Glass...

As well as riding my bike, since I stopped working I have been trying to get more opportunities to do some photography. This was helped by being asked by the incredibly talented glass artist Lorna Radbourne aka catrionastudiodesign to photograph some of her work for her social media and exhibition catalogues.

This was a great learning experience, glass is hard to photograph, and to capture the detail that Lorna puts into her pieces tested my skills.

Spending time talking about the commission with Lorna, we decides that it would help bring the pieces to life if we took them outside and captured the photographs in an authentic location (i.e. her garden).

We set the swan up next to the pond, and built a faux fence for the corvid gate.

I think the results turned out well, and I’m happy to say so did Lorna, and will be using some for her marketing.

Lorna’s work is stunning. The ability to break a complex subject into so few parts, but maintain the complexity of colour and texture of the real thing, is to me, the work of a true artist. It was a privilege to be able to make these images.

ARC

I stopped paid employment back in January, while I take time to reset and work out what comes next I have been riding my bike, a lot, and this has included volunteering with the Adaptive Riders Collective as a support rider on their weekday rider. It’s a great charity with a great ethos to bring together all those who love riding their bikes off road, be that adapted hand cycles or two wheelers.

For the past while ARC have been working with Endura to develop a range of clothing suitable for adaptive riders. The first prototypes from this collaboration have been developed and Endura wanted to get some user feedback so organised a day with some of the ARC riders to trial them and provide direct first impressions. I went along with my camera to document the day

It was an fascinating insight into the design process and the thoughts that had gone into what refinements riding kit needs for those using handcycles, from flat seems, pocket placement to cut of jackets to avoid water pooling. After the morning of discussions and trying kit for fit and ease of use we head out to trial it on the trail. Given the weather and location this trip clearly had to involve a trip over the hills to Achray farm for some goat ice cream.

Anyway, here is the story of that day

filters

“i danced along a colored wind / dangled from a rope of sand” tom waits

i don’t usually place my photographs in time, holding to the vanity that they are timeless, but these words and images have come from a time that is unlike any other, that most of us have no living memory of anything similar.  the pandemic blew in, and blew out so many conventional wisdoms.  the economy collapsed, the ecology thrived, the streets drew quiet, the people made noise.

people got sick, people died.  for some it was real, for others it was all a great hoax.  after all it was unseen.  while the virus was unseeable its effects were not. 

our neoliberal economic model has been shown wanting. it has exposed the lie that the owners of production like to peddle, that they are the ones that produce the wealth.  well without your workers where is the wealth? and anyway, who do you produce the wealth for? it is certainly not the likes of me. i, like most, work to gain the means to survive in the society we have allowed to develop, but we gain little and lose most.  we are killing the world we need to ultimately survive, slowly we thought, but it appears now not, as the climate change accelerates.  the screens put in front of us to shape how we perceive the world around us are starting to dissolve

but anyway, as we dance along the colored wind, living quietly in my wide open locked down location i was wondering how to capture this time in photography.  well in the end there was an obvious route to take.

i have meddled with infrared photography on and off, but it has been by using ir filters on my standard camera.  this has the limitations of time.  long exposures are required to allow the inbuilt ir filters to be overcome, so the results are often blurred by the noise of time, the truth hidden.

so, in lockdown i acquired an ir converted camera, where the blocking filter has been removed and replaced by an alternative. walked out and took some images of the seen unseen, or indeed the unseen seen

the results look like the familiar but are not quite as we expect to see the world.  something has changed, we have seen the unseen, we see an alternative, we recognise it but not as we expect, the rope of sand is just that, we realise we are hanging on to nothing.  if we let go, the reality need not be bad, it could be beautiful, and hopeful, and uplifting.  there is another possibility, and those that say otherwise just need their filters removed and reset

abstractions

i have always led a peripatetic life, particularly in my childhood, living in different countries around the world has forced on me with a keen awareness of what is around me from the cultural panoramas to the small nuances of everyday life.

my photography reflects this past and what it left me, a love,  born of necessity, for what is around us but often unseen, everyday objects, life, and the landscapes we travel through.

this collection was from an exhibition i held, displaying some of the things seen as i wander the quiet and not so quiet places
the selected photographs take, as a focal point, the detail from our larger surrounds, the abstractness and the beauty of things.

surfacing, well worth a listen....

surfacing is the new album by leeds based musician/ composer toby wiltshire (link here to his bandcamp site)

it’s an album of staggering soundscapes that, for me, have echoes of the work of richard skelton and floating points. it is the kind of music that i never know how to categorise (some of the tags the artist gives it include ambient, drone, electronic, soundscapes, new classical). but i can say it is the kind of music that i have been listening to a great deal of late. lots of the afore mentioned richard skelton, library tapes, and the slightly misnamed deathprod

i’m no music critic so i’m not going to attempt that here, so why am i blogging about it you might ask?

well i provided the photography for the art work which you can see here….

limited edition prints are available for toby’s bandcamp page

living the dream

“Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old Nature,
the great inventor, ceaselessly contrives. In all creation,
be assured there is no death - no death, but only change
and innovation; what we men call birth is but different
new beginning: death is but to cease to be the same”

— Ovid, Metamorphosis, xv

---

for some time now I have been working on a series of photographs that speak to power in the landscape. It’s a subject that has taken me down may thought paths.  what is power? is it the destructive force of nature, or our ability to harnes that force to provide for our needs? it’s the ability the landowners have to control access to our wild places, or it could be the ability of a landscape to bring calm to a troubled mind?

