Tomorrow it will be one year since my first Visual Aroma post, about orange blossom and Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs. Right now, I am in St Ives, Cornwall, with slow wifi and patchy reception, taking a few days of solo holiday before attending a conference at the University of Falmouth. I decided to spend a couple of days in St Ives, to see the small Tate and the Barbara Hepworth studio, and to bathe in the sea. Cornwall has strong associations with art and literature, and with the gothic. It was home to Daphne DuMaurier, and has produced filmmakers like Mark Jenkin, whose strange and gothic films Bait (2019) and Enys Men (2022) set up eerie atmospheres that depend on the landscape.
I have been staying in a little bedsit, and walking to the beach and the galleries. On the corner before the road leading down to Porthmeor Beach, there is indeed a housefront clairvoyant, so I have been making a left at the clairvoyant for the last couple of days. This leads me past an overgrown churchyard, filled with commonwealth war graves, and a church that backs on to a funeral parlour. It is extremely Ethel Cain.
But the beach by contrast is Baywatch and Point Break (Kathryn Bigelow, 1991), with surfers of all ages and genders, seal-like in their black wetsuits, glistening with salt and breaking my heart with their lithe beauty. I saw a lifeguard who looked like a young Brad Pitt, his perfectly tanned feet resting on the wooden ledge of the lookout above the surf school. All this, and a Tate Modern, and around the corner the most charming little wine bar, St. Eia, where I went as often as possible. In the evening, the beach was quite empty, and I walked in the surf, and let the ocean caress me.
Before I left today, I got in the Atlantic again. The unparalleled sensory pleasure of letting the waves hit my naked torso, tasting the salt of the ocean on my face, and then returning to the shore and pulling on a very soft hoodie, sitting in the sand.
At Barbara Hepworth’s studio I was overcome at the sculptures in the garden, how right they were in that place, surrounded by calla lilies and lemon balm. Four Square (Walk Through) (1966), the only piece which you could actually touch and interact with, felt like some kind of portal. Cornwall does feel like a thin place, a threshold place, where you could disappear into the ocean or the huge rhododendrons that grow everywhere, and emerge somewhere or somewhen else. I’ve now arrived in Penryn, for the Sex, Scandal, and Sensation conference, where I’ll be giving a paper on Saltburn (2023) as trash cinema. The campus here is overflowing with vegetation, and it is somehow giving both ‘last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again’ and the wooded parkland of Lucile Hadzlilhovic’s Innocence (2004). Facing me, is an enormous rosemary bush, and I got up to pull off a few leaves, its distinctive aroma lingering on my palms.
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Nice! Will be around St Ives tomorrow, so I’ll wave if I see you ☺️
Oh nice, I’m based just in Penzance! Hope you’re enjoying the sun and sand etc. 😎