1876
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Out of the silence of centuries, discrete words will, one day, surface for us …
Edmond Jabès
text without words
unheard conversation
solitaire
(listening to the light)
setting sun reflects from a neighbour’s window
fading white wall whisper
shadow play, apple tree, evening breeze
spaces of silence
allow new possibilities
beyond the edgeless shape
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Now playing: Steve Roden & Stephen Vitiello – The Spaces Contained in Each
Island of residual
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It was only for a few days. The immediate sensory world became a continuum of white and grey. A familiar world made strange. Almost all colour, leached from the field of vision and imagination.
White
Grey
Monochrome
By coincidence, Han Kang’s The White Book is on the reading pile. Other texts from the white world call from the bookshelf: Peter Davidson’s The Idea of North; Nancy Campbell’s Disko Bay; Barry Lopez’s Arctic Dreams; the ‘white day’ in Sophie Calle’s ‘Chromatic Diet’ from Double Game.
Watching the swirling snow outside, an incongruous memory of sitting on a baking hot bus travelling from London to Barcelona. I was reading Kenneth White’s travels in Labrador recounted in The Blue Road. I read blue but felt the white world. As if holding a cooling block of ice in my hands as the Spanish sun burnt through the window.
The Idea of White
Encounters at the White Edge
White Dreams
White Food
White in the White World
Mika, our cat, sits on my knee. A rush of grey flecked, white fur becomes a tactile landscape of frozen ice, glaciers and crevasses. The white world.
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Then, almost as suddenly as it arrived, the thaw began. More and more of the temporary, subnivean world revealing itself each day. Colour returning. Fresh, vibrant, as if newly painted. The last ice crystals, sprinkled on living worlds of green.
Islands of residual reverse. White dissolves.
To see a new history of colour in the silent stories of the old weathered walls.
Formed
Quarried
Placed
Patched
The eternal cycles continue …
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Now playing: Thomas Köner – Nuuk
Lost coordinates:
Where untold stories bleed
into images beyond words
Where unheard sounds
of the spectral field become
entangled
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Now playing: Jim O’Rourke – Disengage
All tracks, footprints, paths were gone. Buried. He had pitched a tent on arriving: how come it had not blown off? From inside, he watched the complex improvisations of the wind. He heard how it suddenly laughed with the sand, danced with the sand, amused and irritated the sand, amused itself and got irritated with the number of grains. And finally, it became, in its desire, a mad sand god dragging monstrous winged creatures off to conquer the world.
Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions
In a few steps, a familiar world made strange
Disorientation
Elemental vortex
Snow on sand births alien forms
Flecked horizon of Rothko greys
From a very brief walk along the shore at Limekilns, Fife on 28th February 2018, around 15.00. An encounter with the “Beast from the East”.
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Now playing: Chaya Czernowin – Wintersongs
The low instruments were moving like the slow search of a plant towards light – CZ
Aerated Waters
Marchmont, Edinburgh
P e r s e v e r e
P e r s e v e r e
P e r s e v e r e
P e r s e v e r e
Marchmont, Edinburgh
Not so Chic
West End, Edinburgh
‘Zona AntiFascista’
Patrick Geddes Steps, Old Town, Edinburgh
‘Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance, to the radio’
Newington, Edinburgh
ARE
U
JELLI
Cowgate, Edinburgh
When the inside becomes the outside
New Town, Edinburgh*
Now playing: Jon Hassell – City: Works of Fiction
Foregrounded over the Forth
An archipelago of transitory islands
.
A solitary tree, inhabits the island
Island of the hidden lagoon
(Love) Island of the heart
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Now playing: Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto – Love, Love
.
The call precedes
the chorus of arrival
A delphian chant
from an ancient score
We can only be onlookers
Line
of the long
low
swoop
Ascending
over the Forth
Carried
on song
– Fading – – faint
– – – far – – – – beyond
Our horizon
We can only be onlookers
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Limekilns, 4th February 2018
On the last day of 2017, the impossible textures of the sea
.
.
A full moon emerges
rises, observes
.
.
Constant flux underfoot, new paths
.
Sustaining coastal energies, wind, sea spray
changing colours of the tide
Cloud and sea – a mirrored
chiaroscuro dissolving
the lip of land
Grounded exhalation
.
.
silhouettes of breath
etched on the gloaming
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A week earlier – 26.12.2017
Bookends of light
fizzle into folds of darkness
Half a silver lozenge, to pluck from the sky
.
We leave it to the nightwatch(er)
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Taken from a series of short walks around the West Fife coast during the last week of 2017. Putting this together left an initial conundrum. How did I photograph a full looking moon and half moon less than a week apart? I posted the question on Twitter and thanks to Portals of London (@portalsoflondon), Jennie Murray (@lithgaelark) and MAW Holmes (@MAW_H) for the clarification. Basically I had taken a cycle at 29.5 days and halved it instead of taken a quarter to move from half to full. (new – half – full – half – new). However, possibly preferred Paul Kenny’s (@jmarmaduke) answer of alchemy.
Now playing: Ketil Bjørnstad, David Darling, Terje Rypdal, Jon Christensen – The Sea II
light / pool
flood / line
cascade / spill a
strange gravity
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Now playing: Catherine Lamb – ‘curvo totalitas’ (2016) from Yarn/Wire Currents 4
As if
a breath freezes
into veins of ice
A sketch outlined
on the silence
of darkness
From darkness
an opening eye
I
aye
Listening in:
a language
of limbs
.
Out of darkness, (slight return)
a singing ringing tree
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Now playing: John Dowland (played by John Potter, Stephen Stubbs, John Surman, Maya Homburger, Barry Guy) – In Darkness Let Me Dwell.
Murdo Eason - From Hill to Sea 