T HE wind howled as David Goard slowly and steadily unrolled a path of brown paper across the Arctic landscape.

It was a scene of chill, white mistiness and I suddenly realised, that despite watching the film within the comfortable confines of Hexham’s Queen’s Hall, I was cold.

Damned cold, in fact, but I couldn’t stop watching! The combination of waiting for something to actually happen and the sense of peace that descended, during the few minutes of ‘time out’ in an otherwise busy day, made me feel suddenly becalmed, like a sailing ship.

The Haydon Bridge artist’s latest installation, running now in Gallery One, was inspired by a trip he took to Iceland last summer.

The month he spent ‘in residence’ at the arts centre in the bijou northern fishing village of Listhus had taken him back to his roots as a painter, he said.

The handful of bold pictures in Gallery Two, upstairs, certainly demonstrates that, along with his new-found fascination with water in all its forms.

Entitled variously Meltdown , Flash , Dash and Whoosh , water cascades down waterfalls, peels away from ice-flows and ultimately meanders across pure plains.

But really, David’s career in recent years has been all about creating dramatic installations designed to draw the viewer in.

Candidly, though, he admits even he is rather surprised by his latest production, because it ‘came out of nowhere’.

“I went into an art shop to buy some drawing paper,” he said, “and the man in there asked if I’d like some rolls of wrapping paper, the type that normally goes on to a machine.

“It was going cheaply, so I just took it without knowing what I was going to do with it.”

Listhus only has a population of 800, but boasts an international arts centre that attracts people from all over the world. So it was that the person he ended up sharing his accommodation with was a film-maker, Kalun Leung, from Hong Kong.

David said: “I only had the vaguest of ideas, so I simply asked him if he wanted to go up into the mountains one day and we’d see what came out of it.

“If I hadn’t had the paper and there hadn’t been a film-maker there, this installation wouldn’t have happened.”

He was in Iceland during the height of summer, when the nights comprised a couple of hours of darkness at most.

“Even then, it was only twilight really,” he said, “and the quality of the light was fantastic.

“Iceland has never had an industrial revolution, because it went from fishing straight to banking and technology, so there is no pollution.

“The clarity is stunning; I wear glasses, but I felt I had the best glasses on in the world!”

His trip has also refreshed his view of his native Northumberland, too. He doesn’t take it for granted anymore. “Sometimes you have to travel to find home,” he said.

Meanwhile, his celluloid self was still rolling out his paper pathway in the background.

“I realised I could only do the film performance once, in a single take, because the paper got wet,” he said.

“My only instruction to the cameraman was to keep filming until I disappeared over the horizon. I didn’t realise it would take quite as long as it did!”

His black shape was but a scuttling speck in the distance by the time I left, determined to find a hot coffee and a fan heater.

Anyone else who would like to visit David Goard’s Iceland can do so up until February 20.