haiku

Reflected
in the dragonfly's eye -
mountains.

ISSA

a study

John Ruskin

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.

the reverend removed

The Reverend Removed : after Raeburn, L Punton, Dec 2011

threshold concepts in fine art

Jim has posted on his blog some research we did together into threshold concepts within fine art.

explosions on ice

photograph courtesy of Scott Polar Research Institute, Cambridge.

walking with Béla Tarr

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.

burning mountain part 2

I mentioned in an earlier blog post that during my recent trip to Australia, I was hoping to visit a place known colloquially as "burning mountain". Well, I did manage to get there, and indeed, to climb the mountain. On Mount Wingen, (it's official name) there's an underground coal seam that has been burning for around 6000 years and which currently reaches the surface almost at the very summit of the hill, a fortunate occurrence it seems. Long thought to be a volcano, it's only relatively recently that it's existence as the oldest naturally burning coal seam on earth has been confirmed.

The term mountain is, to my Munro climbing eyes, a bit of a misnomer as the summit can be reached by a well constructed pathway in about an hour. As you reach the summit field, you reach a raised deck designed to keep you off of the friable, brittle earth. There's no smoke dramatically billowing from holes; only a gentle warmth in the air. There's a strangely pleasant and mild smell of sulphur that reminds me of the glass jar filled cabinets of the chemistry lab of my school days, and an awareness that the ground resembles the burnt out embers of a coal fire. Bird song, exotic to my Northern European ears, resounds all around.

Once you ignore the warnings and leave the safety of the deck, the true nature of the hill begins to reveal itself. The smell of sulphur stays the same and you become quite acclimatised to it, but you gradually notice more that the ground is not quite the same as anywhere else you've ever been. Cracks and chasms open up where the seam has riven open the ground during the burning head's passage years earlier. The sharp, brittle, almost hollow nature of the ground is confirmed as your feet crunch upon the pale burnt out embers as you pass slowly over them. Then you begin to really sense heat, more than just mere warmth. A heat haze rises from patches of the ground, sometimes only very faintly. There are kangaroo droppings where the ground is pleasantly warm, the animals clearly using the hill top to find solace during the night. And finally, as you've wandered the summit field, you edge over to one side to discover the burning head of the seam and are met by a fierce heat. Not so hot that you can't stand upon it, but hot enough that you wonder whether the soles of your shoes will melt a little, and that radiates an intense heat towards your face that quickly becomes oppressive. I film the experience with my camera, and the heat at this climax causes my lens to flare in bursts. I look down at my footprints and think of Armstrong and Aldrin's on the lunar surface, the texture seeming so oddly similar.

Of course, most will also have noticed on the way up that the ground moves gradually from being fertile and populated by vegetation, to a forest floor where not much grows, the burning head having passed below in the past. Those more observant and educated in such things may recognise a shift in the types of gum trees that grow along the way from eucalyptus that thrives in temperate areas, to those more commonly seen on the fringes of the outback and capable of withstanding greater heat and aridity.

(note, detail of heat haze in the above video is more clearly visible when viewed on Vimeo)

the invisible is real

Ian Whittlesea : "Poster - Walter De Maria"

coffee grounds

Back from Sydney, Jim and I showed the collaborative work we made in Australia at Vault Art the other weekend. For that we exhibited 12 of the 28 images we made in our series "coffee grounds". They were created by photographing the remains of our coffee left in the bottom of our cup each morning and made negative, although other than that, there is very little manipulation.

Here is a selection from the series.

Constable

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

dark cloud constellations : the emu and coalsack nebula

our campsite in the bush near Gilgandra

Camping in a forest of eucalyptus in NSW, we looked up through a clearing to find the most wonderful night sky with stars of exceptional clarity and brightness. This low-tech image below, a 60 second exposure where I left the camera on the ground, shows the varied colours of the stars. What it doesn't convey however, is the dark area in the milky way. Initially surprised by how clear the milky way was in the night sky, we suddenly noticed that there was a significant amount of darkness within it which I've subsequently learned is called the coalsack nebula and the "Emu" - an aboriginal constellation consisting of darkness rather than stars.

the sky in the southern hemisphere photographed near Gilgandra, NSW.
(click on the image to enlarge enough to view) 

Like it's northern hemisphere counterpart the great rift, the Emu is an area of darkness in the night sky that makes it evident that the night sky is never really totally dark. However, these dark areas are not voids, or absences; the dark patches are star forming regions in our galaxy. Proto-stars (newly forming stars) generate molecular dust that doesn't allow light in the visible spectrum to shine through. However, with the advancements of telescopes that see in different light waves (e.g. x-rays or infrared) we now know that there is activity in these dark areas. This too reminds me of my earlier post on a new man made light absorbing material.

the "emu" (image by D. Smith)

I feel I've a lot to learn about aboriginal culture, and being here has sparked an interest in it for me. But I'm especially fascinated to learn of a culture that values the dark spaces, the interstices of the sky as much as it's light and objects.

We were en route to the Warrumbungles and Coonabarabran which have two observatories, being at a higher elevation (1160m above sea level) than the surrounding countryside. Clearly, this is good sky-watching country. Sliding Spring Observatory is housed inside the Warrumbungle National Park, and is Australia's largest optical astronomy research facility.

Back to solid visible objects, as you drive along the road to Coonabarabran, you pass various models of the planets in our solar system with the 37m dome of Sliding Spring Observatory representing the sun.

"Jupiter"

These are scale models (38 million times smaller than the real thing) of the planets in our solar system with relative distances between them as you drive. It was designed to give you an idea of the vastness of the solar system. There's at least an hour and a half of driving between Jupiter and Neptune, the two planets we passed; I'd almost forgotten about it until Neptune popped up, reminding me of the huge space between them. Remembering there's only 5 minutes drive between the Sun, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars, the distances to the outer planets are phenomenally huge.

Jupiter, west of Coonabarabran

Neptune, in Gunnedah

(See also here for a post on the Guugu Yimithirr people of Northern Queensland).

Eugenius Johann Christoph Esper

Coral, Eugenius Johan Christoph Esper, c 1798

fruit bats

A short video I made in the botanical gardens in Sydney of the extraordinary colony of fruit bats. Apparently there are so many of them they are beginning to damage the trees. As the bats are a protected species, the gardeners have been given special dispensation to try to reduce/control their numbers.