We travel, always only ourselves.

Reaching across the surface,

straight across.

How unknowable these new lands remain,

even as they push up towards us,

out of their geographies and their layered histories.

We carry with us,

in one small bag,

our lived memories

and find them, echoing back to us in new places.

Always a stranger, travelling.

We went to a fascinating exhibition at the Kulturforum in Berlin. Prints from Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) and William Kentridge (1955- ). My favourite room was titled "Inside the thought-space of images". Kentridge's response to Dürer's Melancholia was a journey through his studio:

He traces his pacing around, labels places of emptiness, lassitude, and the 'insupportable weight of eyelids'. The collage, ink, pen and pencil drawing was 24.6 x 39.3 cm, framed behind glass on the gallery wall. A very large version was copied on to the floor so that visitors could retrace his steps.

Seeing the exhibition prompted me to think more about one of my artworks. Called 'Cartographies', it has stayed in my cottage in England. Red wool from Nepal is stretched across the surface of collaged tissue paper and paint. It is 60 x 80 cm

Now I saw in it how, travelling, we are always strangers.