i have found it at times an sisyphean labour, to settle on a coherent narrative, to settle my mind on the task in hand, indeed to find a collection of images that provide the way into seeing the story i’m trying to tell.

this collection is not that, but it is not unrelated.

the photographs here have emerged over the years and mostly without me having had a conscious idea of what they represent or how they relate.  but now, at the time of writing, i like the rest of the country, and indeed much of the world, am confined to my home during what is an unprecedented challenge to our current way of life.  so I have been looking through my catalogue of images.   the photographs collected here seem to  choose now to coalesce and show why they allowed themselves to be captured.  It’s clear that the images do have a story to tell and that they were just waiting for me to hear them.

so, what did they coalesce around? what do they want to tell you?  as a viewer you will find your own meaning in them i’m sure, but to me they talk of the futility of all undertakings.   we all have dreams, we all have needs.  people build the buildings and things they need to make those dreams happen.  the dreams that may be as simple as having a dry place to sleep or a way of making the money to keep the dream alive, or indeed as grand as leaving a mark on the world so you remain remembered.  however, in the end, as is the way, the dream dies, that solution returns to dust.

but don’t let this description of the entropy that drives our world be seen as a fatalistic or pessimistic view of what is present.  as the introductory quote from ovid suggests, and bob dylan states, death is not the end.  many of the things that were once dreams of some individual or of a community may decay, but something else will come along and reuse that space that is left behind.  so really, all that can be said, and all that these captured moments are telling us, is that we are always living the dream.

detractions, or the bastard countryside

having lived on the margins of a city for 15 years i often found myself wandering in that space that is neither city nor countryside. 

 it has never been a space i particularly enjoyed inhabiting.  being not one thing or the other, it tends to contain the clash of the two.  like some ancient chimera, it is unruly, unsettling, but often revealing.  a frankensteinian beauty of human detritus, abandoned and consumed by nature.

 many of the photographs that i have taken on these walks i have been collecting together in the detractions project. 

while the images in this project are intended to show the human impact on what is ostensibly called the natural environment it is not unexpected to find contamination as one evolves in to the other, yet i  have been surprised when looking back over then how many have been found miles from the road in what truly should be a pristine, uncontaminated space.  human impact is everywhere. 

it is the current zeitgeist to see this invasion as an indication of the damage we are doing to our crucial environs and to get disturbed at the spoiling of the “natural landscape”.

 i do share the view that we are doing untold damage to the planet that keeps us alive but, in the uk at least, there are no natural landscapes.  human activity has shaped all areas of this country.  from the consumption of farming lands in to the industrial landscapes of the midlands and the central belt, to the ancient middens uncovered by the plough, we have fashioned the landscape we live in, and much of it is glorious.  but let’s just not kid ourselves that we have any wilderness.  the hills and mountains of the highlands are denuded of trees by the constant grazing of deer and the burning for grouse.  cumbrian hills are much the same, kept grassy by the efforts of the sheep that keep us in lamb and mutton

 i could go on, but you get the picture, and it’s not the reason i started composing this article anyway, i just got side tracked.   apart from the blatant plug for you to look at the detractions project page, i wanted to share the wonderful glorious book i came across this week.    

robin friend’s bastard countryside.  this collection of (coincidentally) 15 years of wandering sums up pretty much (and much more eloquently) what i am trying to communicate with detractions.  as the publicity blurb says, it embodys a friction between british pastoral ideals and present reality. not only is it a curation of thought-provoking images but it has an equally lucid essay by robert macfarlane (and if you haven’t read his books you really should).  so, check it out and if you can, get a copy and support an artist.

a move north

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leeds docks

after almost a decade and a half i made the return. i moved north to become a southerner

saying good bye to leeds was hard, saying hello to clackmannan was easier.

going from the city back to the country was a move that was necessary and had been a long time in the arriving.

many people asked why, and many people still wonder why. and those are not questions i can fully articulate. they reasons are a mix of the emotional, political, and thrawnness.

maybe one day i’ll write about those, but for now let’s talk about the new.

since moving we have been living in a large (and fairly dilapidated) farm house, half a mile up a dirt track from the smallest village in the smallest county.

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our house, for now..

it has been a major culture shock for A (not one that has been a struggle mind) but less so for me, having lived remotely before.

we got off to a stormy start having chosen to move the week that that the beast of the east arrived bringing the worst snows for nearly a decade, but the summer that followed was one of the best since my childhood. 

making a move like this, where you uproot the stable and familiar to replace it with the unknown was always going to raise a serious case of introspection, but as i say, i’m still working that all through.

having now bought a house (we move at the end of october) what better time to share the images i have taken over the past 7 months, maybe they will give an insight into the introspection, or maybe they are just a story of time passing, new beginnings moving into the new familiar.

so please enjoy, and share your comments.

aitkenhead

g..

welcome..

i have always lead a peripatetic life, particularly in my childhood.  living in different countries around the world has forced on me a keen awareness of what is around me, from the cultural panoramas to the small nuances of everyday life.

my photography reflects this past and what it left me, a love,  born of necessity, for what surrounds us.  often unseen, everyday objects, life, and the landscapes we travel through.

here, i have the opportunity to display some of the things seen as I wander the quiet and not so quiet places

i hope you enjoy.  you are encouraged to leave your thoughts.......