Category: Signs and Signifiers

Transitory Islands

 .

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

≈≈≈

The ‘Transitory Islands’ pic was a fairly random phone shot from crossing the Forth Rail Bridge by train – a journey undertaken many times. Perhaps this chance encounter pulled something, initially unseen, out of these raindrops:
Serendipitous encounter No. 1: (On twitter @gawanmac asked: “it just me, or is that archipelago humpback-shaped?” A delicious coincidence as a number of humpback whales had been seen in the River Forth that very week). Is that also a gull masquerading as an eye?
Serendipitous encounter No. 2: playing Julian Priester’s Love, Love and drawn to the cover which I hadn’t really looked at closely before. A view reminiscent of the outlook, crossing the Forth Rail Bridge by train, where the gulls are often seen flying below you.  Some disturbance in the water, have we just missed a humpback whale breaching?

Now playing: Julian Priester Pepo Mtoto – Love, Love

We Can Only Be Onlookers

.

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

 

≈≈≈

Limekilns, 4th February 2018

The Surface is a Zone of Encounter (An Assemblage)

I think that light makes material space … light is really the primary form of our habitation and makes surfaces come to life.

The surface holds what we project into it. It is an active site of exchange between subject and object.

Giuliana Bruno

 

Two sides of the border

Cleaved

Landscape

    of mark making

 

 

———->

Lines of travel

<———-

 

 

Whilst waiting

eye follows line

of divide    –  lit

spill      on surface

softening shapes

of solid geometry

 

 

Celestial movement in concrete

Cascade of perseids?

Constellations and star signs?

 

 

Whorl

Eye

Portal

 

 

From the atlas of green worlds and frozen seas

 

 

From the atlas of mutant landscapes

(Oracle?)

 

 

Where the striped fish, with no name, shoal in the ocean of lambent light

 

 

Emerging language: futurescape

(in process)

 

 

The point at which surface folds

New ecological imaginaries

Ambivalence of the non-human world

 

 

When the colour & texture of the sky triggers a memory of James Turrell in the Museu Colecção Berardo, Lisbon.

 

Dream:

High sun burns over thin snow. The very last snowball harvest.

 

New languages of underfoot

 

 

Spectrum edge

Light cuts

 

 

Interiors of darkness

Draped, infolding

 

.

Out of darkness

a huddle of shadows

settle to stillness

.

From the silence

quiet violence

of a whispered judgement

.

.

Material Surface / Mental Space

Optic / Haptic

Interior / Exterior

Local / Global

Past / Present

Present / Future

Public / Private

Found / Lost

≈≈≈

Now playing: Lawrence English – ‘A Surface for Everything’ from A Colour for Autumn.

Reference:

Giuliana Bruno,  Surface: Matters of Aesthetics, Materiality, and Media (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2014).

Photographs from:  Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, Koganei Park, Koganei, Tokyo; Meiji Shrine, Tokyo; Rosyth Station; Inverkeithing Station; Grounds of The Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art; Abandoned railway carriage, Turnhouse Road, Edinburgh; Fife Coastal Path; Museu Colecção Berardo; Rosyth Churchyard; Lisbon; South Bridge, Edinburgh; Shinjuku, Tokyo; House Interior; Koganei, Tokyo.

On the Other Side of the Castle

Youtz / twilight / twig / antenna

On the other side of the castle

Argyle House, Edinburgh

Oblique rain

fall     in the glitch

land   (e)scape(s)

≈

Now playing: The Bug vs Earth – ‘Other Side of the World’ from Concrete Desert.

Call and Response

the mist

the call

the fall

the mist …

=========

Later

(with headphones)

=========

The missed      call

The Fall

the mist …

(Blindness, Peel Session)

 

Twa Ools / Trees

Call of the rain-smeared cobbles

(Rose Lane)

Nocturne

≈

St Andrews, March 2017

Spectral Dreams of the City Stones

 A dream in masonry and living rock

Robert Louis Stevenson

the habit of dreaming and the ability to dream are primordial

Fernando Pessoa

dscn5420-001

.

adrift

casting a line

to pull down

the stars

.

dscn5448

.

at the threshold

of hearing, sounds

of the city, stored

in the stones

.

dscn5447

.

thought bubble

of the white dove

 

fractured figments

of translation – PA?

.

dscn5444-001

.

dazzle me

with dreams

of a kinder

kind of blue

.

dscn5441-001

.

even electrons

get lost

in the forest

    (scratch)    —–>

this way

 

≈≈≈

From a walk through the New Town of Edinburgh on 14th January 2017.

(Edinburgh’s) buildings are dominated by locally quarried sandstone so that the stone-built heritage literally grows out of the bedrock foundations of the city. (McMillan and Hyslop, The City of Edinburgh: Landscape and Stone, 2008).

Now playing: Morton Feldman – Triadic Memories (Steffen Schleiermacher).