Red Route

For the last few years I have seen that there has been a Red Route 28 mile walk event each May, with artistic interventions between Cardiff and Merthyr Tydfil, led by Becca Thomas.  I have wanted to take part, but could never make it, until this year.

I simply wanted to do it.  The conversations along the way and the challenge of the distance appeals to me.  In advance of the walk, I cut the largest piece of canvas I could lay on the floor of my studio, titled it ‘Red Route on Saturday’ and primed it, not having any pre-conceived ideas about what I might paint.  Just before this I had tested out a painting exercise to test out an off-primary colour palette where masking tape was used, painted over, and then disposed of.  When I reached the disposal stage, instead of scrunching the tape up and putting it in the bin, I stuck it on the wall. From there it was a short step to laying these painted strips of masking tape onto the waiting canvas.  The ‘landscape’ of the canvas was at that time plain buttercup yellow and the masking tape had the most energy, I was immediately thinking of the tape as a journey, as a route across the land.

Since making this original piece on canvas I have worked on an A2 sheet of card and layered the path with tape, until the card is no longer visible.  Having recently come across the work of Catrin Huber in Newcastle at the Hatten gallery, in particular her works on the wall at the British School in Rome and in Herculaneum, near Pompeii, influenced by the colours of Pompeii, particularly pompeii red.  I have since discovered that the red can be created from either cinnabar powder but also when yellow ochre is subject to intense heat and gases, such as those experienced when mount vesuvius erupted in 79AD*. *According to the The National Research Council of Italy (CNR)

Would this work at a larger scale?  I have just today created a more expansive piece on a wall to test it out and there is far more space to travel across.

With the extra space around the tape I am thinking of how I often imagine a journey before setting off, of the sights, sounds and experiences I’m looking forward to, but that the most significant things that are happening are one's own interpretation/filter of events and of what is around you.  I have not quite got to the nub of what I mean here, there is something about how your inner world colours your journey and how the environment through which you travel influences you in turn.  BUT that there are many different ways of journeying.  There’s taking a holiday / journey and then there’s immersion, or a purposeful trip, plus lots of things outside and in between those. 

In considering my Artists books in libraries and Red Route projects, they are two sides of the same coin as 49:51 is my noticing something in the public realm that I’d actively like to change (inner changing the outer)  and Red Route is an experience that I am representing/exploring in paint to explore my inner journey (outer changing the inner).