"dead calm, then a murmur, a name, a murmured name . . .”
Beckett
"I think perfection is ugly.
Somewhere in the things humans make, I want to see scars, failure, disorder, distortion." Yohji Yamamoto Pairs of images made at every lock passed on the grand union canal heading south from Berkhamsted "... and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay" Edgar Allan Poe An exposure every 10 minutes along the course of a river / 480 minutes / 48 exposures "What I see is nothing - I want what it hides - that is not nothing."
Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, 1966 "A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning." Hermann Hesse, Wandering, 1920 'Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.' G. K. Chesterton, Alarms and Discursions, 1911 “It's a kindness that the mind can go where it wishes.” Publius Ovidius Naso, The Poems of Exile: Tristia and the Black Sea Letters, AD13 drowned. hearts, pulling the mouth of the land, to draw breath, as breath left, holding "Earth laughs in flowers" Ralph Waldo Emerson, Hamatreya, 1846 “Death doesn't exist. It never did, it never will. But we've drawn so many pictures of it, so many years, trying to pin it down, comprehend it, we've got to thinking of it as an entity, strangely alive and greedy. All it is, however, is a stopped watch, a loss, an end, a darkness. Nothing.” Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes, 1962 “We observe few objects really closely. As we walk on the earth, we observe the external events at two or three arms' lengths. If we ride a horse or drive in an automobile, we are further separated from the immediate surround. We see and photograph "scenery"; our vast world is inadequately described as the "landscape." The most intimate object perceived daily is usually the printed page. The small and commonplace are rarely explored.” Ansel Adams, Examples: The Making of 40 Photographs, 1983 “Tiny details imperceptible to us decide everything!” Winfried Georg Sebald, Vertigo, 1990 ‘Before it can ever be a repose for the senses, landscape is the work of the mind. Its scenery is built up as much from strata of memory as from layers of rock.’ Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory, 1995 The product of an eight month collaboration with artist David Foster available for pre-order at Inside the Outside unknown Soundings remote depths- still secrets in the deep inhabit the strata plots weaving slender The above works were derived from images made in the River Thames intertidal zone between Blackfriars and Millbank throughout 2019. Processed collectively in 2020. 23" x 36" / Hahnemühle German Etching
“I used to measure the skies, now I measure the shadows of Earth. Although my mind was sky-bound, the shadow of my body lies here.” Johannes Kepler (epitaph he composed for himself a few months before he died), 1630 ‘It is black, indifferent; it sidles away from human utterance. It is too far out in the unbidden world to reach. To desire it is to be humiliated.’ Tim Lilburn, Living In The World As If It Were Home, 2002 |