’The way it buries itself inside the heart’
This is the right time of year to be looking for plants to use on my greetings cards. August to early October, before the Autumn storms come – everything is dead, dried up, and therefore more translucent under light. The growing year is over, what was green is brown, tendrils curl up, seed cases become…
‘Some secret engineering of its own’
On the one hand my experimental images – on the other these photograms of plants, with which I make greetings cards. I began with them twenty years before Covid. There was another time when you weren’t allowed to walk outside London – 2001, when there was an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in cattle.…
Sometimes a long prior sequence of failures
Sometime people read my collages or photograms as landscapes. Sometimes I read them as landscapes myself: it’s fine by me. The first book with black and white photography I ever bought was ‘The Oldest Road – an exploration of The Ridgeway’ by J.R.L. Anderson and Fay Godwin (1975). Godwin was the photographer. I bought it…
’My obsession was not finishing last’
Two months ago I was in San Sebastián, on the northern Spanish coast. I went there to visit Chillida Leku, Eduardo Chillida’s studio and sculpture park, and to stand in front of ‘Comb of the Wind’, his three iron sculptures fixed to the Atlantic sea-cliffs. While I was there, I went to the Museum of…
’undulating piles of lead-coloured rubble’
I’ve been working on images with long horizontal lines of small visual incidents packed closely together. The idea came, I think, from a trip to Japan a year ago, where I travelled on the bullet trains from, amongst other places, Hiroshima to Kyoto. The trains are so fast that the landscape/cityscape seems to speed past…
’one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog’
’-the air one loathsome mass of sultry and foul fog, like smoke; scarcely raining at all, but increasing to heavier rollings, with flashes quivering vaguely through all the air, and at last terrific double streams of reddish-violet fire, not forked or zigzag, but rippled rivulets-’. That’s John Ruskin, from his talk ‘The Storm-Cloud of the…
’White, great eviscerator’
’Inside now. The word is white. It covers my tongue like paint—- I say it and light forms, Bottles arise, emptiness opens its corridors Into the entrances and endless things that form bears. White, great eviscerator.’ From ‘Still life with stick and word’ by Charles Wright (I’ve used a quote from him before, with one…
’With boots poulticed in noxious slop’
A collage made from photograms using roughened and rounded glass fragments collected from the mud and shingle of the Thames foreshore at Limehouse. I don’t know their age, they look perfectly ordinary to me, no lettering. The circles must be the bottoms of glass bottles. Nothing valuable, nothing like the treasures described in Ted Sandling’s…
’A Source of Marvellous Accidents’
One of the interesting frustrations of the way I make photograms is that I can’t see what I’m doing. This image was made by repeatedly moving a handful of materials across the photographic paper, exposing with a low-angled torch. At the end of which I had, as always, a blank, a white rectangle. I’m reliant…
’To let them decay – to break down and reveal themselves’
The squares that make up this image must be part of photograms I created about 30 years ago. At that time I had rudimentary equipment, and I used to wash my prints in the bath. It doesn’t do a very good job at getting rid of the chemicals, and over a long period of time…
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