"pulvis et umbra sumus"
Quintus Horatius Flaccus, The Odes of Horace, 23 BC
|
“In every outthrust headland, in every curving beach, in every grain of sand there is the story of the earth.” Rachel Louise Carson (1907 - 1964) “His way had therefore come full circle, or rather had taken the form of an ellipse or a spiral, following as ever no straight unbroken line, for the rectilinear belongs only to Geometry and not to Nature and Life.” Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, 1943 "The light touched something green in the window corner and made it a lump of emerald" Virginia Woolf, The Waves, 1931 "When I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest woods the thickest and most interminable and, to the citizen, most dismal, swamp. I enter a swamp as a sacred place, a sanctum sanctorum. There is the strength, the marrow, of Nature." Henry David Thoreau, Walking, 1862  “Absolutely nothing visible to the eye provides a reason for or even evidence of those terrifying shifts which can in a matter of moments reconstitute a simple path into an extremely complicated one.” Mark Z Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000 “To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges.” Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs & Human Imagination, 2001 "The world is an ever-weaving tapestry from which no thread can be pulled without destroying the integrity of the cloth.” Dean Koontz, Deeply Odd, 2013 Public access to England’s watercourses amounts to only 3% of the 42,700 miles available. “If you’re by a river, on a river or in a river, there’s a 97% chance that you’re not allowed to be there.” Nick Hayes, The battle for England’s waterways, 2019 Where a watercourse divides two adjoining properties (in this case public / private) the boundary is defined by the centreline of the water between the opposing banks. By its very definition that line cannot be fixed, like a wall or a fence, but is in a constant state of flux. Over time the edges of the banks ebb and flow; endlessly reconfigured by accumulations and detritions, floods and droughts, damage and repair. With each new amendment to the physical geometry of the banks, the boundary shifts; it meanders and weaves, mimicking the passage lines of detritus floating on the surface above. The images presented here collectively represent an attempt to map this condition, to make manifest this tenuous line of ownership concealed below the surface. Riparian Rights was a response to Right to Roam; an open call for work investigating the issue of land rights, access and trespass. An edited version of the work is included in a Journal published by Inside The Outside  “Your dunce thinks they are standing still, and draws them all fixed; your wise man sees the change or changing in them, and draws them so, -the animal in its motion, the tree in its growth, the cloud in its course, the mountain in its wearing away. Try always, whenever you look at a form, to see the lines in it which have had power over its past fate and will have power over its futurity. Those are its awful lines; see that you seize on those, whatever else you miss.” The Works of John Ruskin, Vol. 15, E. T. Cook & A. Wedderburn (eds), 1904 "To love a swamp, however, is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges." Barbara Hurd, Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs & Human Imagination, 2001 "every figure is no more than the lingering trace of a movement that has already ceased." The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, 1754 - 1824 "So it is with time, that lightens what is dark, that darkens what is light." Samuel Beckett, Watt, 1953  "Look around: See how things all come alive- By death! Alive! Speaks true who speaks shadow." Paul Celan, Threshold to Threshold, 1955 “Passion has little to do with euphoria and everything to do with patience. It is not about feeling good. It is about endurance. Like patience, passion comes from the same Latin root: pati. It does not mean to flow with exuberance. It means to suffer.” Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000  At no other time (than autumn) does the earth let itself be inhaled in one smell, the ripe earth; ...Containing depth within itself, darkness, something of the grave almost." Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters on Cézanne, 1907 "The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way.... As a man is, so he sees." William Blake, Letter to Reverend John Trusler, 23 August 1799 "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 |
