Paul Soulellis

I finished the last book in the series of 12 today, so the design of Weymouths is complete. Or rather, the design of the books is complete—I still need to create the reading room experience for the installation in Weymouth, England 27 July – 12 August. The total work is starting to come into focus. After the next six proofs arrive I’ll photograph the entire set.

Weymouths Volume 8 is an attempt to repair. Stitching up the story while opening it to new depths. Preservation of the found ruins.

1. An entire Native American dugout canoe was discovered in 1965, buried in the mud of Great Pond in Weymouth, Massachusetts. The canoe was treated with polyethylene glycol and permanently housed in an exhibit room in the basement of Tufts Library (main branch of the Weymouth Public Libraries). Chester Kevitt details the preservation process for the Massachusetts Archaeological Society, published in their Bulletin, October 1968.
2. Murals painted by high school students surround the glass case.
3. During my visit to the Canoe Room at Tufts Library I was given access to a file containing all of the news clippings and articles that had been collected about the “Indian Canoe” during the last 45 years.
4. 350 years earlier, Samuel de Champlain describes his encounters with the Native American population on his exploratory voyages in and around present-day New York, Vermont and Canada. The word “canoe” occurs 26 times in his memoir of 1603, “The Savages.” Each of the occurrences within Champlain’s text is extracted onto individual spreads that slowly zooms into the canoe, Carbon-14 dated to A.D. 1450.

Weymouths Volume 7 is a journey, a zoom, a reaching back. A dig, a reveal.

This is where I encounter the visible remains of another society. Below the surface, here’s the evidence of worship, ritual, architecture — structures that pre-date our sense of real (embedded within the identity of the place, but “beyond the map”). Volume 7 is about the “Roman works and fortifications with which the neighbourhood abounds,” upon Jordan Hill, just outside Weymouth, England. In 1844 the Ashmolean Society detailed the discovery of the remains, and published the notes at Oxford in 1854.

“The most remarkable discoveries made by Mr. Medhurst in 1843, and visited in October last by Dr. Buckland and Mr. Conybeare, were the foundations of a temple on the summit of Jordan Hill, and of a villa, a quarter of a mile distant, between this hill and the village of Preston.

…

“Dr. Buckland conjectures that this building may have been a temple of Esculapius, which received the votive offerings of the Roman families and invalids who visited Weymouth for sea-bathing and for health.”

As the 19th-century text travels into the foundations (details of bird skeletons, human bones, seeds, coins and ashes), I zoom into my photograph of the temple foundation taken at Jordan Hill on 6 March 2012. I go deeper into the surface and the photograph reveals a single color, like a flatlining of historical narrative. Perhaps this is a way to escape the figurative. By the end of the 112-page book, my documentation of Roman remains floats around a single pixel of color, like some suggestion of another reality. I can’t think of a more authentic way to look.

In Volume 10 I discovered that I can slow down the read by devoting an entire page to a single word. A single paragraph spread over 59 pages. Reading at a different scale, to expose other structures over time, like erosion.

Here is slow reading, again — this time, a single sentence on each spread. This is how reading can be like zooming. This is how reading can be more like digging. Slow reading leads to open reading.

Weymouths Volume 10—Whence is this mass of shingle derived? 

The title of this volume, in the form of a question, is extracted from the 1884 text Geology of Weymouth, Portland, and coast of Dorsetshire, from Swanage to Bridport-on-the-Sea, with natural history and archeological notes by Robert Damon. I’ve pulled 11 pages of the book to use here—the entire “Chesil Bank” section—speculating on the forces at work behind this rare geological formation.

The second text—59 words placed on top of my photographs at Chesil Beach—is the opening paragraph to John Cowper Powys’s 1934 Weymouth Sands. A single word per page slows it down, illustrates each word (or pair of words), opens up the read.

The sea lost nothing of the swallowing identity of its great outer mass of waters in the emphatic, individual character of each particular wave. Each wave, as it rolled in upon the high-pebbled beach, was an epitome of the whole body of the sea, and carried with it all the vast mysterious quality of the earth’s ancient antagonist.

Two more Weymouths books are complete. These are both text-based.

Observation

Volume 5 is an excerpt from The New English Canaan by Thomas Morton (b. 1578), first published in 1637. The “First Booke” details Morton’s observations at Wessagusset, the Native American territory that was replaced by Weymouth, “containing the original of the natives, their manners & customs, with their tractable nature and love towards the English.” I adapted the complete text of the first book into more normalized English for enhanced legibility and set it on 164 pages. It’s a 400-year-old first-hand account of the language, dress, food, living conditions and character of the people that the English settlers fought and killed.

