Project Info
Extract from a talk given at the Nocturnal Land/Water and the Visual Arts Symposium at the University of Plymouth in June 2014: It was Wallace Stevens (Wright, 1962, p.viii) who wrote that “Two things of opposite natures seem to depend / On one another.” The examples which he gave to illustrate this idea, of “day on night, the imagined / On the real,” “Winter and spring,” “this is the origin of change.”
There is contained within this idea, a different way of thinking about change, of change as a movement between opposites, as a flow from one thing to the next, from day to night. So on the one hand you have the loss associated with change, the loss I’ve attempted to express in the Dunwich work, but if one thinks about the idea of loss and it’s progression or change towards its opposite, a gain, there is in the space between them a continuation, a movement, a flow.
These are Pink-footed geese; they migrate here each winter from the Arctic, from Svalbard, from Iceland, from Greenland.
These pictures were made last year on the coast in Norfolk, in December and January, when the days were tilted towards midwinter solstice. In the afternoons I would walk inland along the muddy track-way, sunken between hedgerows, hawthorn, ash and blackthorn, away from the sea to find a spot to wait, to look up and make these pictures.
Each day in the winter the geese take off from communal roosting sites out on the marshes or mudflats and fly inland to feed in the fields. At dawn this process is done in small family groups, but at dusk when they return, these groups conjoin to form vast skeins formed of thousands of individuals, stretching outwards, sometimes for miles, the shape, the lines, shifting and changing.
The geese have tremendous eyesight; you could try making these pictures at dawn as they fly inland to feed, but they see you, even concealed in hedgerows, hundreds of meters away and veer away. But in the evenings it becomes possible to hide in the dusk and wait. In this act of waiting there would be a process of slow absorption into the night, a sort of calm dissolution. But this is combined with an intense concentration, a heightening of perception stemming from the straining of the eyes and ears to see or hear the first hints of the birds on the horizon as the light fades.
As they fly overhead the shape of the skeins is often barely perceptible; you see not the individual birds, but the flowing shape, vaguely, as something slightly darker against the sky. Again, the film is pushed, this time by about five stops or so, bringing a form back into being that it would not otherwise be possible to either see or hold on to. The pictures were made by sound, listening for the geese flying, the cries in the darkness, the sound of wings overhead, like the rushing of water.
For me, the purpose of the expression is not to aim at a complete description of what is already there, but to achieve a sort of joining with things. Looking at something, making a photograph, is not of appropriation of it, but an act more like approaching it, of paying it attention.
The eyes draw one into the world, but what occurs at night is something different. With the loss of the light there’s a narrowing of the brilliance of sight, until one is forced to pay the world more attention in order to make out forms. The restriction of vision focuses perception in on specific things, the more attention you give something, the deeper the involvement or connection with it. By looking at something intently, one enters into a relationship with it. The longer you hold the gaze, the harder you look and the more often you return to repeatedly look at it, the more intense the relationship, the deeper it goes.
Through this deep concentration on sensory perception the physical barrier between the mind and the world dissolves, the mind has a way of leaking out from the body, mingling with the world around it.
Looking back at these pictures I realise that it was actually an unutterable experience, something that is impossible to represent properly. Looking at them I think of the cloud of geese that was sometimes on the clearer evenings just visible forming out of the horizon, the way it expanded outwards as it approached, filling the sky, a dense plane of movement and life, the wild noise rushing overhead, the head filling with geese, and darkness and flux.
I remember feeling that there was no way I could do justice to the experience in a picture, every attempt would be a dilution, but the more I watched the more it became something that was quietly necessary to communicate or express. There was a realisation on my part that the pictures could do something different to the experience; they become something else, a way of suggesting a pattern, a movement, a flow of form.
I remember hearing a lecture by Borges (1967) talking about Walter Pater, who “wrote that all art aspires to the condition of music. In music, form and substance cannot be broken apart. Melody, or any piece of music, is a pattern of sounds and pauses unwinding itself in time, a pattern that I do not suppose can be torn. The melody is merely the pattern, and the emotions it sprang from, and the emotions it awakens.”
In terms of the geese, there seems to me, felt intensely remembering the experience, and diluted looking at these pictures, a feeling like a tremulous pitch, rising, vibrato, pausing to consolidate or at times to drift away, a process repeated again and again until eventually it reaches a sustain of such delicate perfection that it’s almost impossible, a fading expression of something changing, not lost but simply finding its way, adapting, a form that's continuous, shifting with its changing environment.
If one can get beyond the loss of things (ourselves, our identities, the things we relate to, the things we create, places) there is beauty lurking there, all about us. The work becomes an evocation of that, an affirmation of something experienced and deeply felt. The landscape is expressive, it contains knowledge, it can teach, it can reassure, it can reaffirm.
The world does not stand still; the artist’s description can do no more than catch a fleeting moment in a never-ending process. In that moment, however, is compressed the force that will propel it forwards, from the loss contained in the past to the loss that is inevitable in the future. Time unfolds itself in the photograph; it’s all present, the past, the future, in each picture.
There is a fragment of Heraclitus’ thought (Kahn, 1989, p.53) which reads “One cannot step twice into the same river, nor can one grasp any mortal substance in a stable condition, but it scatters and again gathers; it forms and dissolves, and approaches and departs… As they step into the same rivers, other and still other waters flow upon them.”
This is a bit of a jump from geese, to a river, but they are the same really, they both flow. This fragment of thought does not deny the continuing identity of the river, neither is its point concerned with the irreversibility of the flow of time, the uniqueness of an individual event or experience, nor the general instability of things. What is emphasised is that the structure, and hence the identity of a given river remains fixed, despite, or even because its substance is constantly changing. The pattern of the geese shifts and changes, but the containing structure of the skein remains.
If this parallel is pressed, something similar can be indicated about the structure and identity of a long list of things; human identity, places, the shapes of landforms… in each there is a preservation of structure within a process of flux, where a unitary form is maintained while its material embodiment or ‘filling’ constantly changes.
Things have to keep moving in order to maintain themselves. Form does not end, it is not lost, it is shifting instead, in every moment. There is a sense of metamorphosis; the world is a torrent underfoot. Looking at the geese, this seems to be an idea that you can extrapolate outwards, as far as you want to go.