Let your eyes adjust to the dark...

Some of that Sunday art review-reading feeling has stuck with me, that coherency which somehow creates an aura around the art of being brought fully formed into the world. Maybe I should at least pretend to know (everything) about the art I am making before it arrives, but that knowledge comes at me sideways. From a chat, a blog, a list, the light. This particular work however, is already and always here. Elemental, seasonal, cyclical and simple to the point to breathtaking. Well, when the light shifts a particular way, it does mine. The work has taken her time to come into being, even though it is present every time I/we open our eyes. To know this place and the other-worldly architecture, this shelter in a field (with horses) this former gunner training ground, this filmhouse, this echo chamber. To know when the light comes from the line of trees beyond, over the roofs of the houses nearby, and setting towards the curve of Benevenagh. It is happening with help and support from pals, equally enthused and thoroughly experienced with photography as an altered state and embodied way of navigating the world. In this month of September 2021, when screens are showing events that are still hard to make sense of, whether of archival footage from twenty years ago or live streaming of turmoil and upheaval happening too fast to comprehend, visitors are restricted but welcome, to a Limavady field on the north coast, this Saturday 18/9/21. The Camera Obscura @theDome will take place for one day only, and without overwhelming the metaphorical, the experience will be both of the world as it seems, and as it actually is - shifting, upside down and back to front.

Camera Obscura @theDome supported by Binevenagh Coastal & Lowlands Landscape Partnership. Collaboration with and thanks to Martha McCulloch, Harry Kerr, Gail Mahon, Grace McAlister and Caolan McDermott.

Genesis Lost exhibition, Artlink (2019) © Mhairi Sutherland Photography by Martha McCulloch

PS: Mother's Day

‘It is a frightful pass of a quarter of a mile’ so begins a 17th century description of this place in the Glenties district of Donegal. The gloomy, tentative travel writer continues; ‘the descent of the road being steep, the mountain rising over it to a vast height and often dropping down rocks from its abrupt precipices and the no less frightful lake below, sure to swallow up the traveller if he makes the least false step.’ Although I don’t recognise the tone of dismal horror, the descriptors of ‘vast height, abrupt precipices, lake below’ are both familiar and fleeting. Memories flash like the scudding clouds above my mother’s resting place amongst the whipping grass, high above the depth of dark water below.

Although I knew that my grandfather Manus was born at the end of the nineteenth century near Dungloe or thereabouts, when I recently began the search for his birth certificate, I was looking for the usual form of familiar townland name in the area - Meenacross perhaps, or Tully, Cruit or Craghyboyle. Getting nowhere, I was mystified - surely our silent ceremonies, taking place over the years and decades, scattering ashes through the air and falling to the earth, occasionally whirling in the wind - couldn’t have been in the wrong place? My turquoise-eyed, gentle grandfather spoke very little about his early life, silent mostly about his origins, except finally, in his wish to return. Over time, we also brought his daughter - my mother Isabella, her brother Peter and lastly, his own wife, Hannah, from Newhaven on the edge of Leith, to this place.

Scrolling through townland variations and genealogy sites, exasperated, all of a sudden a townland with a sub-title caught my eye - ‘this townland is known as Lough Salt’. Not only had I found the right place, but the homeplace itself was named for this body of water, these cliffs, steep-sided and rising sheer from the waters below. Incredibly, it seemed to me, my grandfather’s birthplace, in his mother and father’s home, was here certified, written in a looping, copperplate hand as ‘Lough Salt’.

Lough Salt road, graphite drawing from polaroid, 2021 © Mhairi Sutherland

B - Bluster, Borealis, Breaker, Brine

Our girl, a bit like lockdown, is still with us. A little worse for wear, having been tossed and turned to face the head of the Lough (Landfall Leeward Low Tide Lunar Bow) rising and falling with higher tides but still holding fast. There have been calls for tractors and chains - apparently fifty tons is a trifling weight to pull from the glar (Gleam Glint Glitter Gloaming) of the Foyle - to set her on course for the east, to be profitably clustered around the mythology of that unsinkable ship, gone unheeded as yet. The hauntology of the Day Dawn (Dayspring Daybreak Drizzle Dusk) her inbetween-ness, fluid and solid, river and mud, vessel and wreck, local and visitor, is perhaps what makes heads still turn, absentmindedly checking the waters (Wavelet White Horses Whirlpool Windward) for a tilting mast and now familiarly solid yet ethereal shape.

