Thinking big

Thelma has just reminded me of Andy Goldsworthy in her post on land art.

I spent most of my 3 years on a sculpture course at art college teaching myself techniques such as forge work, welding, stone carving and bronze casting, but for the last few months I began to make things which did not depend on any particular traditional skills.

I was unaware of Robert Smithson's 'Spiral Jetty' project of 1970, possibly because it had not been properly finished before I left college, but I was certainly thinking along those lines. Maybe I was just tuned-in to the zeitgeist.

I was thinking on a very large scale. I bought an ordnance survey map of Farnham, Surrey, and the surrounding landscape, opened it up and put the needle of a compass in the top of St Andrew's church tower, then scribed a circle of about a mile in diameter across the countryside.

St Andrew's is very close to the art school buildings (or was - I haven't been there for 50 years) and in particular, very close to the world-renowned pottery and ceramics department. So close, in fact, that when they conducted an all-night firing of pots in a drip-feed, diesel-fuelled kiln, one side of the church tower was visibly blackened by the reduction smoke when they shut off the oxygen.

The idea was that I would visit the places where my circle intersected various landmarks, features and roads and put some sort of marker in those places. A white patch of paint on a country road, a patch of whiting in a field - all spaced a few hundred yards apart and having no visual meaning when seen on the ground.

Aldershot - The Home of the British Army - is only three miles from Farnham, and the plan was to get them to take me up in a helicopter to hover at a great height above the church, where I could photograph the series of white marks in the landscape, which would show up to suggest a perfect circle a mile across. I made enquiries with the Army and I think they were quite up for it. I think they liked the idea of a positive publicity opportunity involving collaboration with art-school lefties.

The first thing I did was to contact the vicar and ask him if I could go up to the top of the church tower. He was quite happy to agree to this and I arranged to meet him there one day.

We climbed the stone steps of the tower, but the last bit of the climb had to be made by ascending a 20 foot, vertical wooden ladder which was suspended a foot off the floor by a couple of thin pieces of rope attached to the ceiling. Once up there I had to heave open a wooden trap door and climb out onto the lead-work of the tower roof. He confessed he had never done this and never would.

The climb was tricky because the ladder swung horribly with each movement, and when I got to the top I saw in the gloom that the two bits of rope were very rotten and frayed. I had to put even more pressure on them by pushing up on the heavy trapdoor, and I did so with more than a little trepidation.

The ropes did not break and soon I was enjoying a view of Farnham that very few people had seen over the years that the ropes had first been tied to the ladder. I spent about half an hour up there, just taking it in.

The project became even more conceptual by never being completed, but I did dig an 80 foot diameter ditch and bank earthwork in a local field. Unlike Smithson's Spiral Jetty, I made it by hand. The earthwork was built over, but still exists in my head as a concept.