In my head was an idea, it had no form or sound, just an urgency to be born, delivered into the world to become a participant in evolution.
As I started to work, I used my hands and sometimes my head, conversations happened. The conversations shaped my first idea. Alongside there was administration, accounting and recounting and managing the work, this all caused mutation and sometimes confusion.
For 12months I have worked to make a drawing on the mountain. The idea began as image of transforming a black scar of eroded peat and making it white, all 70,000 square metres! Instead, with a huge amount of help I drew a line in felted wool 300metres long. Over 350 people volunteered their time and energy to make ‘a woollen line’. For the next 6 months I am committed to monitoring the line.
I have already had many conversations regarding this work and continue to do so; I have taken film and still pictures; drawn and made hundreds of metres of felted wool now I need to find a way to reveal what has not been heard or seen, what is essential.
Within this project connections were made, and continue to be made, and then get lost or hidden, can I reveal these connections, capture the fragile and exquisite moments that all too easily fly away, and then take them through another transformation to bring them into the world?
A woollen line 
After reading about this project, and especially “The unseen and unspoken” I am moved to tears. It is poetry, it is spiritual, it has a depth that has moved me. So often today we find people have lost the connection between their environment and the essentialness of maintaining the equilibrium. To each person involved in this worthwhile project I would like to say “thank you so much for caring”. I hope this ongoing project gets a wider audience because for me, it is worthy of “air time on radio and television”, every opportunity that arises to get the word across to the public ‘that we have to save our environment’ should be taken.
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Pip, what you are doing is so wonderful, bringing together the environment, your art , our hearts and souls, the wonderful animals who serve us so patiently, healing the land and our and spirits. Truly remarkable and inspiring!
Hi Pip,
Just wanted to say this is an inspiring piece of work – brilliant. I want to put you in touch with another artist working with similar concerns, Cathy Fitzgerald in Ireland. Have a look at http://www.youtube.com/user/cathnarnia?blend=1&ob=video-mustangbase
Maria,
Thanks for this and lovely to hear from you. I had a look at Cathy Fitzgerald’s work which is beautiful, especially the sound which I realise is her starting point. Interestingly it has taken me time to realise that when up on the Woollen line the most consistent sound that gets recorded is the wind. On the day I took the pictures and film clips for 11.11.11 I could barely stand up! So easy to miss the obvious in looking to represent sites to those who are unlikely to ever get there.
Best wishes
Pip
This is a fascinating project. It makes me think of the ‘land art’ of artists like Robert Smithson, but moving on from Smithson’s concern with entropy to making an actual ecological intervention in the landscape. The way in which this project extends to an engagement with the idea of community, seeks new uses for traditional materials and techniques and yet also manages to work on a profound symbolic, even allegorical, level is truly inspiring. I wish you all the very best with it!
Scott, so interesting that you make the connection with Smithson whose work I was shown last year. I have wrestled with ways of placing my work, hence the invitation to other artists to respond to the site in the Bog~ Mawnog project.
It is not an easy thing this grappling with place, both mine in the world and the peat scar on Pen Trumau. Hopefully you might get to join me on one of the events and we can walk and talk!
Hi Pip,
Your landscape art project woollenline is really inspiring. Its theme is reconnecting the earth with society and vice versa. Your work truly reminds me of ideas developed by Joseph Beuys: You are creating a social sculpture in a former blanket bog using wool felt for healing wounded earth and souls. It is a great task bringing people together for working in the mountains in a symbolic (partly religious) act to reconnect the place with its people. I remember our good talk during the iucn peat conference in Bangor and wish you all the best for your future projects.
Michael,
Great to hear from you, especially this evening when I have just returned from talking with the vice chair of the Black Mountain Graziers, John Morris and his wife Rose. We were catching up on what I have been doing and exchanging thoughts on ideas I have planned. John and Rose are wonderful people and despite initial scepticism have given me support from the start of this work. Tonight they put yet another idea into my head, but you will need to follow the blog to find out more!!
As you probably saw at the start of September we are going up on the mountain with over 1,000 kilos of wool and 11 horses together with an unknown number of volunteers, come and join us! Better still bring a group from Germany, I will find people to put you all up. Short notice I know but give it thought.
Best wishes, Pip
hi Pip
what a beautiful project! really excited as to how this develops further and other future projects. Would love it if you would come to the capel here in furnace and talk about/discuss this project at some point.
Good to see you at MOMA yesterday,
avi x
aviallen@hotmail.com
capelygraig.com
Looking at your capel, you too have a beautiful project! without knowing exactly I also get the feeling that there is a deep sense of sharing embedded in your work. A sI cannot remember what your feelings were about our work together in Carmarthen I guess this idea comes from the quality of the images on your blog.
Hi Pip,
I helped with the Woollen Line whilst I was in Gwernyfed High School and I’ve always wondered how everything is going. A greatly inspiring project that has been a part of my career path. I’m now in university, studying Marine and Natural History photography and I still speak about the fond memories I had being apart of the project and the exhibition in Crickhowell.
Any updates on the project would be fantastic!
Hi Ellie,
So timely your comments as I was only talking about the Woollenline with the chair of the Sustainable development Fund panel last week.
I have not been up on the hill for some time as work has moved along a new line see, http://www.pipwoolf.com
What I can tell you is that wool is now being taking seriously by others working to control erosion and I believe there was a program on television about wool being used by Snowdonia National Park.
The other amazingly positive outcome is the Black Mountain Partnership http://www.blackmountains.wales
There are also apocryphal tales about less peat in the water coming off the hill but in the end what seems most heartening is hearing that the energy begun with the Woollenline continues to create conversation, perhaps in your case with you and your subject matter.
I wish you well and thanks again for all your contributions.