A Darkening

This film slowly examines and explores a landscape. This is a landscape at a point of transition - the transition between day and night, and between one year and the next. It was filmed around Dorlin in Moidart, NW Scotland, during brief periods of calm and stillness at dusk around otherwise stormy, wet weather. The images of the landscape are dark, damp, and held deep in the grip of winter. It is almost silent, other than the brief interjections of a sea eagle and a heron passing overhead. The film is shot on super 16mm digital format. Dur. 4'33"

below, the rocks plunged into darkness (documentation)

Some documentation of my current show at the Studio Pavilion, House for an Art Lover, Glasgow. The show continues until July 15th, 2018

liath, dearg, dubh.

Pieces of grey, red and black granite found very close to each other by a stream that flows into Loch Ossian, from the slopes of Carn Dearg, whilst making an anti-clockwise walk of the loch in bad weather, March 2015

stilled life with moving trees - a bothy project residency at Inshriach

Inshriach Bothy

view from the porch

I arrived during a week of gales. The Cairngorms are windy at the best of times, yet I’m accustomed to being on the brittle granite plateau where the combination of altitude and the persistence of the wind creates a sub arctic landscape, a place where plants hug the land tightly. However because of the wind’s excessive force and unpredictable cloud level, the snow covered plateau became essentially out of bounds.

arrival at the bothy

I found myself walking in the lower areas of the Cairngorms, along the passes, up into the more modest hills adjacent to the plateau, to hidden lochans, and into the forests – Inshriach and Rothiemurchus, generally less familiar territory for me since I usually seek out high places.

The trees became the most dominant part of my experience. Sat in an elevated hollow, surrounded by a wood of silver birch interspersed with dwarf juniper, the bothy is quite protected and sheltered. Unless you know it’s there, or happen to walk close along the trail, you’d probably be oblivious to its very existence. I spent a good deal of time watching the trees and their movement, and listening to their sound, mixed in with the white noise of the River Spey which flowed in spate and flood nearby.

birch, pine, heather, juniper

 stilled life with moving trees (video documentation of my residency)

I came with a loose idea of some work I could make, thinking that a plan would be wise, but soon abandoned it, and learned to leave preconceived notions well alone, and simply be with the place. Nan Shepherd’s text, the living mountain guided me well in this sense, (and, struck by it’s notable absence on the bothy’s bookshelves, I popped out to Aviemore to buy a copy to leave as a gift).

The work didn’t come, but the time to think, and reassess aspects of my life and practice did, and I felt the repercussions of the trip perhaps more clearly once I returned home. I needed the time away, the space to be undisturbed by modern distractions such as the compulsion to check email. Technology has become particularly invasive and guilty of creating a syncopated rhythm to lifes that can be led more simply. 

As someone who has always loved solitude, I don’t think I’d appreciated how difficult complete solitude is however (thank goodness for a battery powered radio playing Radio 4!). Inshriach can be a quiet place, but on reading the bothy book, it’s clear that for most people, residencies here are anything but solitary, and spur on collaboration.

An Lochan Uaine through Caledonian Pine

from the summit shelter cairn of Meall a' Bhuachaille

But the motion of walking is an antidote to too much solitary sitting and thinking, and a journey to the Lochan Uaine, an unexpectedly bright green lochan nestled amongst the Caledonian pine trees of the Ryvoan Pass, became like a visit to an old, dear friend. Onwards to Ryvoan, and some shelter from the wind for lunch, I made a spur of the moment decision to climb Meall a' Bhuachaille, and despite ferocious winds which made standing near the summit difficult, the addictive lure of a vista, of expansiveness, and of physical exertion made it worth while.

the Cairngorms and Rothiemurchus

Back in the environs of the bothy, life settles into a regular rhythm. Wake up, go to the loo (a composting loo a hundred yards from the bothy), light wood stove, place large urn of water on stove to heat, go back to bed and read or listen to radio until bothy warms up, put the kettle on the trangia (I cheated and cooked on a combination of the wood stove and my trusty Trangia 27), have breakfast, shower (deliciously) outside with the water previously heated on the stove, dress, collect wood from the bottom of the hill in rucksack, re-fill the tea urn with water from the Spey, rest of day is for leisure – reading, writing, drawing, walking, eating,.. At nightfall, light candles, last wood on the stove at 6pm(ish) so that the bed platform isn’t too warm later, retire to bed around 9 or 10, ...etc.

