Cold and misty yesterday. My parents live in the middle of nowhere, which whilst very isolated, can be quite beautiful. I took these photographs when we were walked their dog in the Malverns – the mist reminded me of Dylan Trigg’s photographs on his blog: http://side-effects.blogspot.com/ It’s a little like the snow, everything is detached, separated from what’s usually seen around it.
Re: work – just thinking about ways to combine a more delicate approach to the casts I’ve been making. The dresses were fragile, ephemeral; can this be furthered in relation to domestic objects, parts of homes?
I finished a commission for Enchanted Parks in Gateshead a couple of weeks ago, which went well I think – a local photographic group very kindly sent me links to images they’d taken (see accompanying photographs). It turned out to be a bit of departure from the muted, quiet and contemplative sort of work I normally make, but I think it was really good thing to work in different way, and produce pieces for an exterior location, something I haven’t done before.
Just arrived down in Herefordshire to spend Christmas with my family. We inadvertently benefited from other trains being delayed after ours was cancelled, but it’s still a 6 hour journey from Newcastle. Still, the county seems to be catching up with the rest of the country thanks to the copious amounts of snow currently falling. Looking out of the window just now where the snow was falling under a streetlight, the flakes were so big that they made spinning shadows on the white blanket underneath. I love the smell too – really fresh and clean, gorgeous.
I’ve been taking an inadvertent break from blogging over the last couple of months. I’ve been doing a lot of reading and writing (I’m in the middle of writing my MA dissertation) and it felt like my head’s been full of so many things, that to try and surmise them for this blog wouldn’t work. The writing itself is becoming a piece in its own right, beyond the remit of an academic text. It’s about trace and absence with the home and it rather apt, as we’ve just moved house – I’m therefore using our house as a basis to discuss these ideas.
The move was pretty hectic (to put it mildly) and as a result of not having a kitchen for about 6 weeks, we’ve been living with my in-laws. The previous owners of our new house were rather attached to their plants – so much so, that a massive ivy was growing up the front and partially covering the bedroom window. It was really sunny on our first morning there, so I photographed the resulting shadows on the curtain from our bed. I think it was the shadows which made me think of Anthony Boswell’s work (he’s got a couple of blogs on this site).
I’ve been flicking though The Comfort of Things by Daniel Miller recently (Amazon’s ‘other people who bought this book also bought these’ proving very useful these days). It’s basically an anthropological look the interior of people’s homes, specifically the objects and things they surround themselves with. The first ‘portrait’ is about a pensioner called George whose flat is empty – he doesn’t have any things. Miller describes that ‘there is a violence to such emptiness’. It’s really sad because the empty flat effectively reflects the person who occupies it – ‘this was a man… waiting for his time on earth to be over, but who at the age of seventy-six had never yet seen his life actually begin. And, worse still, he knew it’.
