"Suky Best's project for Cleeve Abbey is a breathtaking example of how creativity can re-energise an historic building and bridge the gap between past and present."

Walking Meditations is the product of a YOTA residency at Cleeve Abbey, a fifteenth century monastery in rural Somerset. Suky has mapped the seasons over the course of the year, creating images that reflect on the relationship of the Abbey community and nature, contemplating the passing of time.

The finished work consists of a tapestry of images suspended in the Abbey refectory,on the wall on which there once was once religious artwork. The images bring back to the Abbey the vitality of creative work that once existed there. The 55 prints are made up of composites taken from digital video.

[ photograph © 2000 David Moore ]

The project is a joint commission by DA2, English Heritage and the South West Arts Year of the Artist programme. Suky Best's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She trained at the Royal College of Art and is currently Fellow in Printmaking at the University of Wolverhampton, UK.

Suky Best:

"I wanted to make work about the immediate landscape and bring it back inside the monastery. The work is about detail - the longer I spent within the abbey, sitting still, imagining a life of contemplation, the more the details sung out.

This was a place of spiritual contemplation and the building reflects that. In the refectory, the whole room is decorated with flowers and angels. If you look at medieval images of paradise, it's a walled garden in spring, flowers everywhere; outside the walls lay wilderness - a place to be feared, inhabited by beasts.

Living in the abbey, you would have seen the changes that were happening around you only in the immediate environment, within the abbey confines, and a bit of the view beyond. If you look at the decoration about the place, it is all based on flowers, not the landscape. It's all on a much smaller scale.

My work is a contemplation on that scale, the detail of how a moss or lichen changes over the seasons."

[ photograph © 2000 David Moore ]

Presented with support from English Heritage and South West Arts YOTA award.