Morton describes the Native Americans as noble and superior people, compared to the English, and believed that the New England settlers should take a more integrated, “multi-cultural” approach. The publication of The New English Canaan was considered heresy and Morton was eventually arrested as an agitator and banished to Maine, where he died in 1647.

Burial

Volume 6 is the haunting text of the 1642 deed that details the purchase of 26 acres of land by the English settlers from the Native Americans. It’s signed by the English and four Native Americans. In his 1884 Historical Sketch of the Town of Weymouth, Gilbert Nash introduces the text by saying that the “Indian title to the town was extinguished by purchase.”

Test book just arrived from Edition One Books in Berkeley, CA. This is Weymouths Volume 1—The Interviews.

Cover and sample spreads from Weymouths Volume 12—1,485 Colors.
330 pages of color pixels randomly extracted from photographs taken in March and April 2012 at—

Weymouth, Dorset

• Chesil Beach
• Nothe Parade
• Jordan Hill
• Maiden Street
• River Wey
• King’s Statue

Weymouth, MA

• King’s Cove
• The Canoe Room
• House Rock

The pixels are organized in quartets, as quintets (with the addition of background pixels), as groups of 10 in spreads, in nine chapters of 165 (organized by location), and all 1,485 colors in the full volume.

To wander, to ramble, to roam.

Perched Blocks, Erratic Block Large masses of rock, often as big as a house, which have been transported by glacier-ice, and have been lodged in a prominent position in glacier valleys or have been scattered over hills and plains. An examination of their mineralogical character leads to the identification of their source and, consequently, to the path taken by the transporting ice.—Text-book of Geology. Archibald Geikie Macmillan and Co. London, 1882

Weymouths Volume 9—40 Views of House Rock. 100 pages plus cover.

Weymouths attempts to portray place and identity as endless, multiplex constructions, unlimited by reality or imagination. Every instance—each memory, text, image or encounter that I record in these books—contributes to a constantly connecting (and expanding) view of the past and future.

One place that this plays out—albeit in the language of machines and bots and the crowd at large—is Wikipedia.

“Weymouth can refer to” appears at the top of this Wikipedia page (and at the top of every Wikipedia disambiguation page). At the bottom of these pages: “This disambiguation page lists articles associated with the same title.” This is where sense is made on the web—where meaning focuses and expands.

It’s how the crowd understands “Weymouth.”

There are Weymouths in New Jersey, Massachusetts, England, Nova Scotia, Tasmania, New Zealand and Barbados. 19294 Weymouth is a main-belt asteroid, discovered in 1996. Tina Weymouth was the bassist for the Talking Heads.

I’ve grabbed all 82 of the images from all 33 articles, and all of the user-supplied metadata associated with each image. This pile of content is gathered into Weymouths Volume 2—Weymouth can refer to.

Here are all 33 Weymouths, according to Wikipedia today.

• Weymouth, Dorset, England
• Weymouth and Melcombe Regis (UK Parliament constituency)
• Weymouth and Portland
• Weymouth Bay
• Weymouth Beach
• Weymouth Harbour, Dorset
• Weymouth Harbour Tramway
• Weymouth Pavilion
• Weymouth railway station
• Weymouth Quay railway station
• Weymouth, Nova Scotia, Canada
• Weymouth, Massachusetts, United States
• Weymouth Township, New Jersey, United States
• Weymouth, Tasmania, Australia
• Weymouth, Auckland, New Zealand
• Weymouth, Saint Michael, Barbados
• Weymouth F.C.
• Weymouth College
• HMS Weymouth, several ships
• 19294 Weymouth
• George Weymouth, English explorer
• George W. Weymouth, American politician
• Katharine Weymouth, publisher of The Washington Post
• Lally Weymouth, American journalist
• Richard Francis Weymouth, English Bible scholar
• Tina Weymouth, bassist for Talking Heads
• Thomas Thynne, 1st Marquess of Bath, 3rd Viscount Weymouth
• Ceawlin Thynn, Viscount Weymouth
• Weymouth bit
• Double bridle or Weymouth bridle
• Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy
• Weymouth Wildcats
• Weymouth Sands, a novel by John Cowper Powys