ORCOMBE.COM : A SMALL TREE

Working with friends and collaborators, I've just started a site for prints called Orcombe.com. The first publication is a print made in collaboration with my friend the photographer John S. Webb, who lives and works in Sweden. The print is a combination of four modes shown together: poem, image, commentary and memorial, and it makes connections between the works of the artist Ian Hamilton Finlay, the economist Ernst Schumacher, and the peace campaigner Brian Haw, who lived on Parliament Square, London, for almost ten years to protest against UK and USA foreign policy. I have taken up the form of the one-word poem, invented by Finlay, and echoed several of his works in this new composition that incorporates commentary, rather like Finlay's Heroic Emblems (Calais, VT: Z Press, 1977) that incorporated commentaries by Professor Stephen Bann.
     The print is called A Small Tree. I had in mind Finlay's Small Is Quite Beautiful (stone, with Richard Grasby, 1976, collection Scottish Arts Council) because it picks up on Schumacher's most influential work and plays with that nice distinction between American and Scottish usage of the word 'quite'. My poem is in fact thirteen words including three colours and the important diminutive; the colours are conveyed only in language. It took many months before John Webb was able to get the right kind of flowering Hawthorn image, quite an unusual shot, on the coast at Ribbersborg, Malmo, near where he lives.
     The print is available only through the site Orcombe.com.