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

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