• STRAND

• (2016)

Walking • Edgelands • Ritual • Observance

Created by Mark Offord for SPILL Festival and produced by Pacitti Company, Strand was the project through which Mark (O) and Robert (Merry Grey) first collaborated, subsequently going on to form the Rough Band.

Strand was a silent early morning walk made and led by Mark, out of the enclosure of Ipswich town, around the boundaries of the river Orwell, from urban landscapes into the rural hinterlands and back. Tracing the edges of the shoreline bounds, under the bridged borderline, and the pattern under the plough.

A ritual ramble of observation, change and memory making, Strand invited looking and listening, wandering and wondering. Day broke, waders woke, a tide turned. Folk walked and watched, trod carefully and quietly. Strand was simple but intentional, allowing space to breathe and belong.

Speaking to Ana de Matos for SPILL TV, Mark said of the project:

“I love walking and I find that when I'm walking, it's like a very distilled form of observation - the environment in general, noise, wildlife, the birds - I find it a really pleasant distraction away from internal noise. It’s a form of ritual observation.

Symbolically, Strand is very significant to me personally. I live a few miles out of town. I pass this route every day on the way to work, but as part of this piece I’m developing a love of this circuit, that takes me from home to town, and town to home. So it's a circular walk, but it's quite aggressively bisected by the Orwell Bridge, like a punctuation mark in the middle of the walk. It promotes this sense of liminal space between town and village, life and death.

When you think of the name Strand and what that is - the strand is the stretch of river along the shoreline of the Orwell, the space between the earth and the estuary. It’s a dead space. You’ll notice, there’s a road that goes along and separates the two quite graphically and it creates an incredibly still space where the wildlife stops one side of it and there’s a no go zone, a liminal zone, like a threshold in the middle. It’s loaded with the symbology around death and the afterlife, the over world to the under world.”