Books, Scrolls, Calligraphy, Performance
Outside:Inside
In 2018, I and a group of artists including Cellist Emily Burroughs, Bron Bradshaw RWA & Terry Flaxton RWA came together to create a one hour live event titled Outside:Inside. We knew that Celtic tree circles are partly ceremonial and rooted in pre-Christian tradition and early British people’s would have recognised. In Robert Graves book of 1948 (called The White Goddess) he describes what he believed was an early script describing trees. The Ogham Tree Alphabet had 20 phonetic letters. Working alongside singers (and some of our artists as musicians), using live and recorded sound, projected moving images, we devised an hour long performance.
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Above and to the right is a video of the playback material and critically the first 1 minute is where my own mother, Adelina Humpston, speaks a form of Welsh similar to what Robert Graves considered the original Ogham language to sound like. We used this call and answer form as a way of asking the audience to speak the Ogham language in response to Addie's Welsh - after they've responded, she translates the words into common English - all of this at the very beginning of the performance: The performances were presented at the Red Brick Building Glastonbury as part of Somerset Art Week, September 2018.
Ogham Ceiling Hangings
When we formed the group of seven to work together on Inside:Outside, we started by walking around a Celtic Tree Circle that Bron had planted 20 years before. I became intrigued by the idea that early peoples were scoring stones or staves of wood with hand tools. I then wanted to make some beautiful marks myself. The Ogham script has a central line with marks coming off or across the stave. I realised in fact the central stave was like a tree itself with symbolic roots & branches. It reminded me of Chinese symbols and inspired me to make 13 scrolls that describe the 13 sacred Celtic trees. These circles were based on Lunar calendar months pre-dating the Gregorian calendar. The difference being they followed the Moon cycles which are 13 in a given year. Each month is ascribed to a tree 1st the Birch 24/12- 21/1. Then Rowan 22/1-18/2 & so on...
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So I took this interpretation of an early Celtic language, using black ink to paint the Ogham markings, and created 13, 7 foot long scrolls which represented each tree and arranged them throughout the performance space, which we hung from the beams that create a grove-like space for the performers and a backdrop for the musicians.
The Ogham Book
In 2023, Bron Bradshaw asked me to create a book around the ideas I'd been exploring around the Ogham Alphabet and as her organisation, Dove Arts in Butleigh Somerset had received money from the Arts Council to create a set of Artists book for the Tree House Library Collection, so a confluence of events came together to create the Ogham Book which you can see to the right.
In my book I have made small puches where each of the inclusions - often small versions of the calligraphy on the scrolls can be found. At the front there's an Ogham, circular calendar that represents the Celtic year. |
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A note on the performance space: The Red Brick Building
The Red Brick Building is a rectangular space with central poles dividing the entire space down the middle - this is always a problem for performers as they face one side of the space with only half the audience seeing them.
What we decided to do to deal with the space was to provide a large screen in front of one audience with the division to their left as they faced their screen and on the other side of the pillars the audience faced in the opposite direction facing a 2nd screen at the other end of the space - effectively the audience can be thought of being in two trains passing each-other in different directions...
In between in amongst the central pillars was a space for cellist and singers - at each end a keyboard and a guitar. In this setup both audiences could see screens and performers.
What we decided to do to deal with the space was to provide a large screen in front of one audience with the division to their left as they faced their screen and on the other side of the pillars the audience faced in the opposite direction facing a 2nd screen at the other end of the space - effectively the audience can be thought of being in two trains passing each-other in different directions...
In between in amongst the central pillars was a space for cellist and singers - at each end a keyboard and a guitar. In this setup both audiences could see screens and performers.
Notes on the Ogham Lunar Tree Calendar
Robert Graves believed that the Celts used a Lunar Calendar consisting of 13 months, each 28 days long. The months were rep[resented by trees, each standing for a consonant from the Celtic Tree Alphabet. Graves was inspired by the Irish historian and writer, Roderic O'Flaherty (1629 - 1718) and his book 'Ogygia' which was first published in 1685 and originally written in Latin.
"Ogygia is the island of Calypso, used by O'Flaherty as an allegory for Ireland. Drawing from numerous ancient documents, Ogygia traces Irish history back to the ages of mythology and legend, before the 1st century. The book credits Milesius as the progenitor of the Goidelic people. O'Flaherty had included in his history what purported to be an essay on the understanding of the ancient Ogham alphabet. Based on the 1390 Auraicept na n-Éces, he stated that each letter was named after a tree, a concept widely accepted in 17th century Ireland."
"Ogygia is the island of Calypso, used by O'Flaherty as an allegory for Ireland. Drawing from numerous ancient documents, Ogygia traces Irish history back to the ages of mythology and legend, before the 1st century. The book credits Milesius as the progenitor of the Goidelic people. O'Flaherty had included in his history what purported to be an essay on the understanding of the ancient Ogham alphabet. Based on the 1390 Auraicept na n-Éces, he stated that each letter was named after a tree, a concept widely accepted in 17th century Ireland."