Residency reflections: Annie Lord

There is potency in handmade materials. As an artist, to know the source of your ink, charcoal, or paint, suffuses them with new meaning. I often work with plant materials; turning willow branches into charcoal or boiling up oak galls to make ink. But despite knowing that stone has a long tradition of being used as pigment, I’d never worked with it directly. Early in my residency in Berwick-upon-Tweed, after an evening spent drawing the Old Bridge, I wrote a note in my sketchbook which simply said “sandstone pigment?”

I wanted to take the colour of the bridge: the warm pinks, the soft browns and apply it straight to my page. I did not want to try and replicate the bridge’s colours from a set of mass-produced paints; I craved a literal translation.

Berwick Bridge is currently undergoing restoration. After 400 years of carrying people, animals, carts, barrows, and more recently, cars and motorbikes, it is inevitable that it requires attention. During the repair, scores of stones have been replaced. The new stones (so much as a stone can ever be called new) are obvious. Their bright, lichen-free surfaces set them apart, as well as their comparatively straight edges. But it will only be a few years (which is nothing, when considering the age of this bridge) before they begin to blend in.

One morning, I walk to Tweedmouth industrial estate to find the supplier of the stones used to repair the bridge. At Roluna Stone, Mike fishes around for some small chips for me to take away. They are remarkably friable, the corners crumbling to dust under the pressure of my thumb. Back in the studio, I start to break them down. The trick is to find a single weak point, then exert enough pressure so that the whole rock crumbles into sand. How easy it is, for this stone to revert to form.

To turn this dust into paint, I add a binder made from gum arabic, and locally produced honey, grinding them together using a glass muller (a kind of flat-bottomed pestle) on top of a tempered glass slab. It begins noisily. The sound of thousands of sand particles being ground ever finer reverberates through the studio. As I work, my arm moving in rhythmic circles, there comes a point when suddenly the paint seems to give. The crunch of the sand transforms into a softer, stickier sound. I exhale and unclench my jaw. Mike from Roluna Stone had told me that the hardest part of cutting stone is getting through the outer crust. Once past that, things get easier. So often, in actions of labour, there are these breakthrough moments. It is quite extraordinary, to take a such an enduring substance as stone, and through time and effort transform it into a fluid paint. I scoop it into empty limpet shells gathered from Berwick Beach. They make ideal containers and have been used by artists since prehistoric times.

At a sketching workshop by the bridge, we try out two different batches. One is glossy and smooth; the other far grittier. I’m pleased with the professionalism of the first batch, yet it turns out that the group is more interested in the rough version. They like its unpredictability, and the particles of sand it leaves on the page. It feels truer to the character of the bridge. Over the course of a single hour, the group of sketchers create a dozen interpretations of the bridge. Some focus on the texture of the stone, some capture the full span of the bridge, and others draw the reflections of the arches in the river, stone and water meeting full circle.

The labour of paint-making is not inconsiderable; it is noisy, time-consuming, and requires safety measures to ensure it doesn’t harm the maker. Yet it pales in comparison to the efforts required to build a bridge. Berwick Archives holds the original account books for Berwick Bridge. They begin in 1611 and continue over the several decades that it took to build the bridge. They contain weekly records of the names of the workers, their professions, how much they were paid. There are masons, smiths, lightermen and labourers. There are sections too for ‘boys’ and ‘woemen’. As the arched stone bridge took form, setting in place a route that would stand in place for hundreds of years, the list of names grew and grew. By inviting people to draw and paint the bridge with sandstone paint, I hope that we honour the collective effort that has gone into designing, constructing, and maintaining the bridge. An ongoing effort to allow a safe passage over the river.

The Berwick Bridge 400 celebrations took place over the first weekend in August. A procession made its way over the bridge and a blessing ceremony took place, with a wreath being thrown into the river below. On the Tweedmouth side of Berwick Bridge, I laid out my paints and paper, and invited people to come and sketch with me. Hundreds of people came along. We discussed the sandstone, and the process of turning it into paint, read out the names of the original workers of the bridge, and thought about what it must have been like to be part of that crew. I handed out paint, and watched people carefully observing the bridge, and making their own impressions of it on paper. I watched a child make the arches in three confident swoops of the paintbrush. A woman sat quietly on a bench for a long time, then came back to show me how she’d built up the paint to create different hues. Someone else made a small book, with each page reflecting the different textures and shapes of the bridge. Each one a portrait of Berwick Bridge, captured with the very stone it was built from.


In 2025, Connecting Threads plan to invite people to collaborate with Annie on a final project to mark the culmination of the residency. Sign up to our newsletter to stay informed.

www.annielord.co.uk
@annielord