The Hills Are Waiting

The Hills Are Waiting

This poem from Old stone and ancient bones is featured in an exhibition at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery from December 14th through to February 22nd

Celebrating the inspiration that the dark gritstones and softer limestone landscapes have offered  artists over the centuries, the  “White Peak, Dark Peak”   exhibition features prints, paintings, finds and poems from the Museum collection. It includes several new pieces added to the collection during the Enlightenment! initiative. Take a look at the Collections in the Landscape blog

Stone and Water’s Ancient Landscape also puts in its own imitable weedy, reefy, trilobite-y appearance as another artwork inspired by the landscapes of the Peak

Old stone and ancient bones: poems from the hollow hills

is my small book of new poems...

From the cold silence of chambered tombs to the beauty and blessing of the Ring of Brodgar and the strange, dangerous excitement of faerie hills and the Kelpie's streams, Old stones and ancient bones presents a collection of poems that invite you to enter a vibrant world of memory, dream and enchantment….

Getting a copy: it seems strange to say it but you are probably better (quicker response and I actually make more money!) if you buy direct from LuLu: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ 

I do have copies to sell, coming in at £8.50 inc P&P

Cheques: to Creeping Toad address: 51-d West Rd, Buxton, Sk17 6HQ, UK 

Paypal possible: get in touch

ISBN: 978-1-291-46593-8

Amazon: Old stones should be available through Amazon soon as well....

Creepy Houses and Limestone Monsters

Mansfield Library: quiet, almost innocent

Wild, strange and dangerous days, these dog days of summer…As part of this year's Summer Reading Challenge, I've been doing workshops for Nottinghamshire and City of Nottingham Libraries making creepy houses and spooky landscape pop-ups. These have set out to inspire young people to tell us stories and to use the ideas they find in the books they read and apply these in other situations

So last Wednesday saw us creeping in Mansfield Library...

the tide starts to come in...

high tide, lots of people, lots of making!

a lovely selection of homes for the creepier customer

with your own burning room
and escape door (lower right)

fireworks!

Then Thursday, I was plunging again into our Carboniferous past and leading  workshops in Buxton Museum and Art Gallery as part of our Ancient Landscapes project. We were making puppets inspired by the animals of those prehistoric seas that gave us the limestone of the Peaks. A lot of creative license was exercised (not least over time periods and dates) and scientific presumptions challenged (how could anyone possibly know that trilobites were not rainbow patterned?)

Eurypterid in full predatory splendour!

a small, and rather dismal,
Boggart

Next Creeping Toad wildnesses

5th -16th August: summer residency at the Holly Lodge Centre in Richmond Park, Surrey: closed sessions not open for dropping in

20th August: more Spooky Towers and Creepy Houses: Aspley Library, 10 -12, Bilborough Library, 2- 4, Nottingham. Free, drop-in events - give yourself 45 minutes at least to make your pop-up spookiness

21st August: even creepier houses, this time in Mansfield Library: 10.30 - 12.30 and 1.30 - 3.30. Again, free, drop in activities but give yourself time to do the making

22nd August, Sherwood Pines Country Park: away with the fairies, goblins and trolls: lively storywalks! Details, booking and prices: http://www.forestry.gov.uk/forestry/INFD-98FBDY

29th August: Ogden Water Country Park: more faeries, elves, goblins and trolls: telling stories, making up new ones, finding evidence of terrible enchantments and wild adventures and making tiny goblin puppets to take home and upset the neighbours….Details, bookings and prices: http://www.ogdenwater.org.uk/whatson.php

Next Ancient Landscapes events:

Tuesday 6th August: Winnat's Pass Walk: exploring the millstone grits of the Dark Peak. Meet: Castleton Visitor Centre Car Park, S33 8WP, at 2pm. Walk 2 - 4pm, some steep slopes and off paved footpaths

Wednesday 7th August: Life in Ancient Seas at Leek PlayDay

Brough Park, Leek, 11 - 3: meet the Ancient Landscapes team and make your own finger-puppet fossils or ancient seascape

goblin yoga

Come and join in…or we'll send the trilobites round

Hopping around in June!

