Sunday, 27 February 2011
Saturday, 19 February 2011
stone shadow
Over a period of 36 hours in the last couple of days, I've traveled from London to Aberystwyth via Birmingham, and back again - all the while reading JG Ballard and the papers, and listening to PJ Harvey's Let England Shake and Gillian Welch. I was also trying out, for the first time, the 'distressed analogue' possibilities of the Hipstamatic photographic app on my iPhone.
On the way there, I carried the pebble from the beach at Aldeburgh (see 1st Feb post, 'I hear these voices'). My half-arsed homage to Richard Long's Crossing Stones entailed depositing it on the beach in Aber, & exchanging it for another stone to take back - circuitously, eventually, who knows when - to Suffolk.
What follows is a long-ish chronological sequence of images from the journey. In large part, rather murky, sub-aquatic glimpses and fragments of Britain from the train as I passed into and out of cities and night. A sort of flip-book of shadows and flickering light, with a fleeting and surreal burst of apricot sunshine on arrival at the sea in West Wales.
Oh the epiphany of the sea ...
Somehow weather, music, Ballard, newspaper (Bahrain, Libya, Tory government cuts, Berlusconi's trial - the 'usual' heady cocktail in these profoundly unusual times), and something parading as 'coffee' conspired to colour my mood and these images - in particular, PJ's devastatingly beautiful, sombre songs:
& the birds are silent in the branches
& the insects are courting in the bushes
& by the shores of lovely lakes
heavy stones are falling
On the way there, I carried the pebble from the beach at Aldeburgh (see 1st Feb post, 'I hear these voices'). My half-arsed homage to Richard Long's Crossing Stones entailed depositing it on the beach in Aber, & exchanging it for another stone to take back - circuitously, eventually, who knows when - to Suffolk.What follows is a long-ish chronological sequence of images from the journey. In large part, rather murky, sub-aquatic glimpses and fragments of Britain from the train as I passed into and out of cities and night. A sort of flip-book of shadows and flickering light, with a fleeting and surreal burst of apricot sunshine on arrival at the sea in West Wales.
Oh the epiphany of the sea ...
Somehow weather, music, Ballard, newspaper (Bahrain, Libya, Tory government cuts, Berlusconi's trial - the 'usual' heady cocktail in these profoundly unusual times), and something parading as 'coffee' conspired to colour my mood and these images - in particular, PJ's devastatingly beautiful, sombre songs:
& the birds are silent in the branches
& the insects are courting in the bushes
& by the shores of lovely lakes
heavy stones are falling
