And Then My Heart With Pleasure Fills – Mountain Path

I was invited to create new work for a group exhibition Walking Poets curated by Dr Mike Collier and Jeff Cowton, Curator at The Wordsworth Trust. Artists were asked to respond to the work of William Wordsworth and Matso Basho. The two poets both created literary works inspired by the landscapes they lived in – Wordsworth’s Cumbria, England and Basho’s Kyoto, Japan. 

During my research, I became particularly interested in what both poets may have worn as they walked the landscapes. Wordsworth was known to be ‘quaintly dressed in a brown fustian jacket’ (Hazlitt), whilst Bashō wore hand-made coats, hats and shoes, declaring himself ‘the old man who makes his own raincloak’. 

As the exhibition was shown in Kyoto, Japan, I chose to make a deconstructed kimono as I was interested in how often dress making patterns can resemble cross sections of a landscape. I created four separate landscape panels; each one loosely representing an imagined journey the poets may have made. In the folds and creases of each deconstructed ‘landscaped’ section is revealed traces of the poets’ thoughts and ideas, as seen in their poetry. Single words stitched into the fabric of the material (in English for Wordsworth and Japanese Kanji for Bashō) express a thought, a gesture or a feeling each may have experienced whilst engrossed in the act of walking through, and sensing, their own landscape. 

Wordsworth and Bashō never met – they lived a century and a culture apart – but this piece (And Then My Heart With Pleasure Fills – Mountain Path – a combination of words from Wordsworth & Bashō) brings them together by using humble personal artefacts such as the clothing they may have worn as they undertook their separate walking journeys in different landscapes.