On my last morning, I wake up to snow, the landscape again transformed. After a hot outdoor shower, with the snow still falling, I pack my things, then make the couple of trips back to the car parked almost a mile down the trail, food supplies diminished, and my load lighter than when I arrived. The weight of the city had also been lifted, and I'm reminded (if I ever really need such a thing) that part of me needs to be in the wild. I anticipate being reunited with my 3 year old son, so the departure isn't unwelcome in the way it would have been years ago, but the bothy, a perfectly formed small space packed with the essentials for good living, sends me on my way, nourished, and replete.

the bothy at dusk

nautical twilight

book found in the bothy library

a sun dog through the birch trees

the view North

With thanks to Walter Micklethwait and everyone at Inshriach, and to Bobby Niven of The Bothy Project

all images L Punton, 2014

Revisiting An Caisteal part 2.

In November, I climbed An Caisteal, a hill I’ve been up many times, in order to make another summit photograph. Having realised that I’d often inadvertently made the same image upon reaching the cairn, I’ve subsequently decided to consciously record the various conditions of weather and light from this viewpoint whenever I revisited the mountain.

13.11.11

Having a small child, my hill-walking opportunities are fewer than they used to be and I hadn’t climbed a Munro for quite some time. Many of the feelings  I’ve often experienced during such walks consequently came flooding back.  The greatest sense was of freedom, and a relief to be away from cities, noise, distractions, and to be entirely at one with the effort of ascending the boggy, tussocky grass on the lower slopes which admittedly are always a bit of a trudge on this hill. The smell of the damp earth was strangely comforting. Slowly and carefully pacing myself, finding a rhythm in my step, walking becomes effortless. Thoughts hone into the here and now. I enjoy the silence. In fact, I need the silence. Work pressures dissipate. The land opens out to show something more enduring, more stoic.

Familiarity is a fine thing sometimes, for without the hindrance of a map (well, of the need to actually use it anyway), close knowledge of the mountain’s geography enabled me to persevere through the early trudge to reach the wonderful long ridge of Twistin’ Hill, the best part of the mountain. This takes you, eventually, to the rocky boulders and “castle” that gives a little scramble before the final cairn is reached soon after.

As seen in my previous post, I’ve climbed this hill in beautiful winter conditions many times. It’s not a difficult hill and is climbed usually in around 5 hours, up and down. Determined to make the most of a free day and to make a new photograph regardless of the weather, we found ourselves (Jim & me) however, climbing on a day with 80mph gusts of wind and with the summit engulfed in cloud. These were by far the most difficult conditions I’d been up on this hill in. Had I not had the desire to make an image from the top, I’d have been tempted to return once we reached a point where the wind on the narrows of the exposed summit ridge meant I had to crawl on hands and knees to be sure I wasn’t blown off in a sudden and unpredictable gust. Miraculously, the rock of the scrambling portions provided some shelter and allowed the “trickier” moves to be made in relative safety. The summit image was rushed. I was barely able to take my camera out and hold it still for long enough to make a sharp image. Jim attempted to shield me of the worst of the wind so I could steady myself. The damp of the cloud we were surrounded in meant visibility was reduced to only around 10 metres and the vista towards Loch Katrine completely absent. Point click, escape…

Nevertheless, despite the difficult conditions, the pleasure of being out in wide open space, of reaching the top with relative ease despite concerns about how hill-fit I might otherwise be, even of managing despite such difficult, and lets face it, unpleasant conditions, I was still so happy to be out on the hill, to be somewhere that I felt I belonged. It seems a cliché, but I felt that I was home, and that I was doing something so intrinsically core and central to my being that this return to An Caisteal nourished me in ways not many other things are capable of. The photograph is a disappointment, though somehow I don’t really mind.

Schiehallion bivvy part 2

I posted some time back about my experience of bivvying on the summit of the mountain Schiehallion, where Jim & I created two pinhole photographs. I also filmed much of the creation of the work and have finally edited it.

Constable

Landscape with a double rainbow,John Constable,1812,
 Oil on paper laid on canvas

the photographs of frank hurley

a radiant turret lit by the midsummer midnight sun
Made during the first Australasian Antarctic expedition, 1911-14

After seeing the film made by Herbert Ponting recently, I started looking a bit more into the other major figure to document the great early Antarctic expeditions, namely the Australian Frank Hurley. Hurley accompanied Shackleton on the British Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914-17 on the Endurance, where he worked as expedition photographer, but he also had the same role on other voyages, such as the first Australasian Antarctic Expedition of 1911-14.

