Calm.
Bright.
Rippling grasses.
Horizon lines tinged in blue.
Listening below the moss.
‘ I have been moved by the blue at the far edge of what can be seen, the colour of the horizons, of remote mountain ranges of anything far away. The colour of that distance is the colour of an emotion, the colour of solitude and the desire, the colour of ‘there’ seen from ‘here’, the colour of where you are not. And the colour of where you can never go….’
Rebecca Solnit – A field guide for getting lost, 2005.
12th Feb sub zero frozen landscape before me. Light was bright and crystal blue. New Moon.
Results from the first tests encouraged me to find a larger waterproof pouch to submerge my cyanotypes in the pools overnight.
The results from these second tests were beautiful. It was freezing and the pouches froze hard under the ice and took some digging out.
My reward for working in the ice was witnessing the bubble columns that had formed overnight.
Using the bird hide which historically was an observation point (until it was burnt down) I am embarking on some small experiments. I like the idea of using an old observation point for these new observations and conversations with plants.
During conversations Anna told me about the ability for sphagnum moss to out grown other plants because of its ability to tolerate very low levels of UV light.
So in response I have done some tests to record underwater overnight UV levels as a kind of sphagnum moss view of the world.
There is research to suggest that Sphagnum grows in response to the lunar cycle so I thought I would record over night each New Moon and Full Moon for the whole year to follow the rhythm of the UV. This years cycle will include 3 super moon’s, 1 blue moon and 2 lunar eclipses.
The connection to the blue colour of the cyanotype is key, in art is has historically been used to depict the far edge of places. (Da Vinci) In Goethe’s Theory of Colours he describes blue as ‘darkness made visible.’ and in 1789 the cyanometer was invented to measure of blueness of the sky – https://www.openculture.com/2020/11/discover-the-cyanometer-the-device-invented-in-1789-just-to-measure-the-blueness-of-the-sky.html
Rebecca Solnit speaks of blue as the colour of where you can never go. In the atmospheric distance between you and the horizon…..Blue is the colour of longing for the distances you never arrive in.
