3rd and 5th October – Here comes the sun

She’s a model and she’s looking good..I always knew I would have a modelling career I just never thought it would be as a sheep!

Tuesday and today this week Rhys Thwaites – Jones – Fforest Films – did some shoots for the documentary film that he is making for and about the project.

We started up at the top in the heather moorlands, from the Pen y Garn trig point and along the ridge, parking at the wind turbines.

The weather was mostly overcast but the visibility was surprisingly good, it was chilly and wet and so it was quite tough, psychologically and physically,  for me to re-enact and repeat crawls for the camera, but thoroughly rewarding and enjoyable too.

Again I engaged with the landscape in a much more intimate way than I usually do when on two feet and upright, it is so silent and sheltered down there in the grass, heather, peat, moss and mud. I encountered lots of furry caterpillars and observed that the heather has almost completely lost its purple hue, just a few clumps left, it felt like a different season for sure, an amazing transformation in just 2 or 3 weeks.

I just love crawling, its feeling very natural to me now, I am very comfortable on my hands and knees, my body moves easily, I can honestly say I prefer to experience the landscape in this way now.

A striking observation was that because the Go Pro cameras were not turned on I was no longer displacing my consciousness to and around the cameras as I do when they are recording, transferring my consciousness to the cameras on my limbs gives my body an enormous sense of purpose, when I am imagining what they are seeing, what my wrist is seeing for example, almost seeing through the camera on my wrist, the landscape looks and feels very different and my bodies place in it is very different, urgent and present, fragmented and transparent, purposeful. The embodied experience is meditative. Crawling for the camera, re- enacting the process beyond the truthful process felt slightly fraudulent and much less engaged. But interestingly I found myself transferring my consciousness to the audio, the mic on my chest and over to Rhys’s headphones many meters away.

Today we spent a few hours down by the river and the ruin, we spent a lot of time waiting for gaps in the clouds, looking out for patches of blue sky, repeating crawls many times to try and catch the sun. When the sun shone everything glistened and twinkled, the sun is utterly magical – moss, leaves. water, twigs, rocks – everything seems to dance in the wake of the sun, its delicious and luxurious and the country side suddenly becomes so soft, friendly and stupidly beautiful.

Photos by Rhys Thwaites – Jones