Tim Cumming

Office Building At Night

A line from one of Raymond Chandler’s thrillers inspired the start of this poem, Shelley’s Ozymandias inspired the end, and time gave me the middle, worked on through the winter and spring of 2014, taking for its model Richard Seifert’s 1972 Brutalist Kings Reach Tower by Blackfriars Bridge, where I worked for a number of years at a west-facing window on the ninth floor in the Programmes Department. The soundtrack includes field recordings from Novi Sad, Posnan, Rue Git de Coeur in Paris, and Soho, and the fire was lit in a pot belly stove sometime in 2007.

Tim Cumming / The Rowley Gallery

PS: Tim is performing in Bournemouth on Friday 27th June at the Vita Nova theatre for the launch of Issue 2 of Boscombe Revolution. Tim’s film will be shown alongside live readings.

The Uncanny

This is a true story and it happened on Rosslyn Hill in Belsize Park, one evening a few years ago, though the pictures you see are not from there, no. These haunted trees are from the rookeries of the notebook, this winter’s trees signalling to each other through the pages. Continue reading “The Uncanny”

Gnawa Studies

The 16th Gnawa Festival in Essaouira on Morocco’s Atlantic coast is a largely free four-day celebration of the music of the Gnawa, what is perhaps the oldest trance music in the world, the root note of inner transportation and sufi trance that attracts hundreds of thousands of Moroccans and intrepid international visitors to Essaouira each June, over the weekend of the full moon. Continue reading “Gnawa Studies”

The Vision Thing

What first strikes you about these Ice Age objects, suspended on transparent plastic stands in glass cases amidst crowds of 21st-century humans, is that they are absolutely tiny. The largest works are approximately the span of a man’s hand, the smallest the size of a child’s fingernail. For a big show it’s an intimate experience. There’s a lot of squeezing about, bending down and peering in, the peculiar sensation of having to adjust your perception to match their scale, as if squeezing yourself down through the same narrow aperture that leads to the wonders of Chauvet and Lascaux. What you’re experiencing is time travel. You adjust yourself to the conditions, and when you become accustomed to what you see, it’s as if you’re looking back to your own time through the wrong end of a telescope, the one that makes everything far away but pin-sharp. Continue reading “The Vision Thing”

From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood

Here is an extract from a prose work in progress about family life in summer on Powdermills Farm in the 1960s and 1970s. My father, then head of art at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art, had hired a cottage there, in the middle of the moor, from the Duchy for £70 a year. No electricity, no running water, a ghost in the second bedroom, and sheep in the paddock at shearing season. It was a wild experience. Wistman’s Wood, primordial remains of the original Dartmoor landscape before its Bronze Age settlement, is a few miles walk from Powdermills, and remains one of the most atmospheric and haunting spots on the whole moor. The paintings were made on a return visit in 2009, and there are two of my father’s sketchbook drawings from the late 1960s. The poem comes from First Music, a sequence about Dartmoor, childhood and memory, in the 2011 collection The Rapture (Salt Books). Continue reading “From Powdermills To Wistman’s Wood”

From Eggardon Hill & Pilsdon Pen

The four landscape paintings on exhibition at The Rowley Gallery were committed to 200gsm acid-free paper using artist’s watercolours and gouache from the peaks of Eggardon Hill and Pilsdon Pen in north west Dorset. Pilsdon is Dorset’s highest hill, and closely associated with the legend of the screaming skull at Bettiscombe Manor, down there in the Marshwood Vale. For many years the skull in question was believed to be that of an African servant girl of the 18th century. Under recent analysis it was proved to be the skull of a young girl of the late Neolithic, circa 4,000 BC. This is close to the vintage of the ancient shaped hills and sacred landscapes of Dorset – stone circles, burrows, tumps, burial sites, excarnation sites, and later fashioned as fortresses raised against the worsening weather and tribal pomp of the Iron Age. All are studded with human, animal and ritual remains in their steep, deeply dug chalk banks. Continue reading “From Eggardon Hill & Pilsdon Pen”