Day Dawn from Portavogie is a biblical name in the Scots maritime tradition. Alternating with family names, and when the Admiralty sequestered fishing boats in the wartime past, alphabetical terms describing weather, climatic and atmospheric conditions were used. The name Day Dawn, fittingly enough straddles both traditions, acknowledging day’s beginning as spiritual wish and earthly movement. The institutional naming is perhaps unintentionally but deeply poetic, resonant and concise as the Shipping forecast, sparky and tumbling as a nonsense verse. A taxonomy of over 200 words conjure up pictures and sensations of the air (Afterglow Airpocket Astral Atmosphere) the sea (Scintilla Seabreeze Squall Stormwrack) and the sky (St Elmos’ Fire Sunburst Sunspot Starlight).

We have just passed the paused time of the Solstice, marking the astrological beginning of Winter and the final full, Cold Moon of the year has risen in a clear sky. Also known as the Long Night’s Moon, the 13th full moon of this year and the last of the decade. The New Year (Neaptide Nebula New Moon Nimbus) is almost here, this Hogmanay night that faces backwards and forwards. In this year, perhaps unlike any other in our lifetime - although plague and pestilence have been a feature of many others - there is a sense, and hopefully a growing understanding and care, towards just how much our lives are still intertwined with the worldliness of earth, sea and sky.

So here’s to wonder and worldliness - Waterfall Watershed Watersmeet Whitecloud Windhowl Windshift Will O’ the Wisp

The Haar, the Sunrise, the Birds and the Boat

She endures. Despite the Harvest Moon tides and a variety of dinghies, assorted floats - although less sand shovelling and anchor realignment - our ghost ship remains, albeit listing a little more gracefully to the left, hunkering down perhaps, for a season of winter storms and a bit of a lashing. Nothing that she hasn’t weathered before though, criss-crossing the banks and troughs of the Irish Sea and the ins and outs of the Ards peninsula. Photos of the younger Day Dawn at work can be unearthed online (above @ J McPhee, 2009) looking stoic and purposeful, with the same spirit that is keeping her, against the odds, just about afloat. Fittingly enough, I sometimes see her at daybreak, when there’s a haar rising from the lough, a darkened, slumbering shape just before the sun breaks over the skyline to the edge of the bridge.

Later, if I’m out drawing, there are mammies and wains making their way down to see their ‘pirate ship’, all heads turning to the haunted waters. Have found a good spot to draw. Neither too visible on the path nor stuck out on the glar, but in-between, tucked into the grassy edge just above an upturned box belonging to the ‘Portavogie Fishermans’ Association’ warning of ‘no unauthorised use’. Here to sketch her I am distracted by the birds. Crows, curlews and gulls, one fastidously turning over a flat stone, another making little stomping steps in the mud to flush out something tasty. I haven’t seen them onboard yet, they know she’s still alive. No fish on the decks but no hulking carcass either, the birds are ordinary yet glorious, a bit like the Day Dawn herself.

In this month of two full moons - Harvest and Hunter - the fourth planet from the sun has already made a portentous and rare, rusty-red appearance. As coincidence slides into strangeness, the Hunter’s moon is also a Blue moon which will rise on the night of All Hallow’s Eve. On the ground, the city will feel and look different this year, with less Halloween bling, visitors and costumed crowds. But above and around us the world is shifting and sorting, restless, maybe revelatory. The in-betweenness of the time that’s in it, the gloaming and the ghost ship that has come as a gift to the city, who knows whether as warning or promise. Enduring. Just about.

Day Dawn, Portavogie NI82, Lough Foyle, ink and pencil on paper @ Mhairi Sutherland October 2020

Flight No. BA662

Having received an invitation for an artists’ residency from NiMAC, a contemporary arts organisation with a critical photography locus in Nicosia, I was looking forward to spending time on the island of Cyprus, at the start of the Mediterranean spring. Having seen my work as part of the Drone Vision: Warfare, Protest, Surveillance project and exhibition in the Hasselblad Foundation, Gothenburg, May 2018 the curator suggested that my interests in the spaces of warfare and the imperial would be apt in the socio-political context of Cyprus. The island has long attracted tourists for its micro-climate of warm springs and hot summers, extending into winter. As an artist with an interest in the sun, albeit UV light and its photo-image developing properties rather than in beach towel mode, my proposal was to explore some of the earliest photographic depictions of the island, those made by Victorian photographer John Thompson in 1878. Dating from the beginning of British colonisation of the island, the images could arguably be said to have laid the foundations of the tourist trade, and so it was a neat double-knot of concerns and contradictions that I would be unravelling during the month of April in Nicosia.

