I might have mentioned that a small group of us in Jedburgh were interested in growing food around the town. This conveniently falls within the social domain of the Fallow Land Project. Vegetable planters here and there that anyone can access when the plants are ready to pick.  Some call this guerrilla gardening (which would seem to be out of kilter in the Tory Borders) but we can look at it as enabling fallow communities to spring into life, an exploration of the fallow commons and so on. Our working title is Get Jed Fed.

Placing planters around the town seems to be feasible and straightforward. There’s strong support from the council and the community generally with no real objections as long as we apply common sense.

The other idea of reviving the herb garden at the site of Jedburgh’s Franciscan Friary isn’t going so well. What we wanted to do was plant some herbs in the existing quadrants, as close as possible to the original garden, and make the place more beautiful for citizens and visitors to enjoy. But because it’s an archaeological site there’s some confusion as to who’s responsible for the upkeep, who should be maintaining it and whether or not townspeople can have some agency in replanting and improving the site which is, to be frank, at the moment somewhere between a dog toilet and a skip. All above my pay grade but let’s see how things pans out over the weeks ahead. 

Here are some pictures of how things stand. The box hedge surrounding the herb quadrants is blighted and the fruit bushes at the back need attention. Above and beyond simple growing the whole site needs a lot of love. Some of the archaeological features have been vandalised and need replaced or repaired. The signage could be done with a facelift and the decking platform, which offers views of... the decking..., would benefit from being re-designed with more benches installed. A more welcoming entrance and it could be a very special place to sit and read a book or play your guitar in the fine weather. 

I’m going over different ideas for an eventual art work or works relating to the Fallow Land project and its themes. I’ve covered a lot of ground (literally), what with the art walks, my own walks and spending time in the field (again literally), looking, listening, thinking, exploring through all the senses, in both the mindful and the mindless modes. The other part is the social dimension which involves growing initiatives in the town and those are going very well. I’ll report on them next.

A few ideas are coming to the fore. Some of these involve recycling ideas and concepts that I've had bubbling away as part of previous investigations into Jedburgh and its hinterland. I had discussed with two of the farmers I know the possibility of making small signs to put on the gates of those fields along the paths where people walk the most, signs illustrating through symbols and/or words what’s going on in the fields. This might still happen and my own preference here is for some kind of ideograms that encapsulate the growing or function that the various fields are undergoing over a given period.

​From my neighbour Alfie Dodds who farms below Hunthill south of Jedburgh I have some wonderful descriptions of the fields in the area I’m investigating. One goes like this: Species-rich meadow used for grazing, cannot be ploughed without permission from Department. Presumably that’ll be the Department of Agriculture. I thought this was all about insects, maybe dragonflies, but what it means is that there are rare grasses in that field and somebody has considered it worthwhile to protect them. As you’d expect other descriptions are very functional, for example Permanent Grass will be left until July and cut for silage or, more detailed, Arable silage field under sown with grass. Will be ploughed out in Spring and re-sown with arable silage mix and grass. To be cut for winter fodder 2025. I especially love this one - Winter stubble scheme to encourage birds, will be ploughed and sown in Spring with Spring Barley, because it's a novelty to me that food growing involves feeding the birds. It all makes sense within a more holistic view of the food environment.

Out of all this I’ll be spending a lot more time in the spring, wallowing in the amazing milky light you get at this latitude. In and around these fields employing cameras, lenses, a bunch of objects and ‘stuff’ to make some short test films and staged photographs, probably in my performance mode as ‘Landowner’. Back to the ideograms I can see a place for those as objects, printed out or as linocuts, brought into the environment.

Sound is tricky and I say that as someone who works with the medium every day. The sounds in those high fields and woodlands can be undifferentiated, nuanced and subtle at the same time, not without interest but difficult to manipulate into an accessible art work. Until I adequately decode the soundscape my way round this problem is to represent the sounds visually or even sculpturally which I find fascinating.

Finally, alongside finding a place for the words and phrases that the farmers themselves use to describe places and processes, I'm considering some activity around sonograms, again linocuts or other prints. If you’re not sure what I mean by sonograms I should make it clear that I'm not doing pregnancy testing for cattle.

​After all that lot I might be able to make some decisions. 

The Fallow Land Project is one that obliges me to take my time, slow time, time for reflection and research over days, weeks and months. Without this temporal stretch I wouldn't be able to unearth meaning. Mining for meaning. Fallow is an interesting  signifier. It carries with it agricultural and ecological significance, metaphorical resonance in the biblical and spiritual spheres and, as I'm discovering, there's an important social meaning that emerges slowly when you start to work with people and form small communities around activities that connect us to the land and the food environment. 

I'm interested in how we can form small communities around food growing in the town - planting vegetables, siting planters around the public space and working with the council to recreate the historical herb garden in the Old Friary. The Jedburgh Artwalks already have the feel of a nascent community.

If they can be sustained these modest initiatives could and should transform social potential from a dormant state into a productive state, releasing creative energy and offering benefits to the individuals, the groups involved and the town. A side benefit, much needed in this slow small town, would be the establishment of a precedent in the cultural creative and community domains, a template that enables further development. That's where I am just now with the meaning of the word 'fallow'.

