artesian

The third issue of Artesian, from Go Together Press, is now out and is a beautiful addition to the series. Following issues based around Earth and Water, its theme is Time, and features writing by John Berger, Jan Svankmajer, Ry Cooder, Bill Morrison and Tilda Swinton, among others. I have two pieces included, one a reflection on rock painting, the other a poem on Philip Gröning's Into Great Silence.

buds

Andrew Morrison of Two Wood Press recently printed up 40 copies of this lovely letterpress and woodcut print. The print was a collaboration - the words are mine from a series of 2009 garden writings, the woodcuts his. The print measures roughly 37cm x 59cm and the colour of the twigs in the print is actually more of a velvety taupe than this reproduction shows. There are copies spare so do get in touch if you are interested in one.

31 sixteen photographs

Despite reasonable assumptions based on its title, there are in fact no photographs in this one (well, maybe one, at the end), which is instead made up of a number of descriptions of the same place - a small hill pond about 40 minutes walk away which I have been visiting at different times and in different weathers over the past six weeks or so. After a while, the exercise - which started out through a dissatisfaction with both the ease and limitations of photography - moved into the area of questions about originality and repetition in a series of written descriptions, considerations which I am still working through. The pieces also serve as a meditation on what photography cannot show.

29 shepherd in the trees

april 2010

8 page hand-stitched booklet sealed with thistle paper

11 photographs in plant paper wrapper

The phenomenon of 'spirit photography', arising during the 1860s and lasting well into the twentieth century, was formed through the combination of photographic practitioners, intoxicated with the possibilities of the new medium - as well as the money-making opportunities it presented - eager to suggest that they could indeed fix spiritual emanations on film, and a credulous public, whose amazement at the possibilities of fixing images at all led them to desire the camera to see what they no longer could. Many were comforted in their grief; just as many were sceptical.

However, a core of cases remain in which the photographers were seeking neither fame nor pecuniary gain, but who felt that by chance they had come across something that revealed an uncanny and hitherto hidden mystery of life. One of the most interesting of these men was Alan Broadrick, parson of the New Forest parish of Bramshaw between 1896-1904, and whose archive of notes, an intermittent diary and a large photographic album is now held in Lyndhurst's Museum of New Forest Life.

In Broadrick's case the question is not so much the veracity of the pictures - the original silver-gelatin photographs are beyond doubt genuine and bear no traces of having been tampered with - but rather his interpretation of their contents. For he believed that the photographs showed figures of good and evil among us, attending on our every move.

Shepherd in the Trees: A Bramshaw Parson presents excerpts from Broadrick's diary, and reproduces photographs from the original album that so stimulated his imagination.

32 a bestiary

april 2010

in progress

The diaries of William Greenwood, 7^th Earl of Monmouth (1687-1731), a keen amateur of the natural sciences, are a remarkable source for some of the more outlandish theories and experiments of his day. In 1730 he describes how, ‘being desirous of improving my nocturnall sight’, he rubbed his eyelids and chest twice daily with an unguent derived from a boiled-up owl. He confessed that ‘the ointment do smelle so ranke that I fear me the attentions of pie-dogs of the shire,’ adding that he masked the odour to some degree with the addition of lavender water. No improvement to his night vision seems to have been effected however, and the experiment is not mentioned after its initial two weeks. The Earl died the following year from a chill caught in an experiment in which he was engaged with testing the efficacy of whale grease as a barrier to the cold.