I think I find Hurley's work more interesting because it seems more varied and often, more intimate, showing details on a human scale. There are of course many wonderful and breathtakingly beautiful images of ice landscapes by Hurley that display grandeur and are intended to create a sense of awe in the viewer, such as in the image above, but his pictures often also seem to contain details that pleasingly undermine this distance from the subject, or which manage to convey some of the physicality of place that can be difficult in the stilled form of the photograph.

Out in the blizzard at Cape Denison adjacent to winter quarters, 1913, Carbon print

For example, the famous image of two men hunched against the wind, ice axes in hand as they struggle to move in the midst of a blizzard (above) is well known, and has almost become emblematic of the difficulty of conditions in the Arctic and Antrctic. Below is a less well known image made on deck where the structures of the ship grow a coat of rime frost and ice.

But I'm far more interested in this completely puzzling image (below) where an unidentified activity semms to be being carried out. Skis are plunged into the snow in an antarctic dusk and an ethereal light emanates from a hole in the snow below. I simply can't comprehend fully what's going on in the picture, and this seems to me to be highly unusual in the images both Hurley and Ponting brought back home in that nothing is "learnt" about the antarctic from this image. There appears to be no
scientific/heroic/pictorialist basis to the creation of the picture (unlike most of the others) and the purpose of the image remains unclear. (I'm guessing that perhaps a snow hole has been dug, with the occupants' artificial light illuminating the entrance, but it's still significantly obscure to continue to intrigue and hold my attention).

The image below is perhaps more conventional, but still I like the presence of the man, looking out to the ice, Caspar David Friedrich-like. With his hands in his pockets, and wearing a balaclava but no coat, braces visible, he stands so very casually as he surveys the ice and the unending immensity of the cold horizon beyond. He looks as though he might just have been passing by for a stroll when Hurley made the picture. Perhaps he was.

He also made a series of early colour images of the Expedition using the then-popular Paget process of colour photography. The colours are rather weak, and the autochrome process would supersede it, but it still comes as something of a shock to see them at all. Even it's failures hold beauty.

Mid-summer, 1915

Unidentified landscape

rime frost

the chairlift today, in Glencoe, courtesy of the SAIS.

...wondering if this is an April fools joke, it's so bizarre.

...postscript: it was an April fools prank.

aerial

An amazing satellite image of the UK just now, with snow covering the country.

snowing in glasgow part 2

27th November 2010, 9.50am

and eleven months ago...

revisiting An Caisteal

After my revisiting Strontian post recently, I thought about those other places I've repeatedly found myself in over time, places of regular pilgrimage or simply habitual return, and I thought about how I've found myself making the "same" photograph on the summit of An Caisteal, a Munro near Crianlairich. I've climbed this hill 7 times now, and by the 5th time, realised I'd begun to make roughly the same summit photograph, looking in the same direction towards Beinn Chabhair and the Arrochar Alps, the weather conditions the main variant between them. Once this realisation had been made, I resolved to continue to make more images on subsequent walks up the mountain.

Co-incidentally, I visited a few exhibitions in Edinburgh yesterday and was also struck by the interesting Alexander & Susan Maris show at Stills, where Alexander Maris also returned to and remade photographs from places he'd visited in his past, also often in mountainous, wild terrain. I think there's something akin to my own process here, something altogether more intimate, more biographical, than that found in Mark Klett's formalised re-photographic survey.

Here are the images I made on An Caisteal. There may well have been more images had I been carrying a camera on the first climbs, though I seem to remember only having a low grade mobile phone camera with me on those occasions, and which I rarely used.

27.11.05

4.3.06

3.4.07

 24.3.08

Clearly from the images, I've a fondness for climbing it in the snow. Perhaps it's familiarity and close proximity to home make it a good winter hill for me when the daylight hours are short, though I recollect the earlier ascents were in fine warm weather and took in neighboring Beinn a' Chroin too.

Re-creation as recreation.

the living mountain

I finished reading Nan Sherperd's slim volume 'The Living Mountain' today.  It's one of those books which you want to savour, and at a mere 84 pages, you know will be over before you really want it to be. Sensing it's condensed riches, I've read it really rather slowly over the last month.

