Mapping the Necklace was joined last week by Venezuelan multimedia artist Cipriano Martinez, who explored both the urban and pastoral qualities of the Necklace Park concept itself to see where it overlapped with his own work.. Cipriano, who lives and works in the UK, is an innovative and iconoclastic landscape artist who explores chaos and resolution in equal parts.

“Weavings, patterns of nerves, mental projections prefiguring misleading ideas of possible maps – these are some of the resources Cipriano Martinez uses to draw a landscape. Nobody can encounter his work with an innocent gaze. All have a favorable prejudice that art always means something, because the lack of a name confounds, torments, and unhinges pure reason. “ Andres Isaac Santana. Artnexus. No 60. Volume 5. Year 2006.

We await Cipriano’s own notes on his visit…

We’re all getting ready for the Explorer’s Awayday May 6 in the Necklace Park, during our big Mapping the Necklace weekend. A lot of work is going on in the background to be sure that this bit of the weekend goes without a hitch…particularly the Food Map Feast in Old Durham Gardens to which all working Mappers on that day are invited.

I was that mildly feral, long-ago ex-pat Santiago de Chile child you track on Twinned Cities...very different from the born-again Santiago de Cuba adult.

I keep thinking of all of the crunch-underfoot experiences of the Durham Necklace Park: trodding on locally-branded "Love" bricks at Houghall near an abandoned pit...crazily steep, iced-over wooden steps leading down from the road into Finchale Priory...the slip-and-slide of autumnal fruit-and-mud at Old Durham Gardens...the clay suck of the riverbanks near Shincliffe...the sponge-spring of the sports ground at Maiden Castle...the heel-grabbing cobbles in the City Centre running alongside clackety pram wheels...

The big decision when sending out the invitation is how far to go...but maybe that's the point: cast the net, see what returns, filter and match. My version of widespread is usually geographical but it's also about netting a wide range of "curious creatives"...who are much like the "curious cows" on the Roaming the Necklace photo gallery, one of my favourite Park images. We could do a lot worse than follow the Necklace Cows and see where THEY go, and as far as I know they're grazing just below Sherborne Road Estate today...