 Like many best laid plans for the Spring of 2020 it didn’t happen. Flight BA662 from Belfast to Larnaca may or may not have taken off, empty of passengers. Cypriot and other European borders closed. Global soundings grew louder and more insistent, and lockdown started with sensations of bewilderment, change and fear rolling over our ordinary lives like a slow tsunami. When I called my sister on the last day of March she answered from an ambulance, already masked and gowned and on her way to the Covid care at Sligo University Hospital. It would be three weeks before she left ICU and another seven before finally leaving the hospital, one of the lucky ones.

John Thompson was a Victorian photographer (1837 – 1921) from Edinburgh, best known for his travels and photographic images made throughout Asia, including Siam, Cambodia, Vietnam and many areas of China. Unusually for the time, he was abroad as a professional photographer rather than as an official or a missionary. In 1878 the British took control from the ruling Ottoman empire of the island of Cyprus, which became a British Protectorate. Thompson was the first photographer to travel and take photographs of this newest British colony, produced as a two-volume album Travels Through Cyprus With My Camera in the Autumn of 1878. Thompson’s oeuvre is widely and justifiably acclaimed in terms of the geographic scope, photographic innovation and sheer aesthetic power of the collections. Some of the most exquisitely crafted ethnographic and travel photographs ever made, and all the more compelling for their part in early photographic history, with its technical and mobility challenges. 

Such accomplishment however, cannot be the complete story of these images. In the sense that Azoulay says that neither the addressed – the historical and contemporary viewers, not the addressee - the photographed subjects, nor indeed the photographer herself, can claim the only true, or full meaning of the image. Interestingly it falls to us, if we so wish, to explore and add to the multiplicity of meanings presented by such images. Thompson, experienced in photographing and presenting images of remote people and places, seems to approach his subjects in a briskly comprehensive way, displaying the signifiers of a remotely exotic Mediterranean island; indigenous people, men and women in traditional clothing, ruins and traces of previous antiquities, a harbour, a city gate and transport by donkey. That we recognise these signifiers of authenticity. or rather what they signify as a dominant, colonised version of what ‘authentic’ may look like, is testament to the influence of early and enduring framing of appropriated lands and peoples, through reproducible and captioned photographic images.

I have lots of questions around Travels Through Cyprus With My Camera in the Autumn of 1878. Cyprus was the last foreign expedition for Thompson before being appointed as effectively the Photographer-Royal by Queen Victoria and settling in London with his family. Did he visit because the island became a British Protectorate? Had he been before? Was he commissioned to take the photographs, or just saw an opportunity? Did Thompson want to be the ‘first’ photographer of Cyprus, similar to the trajectory he had taken through parts of Asia and China? What, if any, photographs had been taken of the island and its people before Thompson. These questions will be explored primarily within the photographs themselves, both positive and negative, and hopefully with access to a hard copy album including captioning and narration by Thompson. Thompson’s collection of wet-collodian glass plates is housed in the Wellcome Trust Library and is toured regularly, nationally and internationally.

Credit: The Wellcome Library, photographer John Thompson, 1878

Even viewed online, the prints are exquisite, the negatives equally compelling. As the original impression on the plate, unmediated by later darkroom manipulation, their reversed, mirrored image is directly connected to our physiology of vision. They also ‘reverse’ the quality of a typical Thompson photograph, rich in detail and information. The negs are muted and withheld, nebulous, framed with makers and identifying numbers. Another reason is coincidental, or synchronistic or perhaps even talismanic. For some of the time I had expected to be in Cyprus, I spent in self-isolation, in a relative’s vacant home. Photographs were dotted about, in frames, tucked into the edges of pictures and mirrors, mismatched bundles of soft, glowing early kodacolour and smaller, curled black and white prints. Sifting through the photographs I found a bunch of negatives, bigger than 35ml and without their partnering positives. These standing, reclining and linked women and girls have a corresponding quality of obfuscation, withheld but activated by a sense of originality. Their blurred and smudged surfaces still hint at a story, suspended and speculative. Distanced by time and intention, one distinguished photographer chronicling the colonial, the unknown other snapping at family life but unwittingly, also photographing within a related colonial framework. One set of questions, perhaps, will unfold into another.