Her only non fiction book, it is a meditation on the Cairngorm mountains and of the experience of walking and getting to know it's peaks, corries and the plateau. It's an amazingly well observed, perceptive and thoughtful consideration of the ontological aspects of spending prolonged periods in wild spaces. This work was written in the 1940's (though not published until much later by Shepherd in 1977 when she was an old woman) and was, for it's time, a prescient book that still resonates today. It stands apart from much mountain literature written by men (although WH Murray would seem to be a kindred spirit) in the way that it explores the nuances of the whole experience of being in the Cairngorms rather than on simply conquering peaks. As a woman walking (often solitarily), bivvying, and camping on the tops for days on end at a time when hillwalking wasn't the mainstream pastime that it is today, Shepherd must have seemed to be a bit of a radical adventurer.  Having her own income (she was a lecturer in English at the Aberdeen College of Education after graduation from Aberdeen University until retirement), her working life echoes the sentiments in Virginia Woolf's 'A Room of One's Own'. She has often been compared to Lewis Grassic Gibbon in terms of the writing style and content in her fiction, though hers is a more emancipatory vision of modern women finding a way out of the drudgery of unliberated life. Her circumstances did permit her to be able to spend many thousands of hours exploring and deepening her knowledge of the Cairngorms which she grew to love so much.

I suspect my own relative familiarity (I read some of it with a 1:25000 OS Explorer map at my side recalling my personal experiences of the locations) with the plateau extended my own enjoyment of the book immensely, knowing how an understanding of the Cairngorms doesn't usually reveal itself upon ones first visit there, unlike the more spectacular western peaks in Scotland. From afar, the Cairngorms actually look a little dull, and their mass is difficult to appreciate. Walking on them on a fine day, they seem benign, and the ground below your feet stretches out for long miles so that the drama of a vertiginous drop doesn't often surprise. However, repeated visits seem to offer up a different appreciation where the vast distances one is required to walk allow for an experience where one begins to make connections with a bodily connection to place, where one feels a greater sense of 'being' in relation to the land.

Of course, one of the most defining characteristic of the Cairngorms is the extreme severity of the climate which it experiences. It is the only place in the UK where it's climate is considered sub-arctic, and the types of flora and fauna present testify to this. Mists can come in unexpectedly and the uniformly high altutide of the land make navigation particularly difficult. In winter, judging distances in whiteout conditions is treacherous and many have died over the years through navigational error - sometimes remarkably close to safety.

Shepherd acknowledges the various terrors, but mostly joys, of this remarkable landscape. In her observations, through chapters headed The Plateau, The Recesses, The Group, Water, Frost and Snow, Air and Light, Life: The Plants, Life: Birds Animals Insects, Life: Man, Sleep, The Senses, & Being, she breaks down and analyses the constituent parts of the mountain experience in a way where the interconnectedness of sensation are made more lucid. She notices small details and enlivens our appreciation of natural phenomena with botanical and geological precision.

Sometimes a smooth portion of stream is covered with a thin coat of ice that, not quite meeting in the middle, shows the level of the water several inches below; since the freezing began, the water upstream has frozen and less water is flowing.

and

At one point (I have heard of it nowhere else) near the exit of a loch, the peculiar motion of the current among ice floes has woven the thousands of floating pine needles into compacted balls, so intricately intertwined that their symmetrical shape is permanently retained. They can be lifted out of the water and kept for years, a botanical puzzle to those who have not been told the secret of their formation.

In Sleep, she contrasts the experience of physically traversing the land with that of the quiet stillness found through sleeping on the high plateau and experiencing awakening in such a place.


I can teach my body many skills by which to learn the nature of the mountain. One of the most compelling is quiescence. No one knows the mountain completely who has not slept on it. As one slips over into sleep, the mind grows limpid; the body melts; perception alone remains. One neither thinks, nor desires, nor remembers, but dwells in pure initimacy with the tangible world.

Shepherd's approach, desipte the specifics of it's Cairngorm location, isn't parochial, but could be seen to reflect the work of Maurice Merlau-Ponty and the study of phenomenology, and shares much with Zen Buddhism in the appreciation of being in inanimate things.

She says, in the penultimate chapter, Senses, when trying to explain the fascination and love for high places:


It is, as with all creation, matter impregnated with mind: but the resultant issue is a living spirit, a glow in the consciousness, that perishes when the glow is dead. It is something snatched from non-being, that shadow which creeps in on us continuously and can be held off by continuous creative act. So, simply to look on anything, such as a mountain, with the love that penetrates to it's essesnce, is to widen the domain of being in the vastness of non-being. Man has no other reason for his existence.

..and in the final chapter Being:

Here then, may be lived a life so pure, so untouched by any mode of apprehension but their own, that the body may be said to think. Each sense heightened to its most exquisite awareness, is in itself total experience. This is the innocence we have lost, living in one sense at a time to live all the way through.

and..

Walking thus, hour after hour, the senses keyed, one walks the flesh transparent. But no metaphor, transparent, or light as air, is adequate. The body is not made negligible but paramount.