At Shatwell Farm, the adventure began with a meticulous task: measuring, surveying, surveying… Under changing skies, with gale-force winds, sudden downpours and the occasional ray of sunshine, we stood outside with my comrade Michael and our sketchbooks, loose leaf and mechanical pencils in hand, ready to capture the site.

It was in the midst of all this excitement that our eyes fell on the gutters. Initially born of a simple personal fascination, the gutters, which at first appeared as a secondary detail of the site, gradually revealed themselves, as we observed them more closely, as being essential to understanding and deciphering the site. Each had its own way of guiding water to the ground, its own character, as if they reflected the personality of the building to which they were attached. They thus became a symbol, marking the architecture of the site, and their diversity revealed an image of the site that we hadn’t immediately perceived.

Once we’d finished surveying a building, we’d set up nearby to transcribe our observations onto our large A0 sheets. Each pencil stroke became a battle against nature, the cold adding to the challenge, while gusts of wind bent our sheets and our lines were lost in the moment. As we made our way around the site and set up our drawing tables again, the wind picked up its game, bending our sheets and disrupting our work. Despite this constant struggle, each line we added gradually enriched our representation of the site. Little by little, our A0 sheets were transformed into a reflection of the place, we were deciphering the site, capturing its unique identity, gutter by gutter, line by line.

-Léa Guillotin

The thin shadow cast by the bevelled edge of the clear plastic ruler makes it difficult to locate the exact point where my line must begin. Just as I peer over the sheet, a corner, gently lifted by a sudden gust, folds the sheet in two. I spring up, moving quickly round the table to reposition our improvised paperweights to flatten our sheet once again. As my partner Lea scrambles to catch a sheet of sketch measurements that is playfully drifting across the gravelled yard, I try vainly to recall where my line was meant to go. Sighing, my gaze glides glibly back to the paper. But it’s no use. I can’t remember. I look up, smiling and squinting from our table set up in the yard, draped in drawings, toward the rest of the farm. Up from the weeds and nettles braided around Siza’s mustard columns and out across the full and gentle curves of fields fringed with hawthorn and hornbeam hedgerows. Courage.

Our drawing is becoming alternatingly creased and dappled from the fickle West Country weather. In this way, it is beginning to take shape. We are measuring and drawing all the drainpipes and gutters of the farm. This, I suppose, is our rather generous interpretation of the group’s task to study the immediate landscape. This task, I am told, is not to be understood anecdotally. Our pipes which hover nakedly alone on the page, plucked from their parent structures, certainly don’t seem to narrate much. And yet, as we proceed, pipe by pipe, gutter by gutter, line by line, from one sheet to the next, each softly drawn streak of graphite begins slowly radiating its own matrix of design logics, accumulating contingencies and its own curious character. Though separated by great swathes of empty paper these fragments of the farm are seemingly not autonomous. Rather, like the other inhabitants of the archive and the farm, they are buzzing brimfuls of activity. As we draw, the gutters are pulled from the flattened periphery to a sharp pointed centre. Each piece of the farm is open, one need only look, or perhaps ask Niall, who will happily indulge in any questions on their nature.

My week at Shatwell did not discriminate between mental and manual activity. We, like tired pilgrims, returned everyday back to the drawing board with the bells of yesterday’s unanswered questions and fraught debates ringing our head. Each day a favourite pebble, which, picked from the beach, is turned over and over again, yielding and unyielding to the rhythms of eating, talking, drawing, measuring and looking. The strange drawing we left behind tells tales of small blooming fruits of discovery, slow sunny hours spent peering over the ruler’s shadow and perhaps even a little about Shatwell Farm.

-Michael Becker