‘Reclining Woman’ N Ireland/Donegal, date + photographer unknown, circa 1960’s

‘Standing Woman’ N Ireland/Donegal, date + photographer unknown, circa 1960’s

‘Girls in back garden’ Derry, N Ireland, date + photographer unknown, circa 1950’s

Meeting the Moon.

July 2019, the month when the Apollo 11 manned flight to the Moon took place 50 years ago, with the inevitable widespread coverage of all things lunar. In July 2017, two years ago, I was visiting the Hasselblad and the Moon permanent exhibition in the Gothenburg Museum of Art. Arriving in Sweden with only a few days to divide up between Gothenburg and travel to Linköping, I knew that there was only a short time for research in the excellent Hasselblad Foundation photographic archive and library. With a quantity of publications to work through, assisted by the deeply knowledgeable librarian Elsa Modin, having enough time to view the historic cameras was not really on my list. But by the end of day one my pile of books was shrinking nicely, and when Elsa quietly suggested to myself and Marta, another researcher, that she could show us the cameras and give a tour of the Hasselblad and the Moon exhibition in the gallery the following day, the opportunity seamlessly became part of the research priorities.

I was already feeling incredibly fortunate to be one of the small number of shortlisted artists supported by an award for my proposal to research the relationship between SAAB aerospace and aspects of Swedish militarism, as part of the Drone Vision: Warfare, Surveillance, Protest project. And as Victor Hasselblad had previously made a military camera for the Swedish Air Force, a predecessor for the cameras taken to the moon, the connections between aerial reconnaissance and vertical viewing practices were fully encapsulated within the historic HB cameras.

 So awe and wonder were added to fortunate, as Elsa told us the story of the moon cameras, of Irna Hasselblad’s contribution as well as Victor’s, as we looked at the back of a camera with ‘sun set + rise’ hand-written on it, together with the F-stops used, at a gold-plated camera, and at the exhibition which includes ornithology photographs but no military camera. But ambivalence too, about the cameras that created images that let us see the surface of the moon, and the vulnerability of our own planet, seen from space for the first time.

That perspective, in this month which commemorates the events of 50 years ago, has generated much rhetoric around greatness and achievement, both headlines and behind the scenes stories. Curiously, considering the cascade of tech developments either initiated or stimulated into production as a result of that space race to the moon, there has been scant critical discourse around that unique and potentially radical perspective. Apart from the hoax and conspiracy theories, there is precious little deviance from the master narrative of advancement and progress. The stratospheric surveillance and systems of verticalised warfare, including drones, all first cousins of the Apollo missions, the arguments about which has been muted amongst the clamour of celebration. When the fuss has died down, maybe time to raise those dissenting voices?

Back of one of the HB Moon cameras. (2017) Copyright the artist.

Gold-plated HB camera. (2017) Copyright the artist.

The Dome. Landscapes of strange.

It was a process of mapping, driving and happenstance that got me across various barriers and into the Dome itself. Supported by an award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, much of my summer of 2018 was spent photographing, drawing and filming in the landscape and in and around the architecture of the Trainer Dome, part of the former WW2 Limavady airfield and military estate. This summer I am revisiting the materials, getting ready for an exhibition in Artlink, Fort Dunree October 2019. My research hadn’t exactly pinpointed the location, but there was a general area that seemed accessible, and I was sure that it was around the next corner, or roundabout, or other side of something…it wasn’t. For such large and compelling sci-fi-like structure it is remarkably well concealed, and even more well defended against a casual visitor and or intruders. The building is located near Aghanloo, just outside Limavady, Northern Ireland and was originally built as a Trainer Dome, one of around 40 erected throughout the UK during the early 1940’s. They were the first architectures to be designed and built specifically for the projection of moving film for target practice by trainee anti-aircraft gunners, and as such are the concrete forerunners of Imax cinema, VR and gaming technologies. The circular dome surface allowed the projected aircraft to give an impression of real time flying across a day and night sky, with gunners operating a firing mechanism, guns minus live ammunition, from the ground area inside the Dome.

Trainer Dome, getting closer. (2017) Copyright the artist.