Remnants: the grace of things (2024-2026)
“Materials are not objects but histories.” (Tim Ingold, 2011)
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Daily, I walk a pathway.
Though I follow the same route through the landscape, it is always different, always changing. Each day I walk I am different, layered with new feelings, new memories, new relations. The landscape holds and responds, it speaks, and dances as I weave. We are in relation. Each step I take a falling and catching, an inhale and exhale, a collaboration with nature, with the weather. Walking this pathway is my practice, walking the changes is the holding, the holding of chaos, the holding of trauma, of the violence. Walking this pathway is my tenderness to myself and to all those I hold within me. I encounter many species along the way: birds, insects, dogs, cats, deer, fox, rabbits... trees, plants, flowers, machinery, fellow walkers, the list is endless. The wind carries my scent to them, and it carries their smells, their sounds to me. Each day these encounters affect me, meet me, become embedded within me, become me. I am both informed by and informing. Steps that mark out a trail in the grass, footprints in the mud, weaving new paths when others have become too wet. And when and where I stop, the ground takes my weight - absorbs it, remembers. All of these tiny markers change the landscape. Pausing, standing and listening, minutes turn into a timeless adventure. The inside and outside merge and I lose all sense of before or after. I wear a green raincoat, and it is as if I become another variation of green in the landscape. Yesterday, I hid in the undergrowth and watched a bright yellow crane load two red tractors with manure; huge machines criss-crossing the fields spraying cow dung far and wide were like angry monsters furiously spewing across the landscape. Balancing curiosity and repulsion and fascinated by the noise, I watched the repetitive movement of crane and tractors dissecting the landscape, while being appalled by the stench. Tim Ingold describes things as gatherings of materials in movement, (2011). I am caught up in the sounds of the machines, the task unfolding, the cycle of sowing and reaping. The cows are grass fed, moved from field to field, grass digested and shit out onto the land that absorbs its nutrients. I wonder what they are about to plant. I have seen fields full of rapeseed, sunflowers, wheat. Nothing is ever finished; everything is always becoming and the landscape I walk through a continuous weaving, and I am one of its many threads. And then there are the interventions, the found objects, the remnants or fragments, of things left behind. Remnant: a part or quantity that is left after the greater part has been used, removed, or destroyed. I see these objects as opportunities to engage differently with the landscape. They speak to me as I pass by. “A pebble is a small |
world,” writes Francis Ponge (1942), and I bend down to pick something up from the undergrowth. There is another kind of interaction that is required here. Only occasionally do I intervene, when the ‘thing’ asks me to. What lies at my feet opens, and I am, for a moment, held by something very small and very old. Something powerful. Jane Bennett’s concept of 'thing-power' from her book Vibrant Matter (2010), is the capacity of matter to act, to affect, to surprise — the vitality that persists in objects, including dead and discarded ones.
Last month, I stumbled across the skull of a Muntjac layered with tiny pieces of rotting flesh, dirt and leaves. Seeing it as a gift, I picked it up and took it home. Carefully I cleaned and bleached the skull and it now sits on my window ledge alongside other bones, shells and pieces of wood. Not long after I crossed the pathway of a dead rabbit, so recently dead that its fur was still warm. I murmured silent prayers in thanks to its short life before gently picking it up and moving it deep into the undergrowth, to the edge of the stream. Here I covered it in branches in a form of burial. Walking this pathway has alerted me, my body to things out of sync, out of order in other areas of my life and environment. Things perhaps others might miss. Just a couple of weeks ago, I opened the back door to the garden and a bumble bee lay on the step. I brought the bee into the kitchen nestled in my hand, feeling their tiny metathoracic legs tickling my palm. I gently laid them down on the edge of a jar lid with sugar water. Refreshed (I think), they eventually flew away dipping and diving in the sunshine, their bright yellow and black body buzzing through a cloud of pollen. A couple of days after I came across a huge spider laid out in the bath, legs splayed. I built a little home for them in the dark corner of the window ledge and asked how long they might stay. That night I looked forward to seeing them the next morning, but by then they had moved on. I wondered where they had gone to, and how far along they were in their life span. I wondered if they were watching me from a dark corner, considering my movements from the shadows. More recently, we (my sister and I) came across a small toad in a field. Sitting perfectly still they allowed me to pick them up and carry them about 1/2km to the nearest stream. I had never held a toad in my hand! Their cold body resting in the warmth of my palm, feet barely moving, as the faint clicking sound from their little black tongue pierced the air - did you know a toad’s tongue is black? They pushed their nose and bulging eyes through my fingertips to watch our journey. And when I carefully set them down on the edge of the stream my whole body softened as I watched them smoothly enter the water and disappear. It had been a long day of clients and meetings, but none felt as rewarding as the soft sigh of that toad body as they slipped into the stream. These moments capture the grace of things. Anna Walker, April 2026 |
