bridget martin

And so the edge of summer has finally frayed and fragmented and given way to the brilliance of autumn, all bronze and copper and gold. Now is the beginning of the slow tilt towards the quiet and melancholy of winter. Mornings are darker and colder and there is woodsmoke in the air. Today has been rainy and grey until now, late afternoon, when the sun made a dramatic and dazzling appearance. It was like the curtains being pulled back at the beginning of a colourful theatre performance.

A spring tide has caused the tide line to be particularly high today with the waves pushing the shells high up the beach in a long ridge, underneath which sing the stones as the waves suck themselves back out to sea. As the waves approach the shore I watch their edges as they crest, and just for a moment time stands still, before they topple and fall and are washed onto the beach in a froth of white lace.

This is the space between land and sea, the littoral, a shifting and ever changing space. It is a place to wander and wonder, to search for treasures, to dream, to be. To look out at that most unreachable of edges, the unfathomable horizon. I love the possibility of edges – be it a shoreline, verge, hedgerow or margin. A second hand book with notes scribbled in the margins is always more interesting than the brand new equivalent. Things can be observed from the edges in a way they can’t from the centre. Think of the secrets the wallflower could tell.

Edges are contrary and unpredictable, offering the possibility of something else, somewhere else. They exist outside of the acceptable, conventional, established mainstream where everything is the same, all straight lines and easy to understand. Edges offer uncertainty, risk, adventure, enchantment. They sing with the possibility of hope.

When I make my pieces of art I want them to be imbued with life. I want them to be messy and imperfect, full of edges and emotion. As a result, what I make is unpolished and unsophisticated but I know there is no emotion in something that is perfect. Perfection is machine like and so it is better I think to leave the smudges and tears and ragged edges as these ‘mistakes’ reveal the vulnerability of what it is to be human.

And it is the edges – torn from book pages and maps, fabric scraps and old paper bags, music scores and worn collage papers – that hold the emotion, as if the edges contain all of the ‘unknowing’ and by bringing them together somehow offers the possibility of ‘knowing’, and maybe the beginning of a story.

Edges don’t do well behind glass, they are stifled and stilled. I want to make art that can be propped on shelves, moved aside for other things, brought out again, like a book. I want it to be picked up and looked at, stained with coffee, splashed with wine, collect fingerprints and continue its story. I want it to be messy and truthful, offering glimpses of the thrilling real behind the dull apparent. The edges are where the life is, with the wind and the long grass, the sea spray and the pull of the horizon, wild and gloriously free.