Description:Q6384
Water on the Border, Helen Douglas & Telfer Stokes. Weproductions 1994. Ed 600.
Water on the Border grew partly out of our experience of working with children. It was also initiated by the sparse Border’s landscape in which we lived: sometimes in winter in snow it can look like a Chinese Painting; solitary pines, marks against white. So the idea came to establish connections between Scotland and China: by combining drawings of trees plants and insects made by primary school children with photographic images of water taken from the Yarrow Water, Scotland and West Lake, Hangzhou. HD & TS With the help of the Chinese translator Brian Holton, a friend of ours, Telfer wrote to Xiao Feng the principal of Zhejiang Academy of Fine Art (now the China Academy of Art), and eventually corresponding via a fax machine at our local printers we secured an invitation to go to Hangzhou. Many organisations helped us with this project most notably The Great Britain - China Centre. They put us in touch with the head of education of Zhejiang Province and this opened the door for us to work with children of Yin Ma Jim primary school. All the ink drawings in the book were done by pupils of the school in Hangzhou and two primary schools in Yarrow and Selkirk, Scotland. Similar to Yarrow Cooks we took classes and the children made ink and charcoal drawings often working outside by the waters edge. The photographs of water were by myself (Helen Douglas), a recurring theme in my work. The translation of Chinese poems into Lalands Scots incorporated within the book were by Brian Holton. The experience of looking East, and being in Hangzhou, was formative for this book. Learning Tai Chi embodied chi. Cycling across the Su Causeway on West Lake was filmic in experience: it unrolled as we cycled, vertical trees metered and framed the scene. And Chinese scroll painting together with Chinese books deepened my understanding of the visual reading of narrative across the page. All were to influence the way the book was laid out in rhythm across the page, breaking up the double spread of left and right.
Dr Helen Douglas Text for retrospective exhibition: Weproductions at Printed Matter Inc, NY 2018.