journal - Guy Dickinson | Tracing Silence

Published on: 23 March 2019

scenes from the dark room / difficult loves

Every heart sings a song, incomplete, until another heart whispers back.

Plato

He heard her in his heart - whispering from the mist

John Geddes, A Familiar Rain, 2011

Published on: 25 February 2019

nightwalk

my silence

is like glass blown by an apprentice

flawed and cracked

but now I have learned to form silence

and next time I will do it right

perfectly

Webb Chiles, Artist of Words and Winds, 1975

Published on: 22 February 2019

“Beyond the edge of the world there’s a space where emptiness and substance neatly overlap, where past and future form a continuous,
endless loop. And, hovering about, there are signs no one has ever read, chords no one has ever heard.”

Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore, 2002

here

in, at, or to this place or position

there

in, at, or to that place or position

“It is as reasonable to represent one kind of imprisonment by another as it is to represent anything that really exists by that which exists not.”

Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 1719

Published on: 22 February 2019

interlude / held like a legend

I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone.

Rainer Maria Rilke, Book of Hours, 1905

Published on: 20 January 2019

witherings III / quietus

Who has never killed an hour? Not casually or without thought, but carefully: a premeditated murder of minutes. The violence comes from a combination of giving up, not caring, and a resignation that getting past it is all you can hope to accomplish. So you kill the hour. You do not work, you do not read, you do not daydream. If you sleep it is not because you need to sleep. And when at last it is over, there is no evidence: no weapon, no blood, and no body. The only clue might be the shadows beneath your eyes or a terribly thin line near the corner of your mouth indicating something has been suffered, that in the privacy of your life you have lost something and the loss is too empty to share.

Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves, 2000

Published on: 19 January 2019

henge / avebury

Perhaps the land sings? Hymns from the ocean, anthems from the mountains, love songs, eulogies, dirges... in voices beyond logic but heard in the bones. It is ourselves we hear, taking the habited and inhabited earth for a sounding board that amplifies the mute ripples of pleasure and anxiety that are always with us seeking concrete objects to latch onto.

Shorthand Notes From The Spirit, Vicki Goldberg, 2009

Ideas of form dissolve in Guy Dickinson’s photographs of the megalithic henge at Avebury. Instead it is the tiniest variations of texture, tone and surface that endlessly hold the eye. In these tender visual fields, where entire landscapes can be found in the space of a few square centimetres, the viewer encounters the unexpected intimacy and softness of geology - a geology that appears to be not fixed but delicately fluid.

In a departure of emphasis for Dickinson, technical complexity underpins this series of photographs, not for complexity’s sake, but as a means of experimenting with new expressions of atmosphere and place. Each of the twelve finished works is a composite structure, produced by layering seven separate exposures from three or four individual megaliths. The use of a range of lenses means that multiple scales as well as subjects are embedded within each interleaved image. At once abstract and concrete, they solicit engagement that is both cerebral and powerfully visceral.

In Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love, the medieval anchoress details a vision of a hazelnut lying in the palm of her hand. ‘I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding and thought, ‘What may this be?’ And it was answered generally thus, ‘It is all that is made. ’ I marvelled how it might last, for I thought it might suddenly have fallen to nothing for littleness”.

One of the enduring characteristics of Dickinson’s work is his openness to both the grand and the granular. There is no risk, one feels, that any detail will ‘fall to nothing for its littleness’. This is one of the many reasons why, for the duration that we look, we feel we are seeing in a different way.

Alison Morris