The Roots Are in Your Bones

The journey is a long one, up a steep winding road overlooking the river dart, shrouded in the cool shadows of familiar dancing trees. I feel safe here. It’s only then I realised that I had not felt safe in a long time, I had not felt all together myself. That’s why I came here. Not here, here, but back home to Devon. To recuperate, to recover, to reconstitute myself ready for my life after this week. To rediscover who I am after losing so much of myself along the way.

I’m here on the last day of my stay. I’ve been meaning to come for the last two weeks but the energy needed was staggering. That’s the trouble with the collection of mental illnesses that conspired the need for my stay in the rolling Devon countryside. They drain the energy out of you. But as I stand here looking at those glorious walls that hold border to this great place, I find myself overcome with energy. It’s the same energy that runs through this place, the same energy that infected me whilst I spent twelve-hour days under great tutelage from inspiring friends.

I feel like I am home. 

I’ve not thought about the Dartington Estate for quite some time. I remember it often enough, but only on the surface of my cognition, not the way I feel it now. The last time I really thought about it was a year after I left. I was doing a project from my university where I had to ‘Go into the city and take a picture of a building that fills you with inconsolable sadness’. I found that task infinitely difficult as nothing at all seemed to even evoke any kind of reaction let alone inconsolable sadness.

Founding florist, Grace Bouchard had recently been to visit our old stomping ground. It was empty, disused, ours would be the last year to pass through its walls. Walls reclaimed in the void left by the Dartington College of Art as it moved to Falmouth. I used those pictures for the project. I had not stuck to the brief but I found the stories of this place more important than a grade. A lesson that served me well in my degree and beyond. I had not been back since it’s last day. I thought the memories would not persist through the emptiness of those studios.

I have lost a lot of myself since I left this place. Tragedy has followed me, I went there in the hopes of finding some part of me I had left buried in its soil or locked in a studio falling in love with Beckett and Ionesco.

     I began to walk up the road.

I was born here in a way, before Dartington I was made of putty, each punch, each tragedy struck me deeply, but I bounced back, remoulded myself in the shape of those inspiring tutors of my school’s drama department, but in coming here the putty hardened, the punches didn’t strike as deep, and I bent with the winds allowing the gusts to change my shape. I grew bark, and for the first time, I had a place where I could set roots, a place I could make into a home at least in the absence of any place that had yet to make me feel at home.

You’ll notice the plant life metaphors. They are deliberate. It is here the florists were born, long before we were florists. I was not alone here. All our founding members grew up here. In different ways, but each of us was markedly affected by this place. Everyone who went there seems to be. When I meet them now, at conferences, at shows, when we get talking about ourselves as soon as Dartington is mentioned, the knowing wry smile appears. Those true dartonians, those of the college of art don’t seem to mind us, clutching onto the coattails, swimming through the history of those that came before us. There is something in the water there, something in the earth. It infects the soul with art.

On the last weeks of the institution, the one that followed the college of art. Our course leader told us that it was not the place but the people that made up DAPA. I’ve held onto that for a very long time, watching as my friends grew up to become artists in their own right. But as I return here, reaching the peak of the climb and looking at the old estate, the bench where I was told my grandfather had passed. The wall I ran my hands along as I jogged on my lunch break. I realise that this place matters. To me. It’s in my blood, and in being here I feel more powerful then I have in so long. What’s happened to me since I left here has not ceased to affect me, but a future I felt I no longer had has arisen to me. 

I head towards our old studios, but I cannot bare see them just yet. I take a detour. Past the swimming pool where Leida swam before I even knew of this place, the bushes where we made love on our lunch breaks, the natural amphitheatre where I first discovered the geeks, the old smoking spot long since empty of tired students and fag ends.

I walk, slowly to the place of my birth. I look at it longingly. The old signage gone, unfamiliar posters on its glass edifice. I walk to those windows hoping to peek inside and as I do, the old whir of the mechanical doors welcomes me, she opened her arms to embrace me and I was swallowed into her joy. I never expected it to be open. No one was inside. This was my time, my own private memorial. 

She smells the same, less coffee but the undercurrent of the building remains. The kitchenette has long been cleared of any recognisable mugs. The studios cleaner than they ever were when we were here. I cry. Of course, I do. I was so happy here and since leaving life has not been all that happy, but these tears are not of sadness. They are a realisation. The overwhelming pressures I have been under seem somehow possible when only moments before they had seemed impossible.

I take my leave, I kiss her walls, salute the displays of student work no one has bothered to remove. I take the long root back, through the fields, past the river. I walk to the spot where we went camping. The spot in the river where we would swim. The wall against which I gave a beautiful boy a blowjob, the tree under which I fell in love for the first time listening to Marlene Dietrich on a portable vinyl player.

I touch the tree’s, dig my hands into the earth, feel the roots of the trees where they spring up from the ground. These same roots are in me. They replaced my bones in the years that I was here; the bark of these trees replaced my skin. No matter how far I have gone, they have been there. Stretched, thin, but always there, reminding me that regardless of all the homes I have lost, I will always be welcome here. The roots of Dartington are my bones. They made me who I am.

They made us who we are and who we are going to be in the future.

The Midnight Florist Collective are fast approaching our first-year anniversary, but we have worked together long before that name. We found each other here. We went off on our own private journeys but the pull of this place brought us together again. We make work now in the same spirit as we did back then, under the sun and in the streams. We are stronger together because the roots of Dartington bind us, its soil holds us, its sun feeds us.

As I left, passing those great walls that hold border to this great place, the wind picked up, it sounded its call through leaves and branches. Just as the doors of DAPA had welcomed me home, the winds of these hills ushered my departure. But she is still here in my bones and my blood. In my spirit and my work.

As we approach the end of our first year, reflecting on its victors and failures and the lessons learned from both. As we plan for the projects that will continue our development as a collaborative organisation. As I travel home on the train writing this, feeling hopeful for the future for the first time in a while. We remember those roots, and how they guide this garden’s growth. Here is to the seeds yet sown.

Andrew Martin Lee
Mid-September 2018