inscription

"Crucial to Bergson was the claim that in this movement of creation, of life and growth, lies the essence of time: 'Wherever anything lives', he wrote, 'there is, open somewhere, a register in which time is being inscribed'."

Tim Ingold - Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

Materials

"The properties of materials, in short, are not attributes but histories."

Tim Ingold - Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description

"Sebald shows himself to be the modern master of a Benjaminian poetics, a mode of writing in which the materiality of human artifacts and habitations pulsates with the rhythms of natural history."

Eric Santner - On Creaturely Life

Archive

"Everything about a modern animal, especially its DNA, but its limbs and its heart, its brain and its breeding cycle too, can be regarded as an archive, a chronicle of its past, even if that chronicle is a palimpsest, many times overwritten."

Richard Dawkins - The Ancestor's Tale

"One of my best-loved teachers, an intellectual hell-raiser and writer of eccentric courage, had always insisted on directly experiencing 'a sense of place', of using the archive of the feet."

Simon Schama - Landscape and Memory

Objects

"Objects contain absent people."

Julian Barnes - Metroland

"The faces of our parents, friends, the shape of objects we left behind - these are the things we share. And even if nothing is left to us but our bodies on the hospital bunk, we shall still have our memories and our feelings."

Tadeusz Borowski - This Way To The Gas Ladies and Gentlemen

Light

"From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star. A sort of umbilical cord links the body of the photographed thing to my gaze - light though impalpable, is here a carnal medium, a skin I share with anyone who has been photographed."

Roland Barthes - Camera Obscura

Space

The city comprises "...relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past; the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet; the line strung from the lamppost to the railing opposite and the festoons that decorate the course of the queen's nuptial procession; the height of that railing and the leap of the adulterer who climbed over it at dawn; the tilt of a guttering and a cat's progress along it as he slips into the same window."

Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

Details

"Thus on one occasion, looking up abruptly from the book which always lies open beside him, he remarks that, when one thinks about it, a vast range of unfathomable contingencies come between the logic of the battleplan and that of the final despatches, both of which he knew inside out. Tiny details, imperceptible to us decide everything! Even the greatest battles in the history of the world were won or lost like that. Tiny details, but they weigh as heavy as the 50,000 dead soldiers and horses at Waterloo."

W.G. Sebald, Vertigo

Roads

"…it is about a road which begins many miles before I could come on its traces and ends miles beyond where I had to stop."

Edward Thomas

Roads go on
While we forget, and are
Forgotten like a star
That shoots and is gone.

Edward Thomas - Roads

Ruins

"Yesterday ... I saw some ruins, beloved ruins of my youth which I knew already ... I thought again about them, and about the dead whom I had never known and on whom my feet trampled. I love above all the sight of vegetation resting upon old ruins; this embrace of nature, coming swiftly to bury the work of man the moment his hand is no longer there to defend it, fills me with deep and ample joy."

Gustave Flaubert

Existence

"...we read in Spinoza a magnificent definition of time, or rather duration, as a 'continuation of existence."

Paul Ricoeur - Memory, History, Forgetting

"Is history simply that time when we were not born? I could read my non-existence in the clothes my mother had worn before I can remember her."

Roland Barthes - Camera Lucida

Thought

"The word Wittgenstein used for 'thought', Denkbewegungen, is a coinage that might be translated as 'thought movements', 'thought-ways' or 'paths of thought': ideas that have been brought into being by means of motion along a path (Weg)."

Robert MacFarlane - The Old Ways

Light

An edited version of light fading on a wall in The Lock Up Cultural Centre in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Accompanying words taken from walks made in and around Newcastle itself.

Note: there is no sound on this video

Walk

An edited version of a walk made in the exercise yard at The Lock Up Cultural Centre in Newcastle, NSW, Australia. Accompanying words taken from walks made in and around Newcastle itself.

Sail

An edited version of a piece made following a resdiency in Australia. Accompanying words taken from walks made in and around Newcastle itself. The 'sail' is a stitched map of all the walks as recorded using GPS.

Snow

Footage shot in 1999 during an archaeological excavation at the site of the Belzec Death Camp in Poland. The footage is of poor quality and as an artist I have been looking to use it in my work.

Note: there is no sound on this video