A handful of stones
I went to Gunnersbury Park with a journal, a handful of stones and no plan.
I arranged them in a circle on a blank page, along with a leaf that had fallen nearby, and left them there. Forty minutes, undisturbed. The only instruction I gave myself was not to touch anything until the time was up.
What the wind did
The wind did the rest. Small shifts at first, barely noticeable, a stone rolling an inch here and there, the leaf flipping over twice before settling somewhere completely different. I traced each new position in pencil as it moved, so by the end the page wasn't really a record of what I'd arranged, it was more a record of what the afternoon had done to it instead.
I don't think I'd quite clocked how much of my normal work is just deciding things, where something sits, what it's meant to mean, whether it's done. This had none of that, no brief, no art direction, nothing to arrive at. Just a page, some stones and whatever the wind felt like doing.
A page that isn't really mine
The marks that are left aren't really mine if I'm honest, they're wind, an hour of April afternoon light. The page just happened to be there to catch whatever happened.
I used Blue Hour for this, ivory paper, blank. Felt like the right kind of page for something with no fixed shape and graphite throughout because pencil's forgiving in a way that suits following rather than deciding.
I think I'll keep doing it, different parks, different weather, different things left up to chance.
