• CURRENT

• (2020)

Rough Band • Death Walk • River • Flow

• ‘Much is there waits you we have missed;

• Much lore we leave you worth the knowing;

• Much, much has lain outside our ken.

• Nay, rush not; time serves; we are going.’

- Thomas Hardy

• Current was a gentle early evening cruise along the River Orwell in Suffolk, on a specially charted boat, The Lady Orwell. The work was a symbolic and physical act of movement, from land to water, from near to far, from purpose to drift. A group of participants spending the evening with the Rough Band, bound together in consensual silence. Floating out and then in again, like the tide. A setting sun and a return.

Subtitled Cruising With The Rough Band, the Beltane project Current was a fully realised but never actioned Death Walk. Planned for June 2020, it was regrettably jettisoned because of UK Covid restrictions.

One of the threads that informed Rough Band Death Walks from the get-go was the imagined projection of the psychogeographic human map onto the landscape. It was a strong current underlying Mourning Sickness, informed O’s proto Death Walk Strand, and the route of the walk undertaken in Ramble with Phil Smith. 

• Although Current was not a Death Walk in the conventional sense it certainly still adhered to some of the same ingredients, and as such it touched on the work started with Strand - that of the River Orwell as a human spine, and the tide as cerebral spinal fluid and carrier of messages from the brain. The Orwell Bridge which spans the river acted as a spinal break in Strand, and the edges of the river as a liminal space. 

  Red Rope had a place within Current, acting as tether from boat to land. Fluids also had a part to play too. There’s a primitive form of scrying using sea water, called Hydromancy - one of the five forbidden medieval magics. O and Merry intended for jars to be lowered from the boat on red rope to collect water. Participants would stare into the reflective scrying water to search for portents ahead, looking forward rather than back. Future rather than past, new beginnings, out and in, like the tide. Life after Death.