Press – Bound & Infinity

STEMFLOW: A TRIBUTARY

Friday 28th – Sunday 30th November

In response to Stemflow, there will be a series of meetings, interconnected with the exhibition, to celebrate narratives that are changing the way we experience the landscape around us.

In Shinto, a tree, river or mountain can shapeshift and take on many forms and expressions and yet remain formless in its constant changing. These myths continue to evolve with the changing landscape and shape the way see the world, in ourselves and in each other.

On Friday 28th there will be a screening of Sisters of the Earth: The Water Guardians, a documentary about the Pani Panchayat, a women’s movement that transformed their community in Bundelkhand through restoring their local water sources. There will be a panel with Minni Jain and Philip Franses (The Flow Partnership), Hafsa Omar (Sow the City) and a member of the Lancashire Wildlife Trust.

On Saturday 29th, Damian O’Doherty will present a photo-essayon the rosehip plant, bioregional economies and food networks and Philip Franses will give a talk on holding and seeking water, comparing Manchester’s sphagnum moss and Rajasthan’s mustard seed.

This will be followed on Sunday with a day trip to Little Woolden Moss.Looking at specimens now thriving in the restored peatland, Philip will guide studies on Goethe’s metamorphosis of plants. Children are especially welcome on this last day, Goethe’s methods involve drawing and describing in an attempt to go beyond a merely rational understanding and are accessible to everyone.

Friday 28th November: 18:30 start

Saturday 29th November: 11:00 onwards

Sunday 30th November: 11:00 onwards

Patricipants are welcome to join for all or any day of the weekend. Please send your RSVP to ednaburns@anywhereoutofthe.world.

Suggested donation:

Weekend tickets: £15, solidarity rate £25. Day ticket: £10/£5

https://www.nickjordan.info/stemflow.html

How Green You Are – No Show

The first instalment in a new series of publications from Bound & Infinity is available in a limited hand bound print edition.

This issue contains two articles, The Experiment as Mediator Between Subject and Object by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; and The Primal Phenomenon of Colour, an abstract from The Wholeness of Nature by Henri Bortoft.

The aim of this publication is to introduce a form of inquiry explored in recent meetings on Goethean Science. Included is a prism which is needed to view the black and white colour experiments and a composition, How Green You Are by No Show.

Many definitive experiments have been done to understand colour, and each of these has in turn given rise to an image of light depicted as rays, refractions, and wavelengths.

Goethe offers a different approach, where the experiment is an entry into the form itself. Whilst many experiments are made to demonstrate a given hypothesis a priori, Goethe begins with a series of experiments to meet the unity that is generative of the difference exisiting in nature, not “divided, and in pieces, but “alive, striving out of the whole into the parts”.

“As none by traveling over known lands can find out the unknown”, says William Blake, “So from already acquired knowledge Man could not acquire more.”

Friedrich Schiller has described the characteristics of this process as “delicate empiricism”. With this in mind, I invite the reader to soften their gaze when viewing the colour experiments included. These experiments raise important questions concerning the dissolving nature of the boundary between light and dark, mind and matter, the invisible and visible.

I would like to thank Philip Franses for guiding these meetings on Goethean Science. Philip taught with Henri Bortoft at Schumacher College in Dartington and this publication would not have been possible without his help.

I would also like to thank Craig Holdrege for permission to use his translation of The Experiment as Mediator Between Subject and Object, Braxton Pearson for mixing and mastering, and Ecka Mordecai for performing the cello on How Green You Are. This song was recorded in Soar Chapel on the ancient isle of Anglesey. The lyrics are based on an anonymous medieval ballad and the music and arrangement are by No Show.

In The Advancement of Learning, Francis Bacon compared human knowledge to a tree, with extending branches of Poetry (Imaginatio), Philosophy (Ratio), and History (Memoria). As involution is to evolution, Goethe’s epistemology is the much needed counterpart to this expansive view of things.

The reader might consider the difference in these approaches when comparing the formation of the taxonomic tree with that described in the following exercise:

Imagine a tree or plant coming into being, visualising it’s various stages of growth and development, from seed to flower to fruit. If infront of you was placed the seed of this plant, you know from experience, that the invisible will become visible, if you could not think this already, the plant could not make it’s presence felt.