Events where you just might find this Toad over the next month

 

telling stories at Dove Valley Centre

Sunday June 9th

The Big Bird, Beast, Bug and Botany Hunt

When: 11.00 - 16.00

Where: Dove Valley Centre

Under Whitle Farm

(between Sheen and Longnor)

SK17 0PR

www.dovevalleycentre.co.uk

Our Ancient Landscapes project will be there among the Birds, Beasts, Bugs and Botanicals. We'll be there with fossils to look at and draw, models to handle, people to talk to, a wall to stare at (just in case we can find anything!) and our usual exciting, messy, colourful and engaging creative activities

I'll be there helping on the Landscapes stall but mostly to tell stories of farms and fields and the plants and animals and stranger inhabitants of the Dales and Moorlands

setting up for last year's Big B day

Sunday June 16th

Father's Day at Ilam Park

puppets for parents?

Father's Day BBQ and Games

When: 11.00 - 16.00

Where: Ilam Park, Postcode: DE6 2AZ. Ordnance Survey grid reference SK132507.

I'll be on the Ancient Landscapes team will be at this National Trust event at Ilam Park

Tempting as it is, we won't be "fossilizing fathers" but we may well invite you to look at some of the fossils we find in the limestone of the area, to make printed fossil cards for Dads, cast your own fossils (for anyone), make trilobite puppets and personal nautiloids….

Our activities are free but car parking charges apply. There are lots of other activities on at Ilam that day - but come and hunt us out!

ancient animal fingerpuppet

Fossils make friends

a weekend that began with foxgloves

Our tent at the Garden pARTy

Our Ancient Landscapes project spent this weekend as an installation on the Buxton Art Trail. We entertained some 150 visitors over the weekend, inviting them to stroke, cuddle and play with our ancient creatures......capturing the essence of the Carboniferous environments that gave rise to the limestone that we live on here

WE were one of four sets of artists exhibiting in Caroline's wonderful garden: Caroline Small herself, Adrienne and Langley Brown, Caroline's Mum and Team ( cakes and tea!) and ourselves. Thanks to Langley and Ady for the tents! Our umbrellas came courtesy of High Peak Community Arts

Visitors wandered into...

block printing fossils with facepaint

ammonite arm

trilobite arm

We did discover, however, that by Day 2 the Reef was growing adventurous....

coral colonising

And then made a valiant escape attempt....

reef pretending to be foxgloves

ancient landscape and ancient limestone

Ancient Landscapes - the tide comes in again

we've had a busy few days as the second phase of this project begins, or maybe as the tide runs again toward the full

Antler coral

With Ancient Landscapes, we are looking at the limestone of the Peak District where we live and the fossils that rock contains. Then mixing observation, deduction and wild imagination, we work to create the original environments that spawned our limestone as installations in crochet, knitting, clay, beads, felt and anything else that takes our artists fancy!

coral development takes concentration

....concentration, and tea!

The first installation is on display in Leek for the next two weeks as part of the Borderland Voices exhibit in the Emporium Art Exhibition (details to follow)


Meanwhile, a new group has taken up the challenge of extending the ancient landscape and a session at Buxton Museum last week, led on to a workshop at Fairfield Community Centre today. Five more sessions will follow and then we'll see just how our coral garden grows before it unfolds its glories again in the Buxton Art Trail in the summer

Inspiration

Our use of crochet in Ancient Landscapes was inspired by the global Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef Project (http://crochetcoralreef.org/) whose influence we acknowledge even though we couldn't afford to sign into their network as a community group.

The connection between those techniques, other artforms and our Peak District landscapes comes from Stone and Water, a Buxton-based community group dedicated to celebrating the creativity of the people and landscapes of the Peaks.

Ancient images

an ancient fish nestles into an ancient coral

After weeks of activity, our first "Ancient Installation" has taken root. There have been bits and pieces posted over the last few days and here are some photos

It has been a lovely project so far - next wave of workshops start in May - with lots of laughter and a sense of uninhibited adventurous creativity that can be rare in adult sessions

 plankton from the seas above a limey reef

a selection of jellyfish

a close up view of a well-grown reef with an early ammonoid lurking

rare, dangerous and possibly provocative: a strawberry blob

something coiled and wriggly emerges from among the shells and stones....

animating an Ancient Landscape

a strange broken moment recording life in a pretended Carboniferous Reef, 360 million years ago.....

Ancient Landscapes - latest news!

It is a while since I had a chance to post anything here and various projects will surface in quick order (hopefully) over the next few days

to whet appetites, here are a few images from our ongoing Ancient Landscapes project. I am part of a community, environment and celebration group called Stone and Water and our latest adventure is recreating the prehistoric environments that gave us the limestone of the White Peak where we live. The first wave of workshops is now finished and we are assembling our ancient sea floor so here are some images from the final workshops and a first view of our environment....