I have a new release, alkaline, over on Bandcamp. These are fairly raw sounds from experimental processes carried out using small electric motors and other generators, resonating and containing vessels and different microphones. These materials will form the core of live electroacoustic performances. But above and beyond these small sounds which are more a documentation of processes than fully fledged compositions I'm more interested in the performance side of this, how to move around inside a space, relate to the sound, objects and people in it.

For the artwork I tried something new and made some prints at Georgie Fay's excellent Print Club in the Hub. Georgie guided the group through the different stages of mono printing and collagraph then left us to it. There are several beautiful aspects to printing that I'd never appreciated apart from the lush sensation of holding a print in your hands. You don't need to be an illustrator, you can keep overprinting and making small adjustments ie. you can be as experimental as you like, and best of all you never know how things are going to turn out. I'm delighted to now have a small bundle of prints that I can scan and transform in the digital domain to make artwork for albums and posters. 

And what a great time we all had of it. A four mile circuit then refreshments and discussion in Jedburgh's Kenmore Hall. My neighbour Alan Dodds who farms locally had provided us with maps and information on what's going in the fields because nobody apart from farmers seem to know what goes on. I certainly don't. The species rich meadow, a variety of grasses just left to get on without disturbance, is a new one to me. The maps have helped greatly in informing our reflections on art in the environment more generally.

As you might know I'll be hosting Jedburgh's participation in the Fallow Land Project for the next five months. As part of  that  I’d like to invite writers to contribute to the art works around the project by writing one or more haiku. A haiku is a short Japanese poem consisting of three phrases composed of seventeen syllables, in a five-seven-five pattern. Quite often there’s a seasonal reference.

The primary theme is fallow which can be understood literally, usually agriculturally, or metaphorically, for example relating to spiritual growth. Other related themes are land use and ownership, soil, the food environment and sustainability.

The Fallow Land Artwalks are under way on the last Sunday of each month. The themes from February to April are word, light and sound respectively so I'll be encouraging the walkers in February to contribute their own haiku.

You can submit as many as you like on as many relevant topics as you wish. If contributors wish I’ll then figure out a way of presenting everyone’s haiku(s) in small publications using folded card and paper as well as putting them on my website where I'll be updating progress regularly. It would be wonderful if you were able to participate and of course if you want to write something more substantial please do!

Please email me your poems (as word docs preferably):-[email protected]

Provisional deadline: Friday 21 February 

There’s a very good Wikipedia entry if you want to dig deeper:-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haiku

And here’s a link to the Fallow Land project:-https://www.artwalkporty.co.uk/project/fallow-land/ 

As part of the Fallow Land project I've made a good start to the the year with my plans to host a series of four artworks in and around Jedburgh between January and April. I had the idea from the excellent work done by Artwork Porty over the years. The idea is to invite people to walk and reflect upon the environments encountered during the walk. Walks can be medium specific, for example a soundwalk, or more general, for example to make connections between creative people.

The first walk is fully signed up and we'll be doing a four mile circuit along the back roads and woodlands above Jedburgh to the south-east. In preparation for this I'm learning from local farmers, informing myself about what goes on in the fields. This is an important part of the project, investigating the patterns of activity in the managed landscape, from land ownership to land use to food growing, from which some kind of art work will emerge.

My hope is that we'll get talking and learning about not only about the land and landscape but also about how we might make art in and around the topics and themes that arise. This occupies me regularly on my walks and I'm always relish the opportunity to listen to ideas from other artists. 

For the next three walks, at the end of the month from February to April, I want the groups to consider particular art forms, especially sound, lens-based media and  writing though I imagine these will all fuse together over time.

I had to get two projects finished recently. These were the kind of ideas that open the door, live in your head and won't go away. So I did them. The first is a sound piece on Doric Scots, my mother tongue, almost incomprehensible to non Scots speakers, and often to me, especially the agricultural variety.

I've taken two phrases in which the speaker doesn't understand what the indeterminate other speaker is saying, in this case disnimakonysins, 'it doesn't make any sense' and  cannamakootfityersayin, 'I can't make out what you're saying' (both tracks linked in grey). The Scots speaker is saying, in Scots, what the non-Scots speaker is thinking, in English. 

​I love this stuff. It's a fight back against the onward march of linguicide, the death of a language, and believe it or not Scots indisputably is a language.

The second project is a simple field recording of me making a fire. Moving a grumpy dog, raking out the ashes, fetching the kindling, wood and anthracite and so on. No big deal, just interesting to my ears so I've shared it. It's called make a fire.

Today I had the rare pleasure of sitting down in the studio with Scots poet Craig Aitcheson to record his magnificent tribute to one of the most iconic rivers, entitled simply Tweed. Craig will be publishing this new piece with art work from Rosemary  Everett.

​We also talked about the best way to begin representing Scots and Scots literature, spoken word and other forms. The starting point, we agreed, is quite straightforward. We make art works in or about the Scots language and invite others to join us.

Maks sinse.