Louis Stevenson Miller

Is This a Dagger Which I See Before Me…

LAWS OF FORM 2025

In the spirit of dialectic, Professor Louis H. Kauffman will give a sequence of talks and lead a recital of Laws of Form, followed by presentations from Graham Ellsbury, Andrew Crompton, Philip Franses, Leon Conrad, Fred Cummins, Nicola Graves-Gregory and Peter Rowlands, that are interactive with the audience and open discussion.

Taking place at Bound & Infinity on the 7th and 8th August, 10:00 til 18:00.

We welcome contributions, send suggestions to ednaburns@anywhereoutofthe.world. Admission: £50. Tickets are available here. No one will be turned away for lack of funds, reduced ticket prices are available.

The Multitudinous Seas (Making the Green One Red) [excerpt] – No Show

DREAMS UNSEEN

An exhibition of Andrew Chalk’s prints and illustrations

Richard Youngs & Daniel O’Sullivan, recorded live at Bound & Infinity at an event to commemorate the exhibition

Over the past four decades Andrew Chalk has quietly produced an idiosyncratic world of music, printmaking and illustration which has rarely been seen, and only then via his domestically-run record label and publishing house: Faraway Press.

Active since 2004, Faraway Press was forced to close when the economic challenges of post-Brexit struck in 2020; a moment in which Andrew would come to question his livelihood, the geographically remote connection he kept with his contemporaries, and the channels through which his talents previously had flowed.

Andrew Chalk was born in York, England, in 1966, and initially trained in signwriting, cabinet making and textile surface pattern design. Teaching himself printmaking in the North of England, he forged a strong affinity with the British Arts and Crafts movement, industrialism, and European traditional printmaking

His formative years were spent in areas associated with these skillsets, and as the years passed by, he worked alone more and more, drifting into a rich solitude. This withdrawal from industrial modes of collective production allowed him to refine his craft, elevating it towards a unique aesthetic based entirely in the home. It was a wistful and decorative form that became the seed and inspiration for the future of Faraway Press.

Inseparably bound, Andrew’s craft is an emotional entwinement, beautifully packaged vinyls, tapes and CDs sold in limited runs via mail-order.

Since 1984 he has collaborated with a myriad of musicians, recording and performing with Mirror (Christoph Heeman, 1998 – 2005), Elodie (Timo van Luijk, 2010 – present), Circæa (Tom James Scott, Ecka Mordecai, 2015 – present) as well as a number of solo artists, a list much too long to include in this short biography.

During 2004 – 2016, Andrews’s primary audience resided in Japan, a connection that was made through his friendship with Daisuke Suzuki. The two shared interests and values, notably an appreciation for subtlety and the ways in which discreet objects can relate to everyday experiences.

In the afterglow of an era of home hi-fi listening, Daisuke and Andrew collaborated on Anglo-Japanese packaging, which would become the signature of his production during the Faraway Press years.

Working closely in this way from the home, a new world began to emerge. Composer Daniel O’Sullivan has described this music as deep wallpaper. In the space between viewer and viewed; between artwork and wallpaper, a relationship emerges in which peripheral stuff, stuff one might take for granted as merely decorative or in-the-background, takes on a new significance, enhancing the things framed, and things unframed, that give a domestic space meaning and a sense of belonging.

The decision to place this exhibition within an existing library-cum-bookshop was not accidental, and Bound & Infinity is perfect, given its focus on poetry, theosophy, and the hand-crafted arts; books that, since my first visit, shimmered gently within the imagination.

When I asked Andrew how he felt about exhibiting in the library he said, “It’s great, instead of shuffling around a white cube and looking at things and being aware you might be taking too much time, it’s relaxing to sit with tea and become a bit of the furniture.”

The works of Andrew Chalk give the impression of something emerging from a faraway and yet familiar place. R.D. Laing once wrote, “Am I amazed that something is appearing that did not exist before? That these lines did not exist on this paper until I put them there? Here we are approaching the experience of creation and of nothing.”

I feel that Laing’s statement encapsulates both the essence of Andrew’s work and the part we play encountering it. We are taken somewhere else; directly into his world and the place of our shared imagination: a place of making, sharing and getting lost in the beauty of creation.

Ecka Mordecai

From the Preface to the exhibition catalogue which is available to purchase here.