Steve Walker's Wormingford

There is a 2-part feature article in The Worm, Wormingford's own paper,
August and September 2004 editions (#236 & #237), all about the exhibition and the artist.

man in field

WORMINGFORD MERE

If a new-made spirit awoke here
and took it for a world
a mossed-in heart carved on oak
is the best evidence of man.

I saw things in the fields around Wormingford which, I hope, no one else has seen there. I saw polar bears, warthogs, giraffe and kangaroos. This was because I was writing 39 episodes of NOAH'S ISLAND while living in the area : Every day I used to sit on a log on Wormingford Hill imagining my animal characters in the show. When I wrote THE ANIMALS OF FARTHING WOOD the imagined animals - foxes, weasels, etc. - were not so out of place, and examples often popped up to audition. I was not so out of place myself, but in a special place. It was a welcoming landscape, evocative, with forgotten corners which seemed to want someone to know their story. Old emotions lay tangled in the nettles waiting for new ideas to unlock their secrets.
Of course, there is Wormingford's most famous story: of the dragon, worm, or crocodile of Wormingford Mere! During the sixteen years I took my daily walks through Wormingford's backwaters I drew the Mere hundreds of times. I live in France now and am unlikely to return to see it again, but it remains a fascination for me, part of my imagination forever. When I have written these words I shall draw it again for memory. And the croc itself, that displaced individual lost in legend, feared and hunted, who began as an egg beside the Nile, became a Crusader's souvenir, then a fugitive in a folktale, till finally coming to rest as this artist's familiar: in and out of the Mere, near and far from Wormingford, the croc plods through my drawings, part of the past, or rather the emotions of the past, which continue to influence all of us in the day we call today.

click the pictures to enlarge