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
Murdo Eason - From Hill to Sea 