Chasing Fog

I had no intention of making these images, but when I awoke to find a dense fog on the morning of the winter solstice, I knew that a rare opportunity had arisen to add to work made in fog.

I always  get that sense of urgency with fog, almost a responsibility to work, at least as far as this project is concerned. Chasing fog can be a photographic nightmare. 

Early morning effort to get to a site, prompted as soon as you see the fog, only to find that  when you get there it has lifted, is frustrating and time consuming. So when there is success there are often more instances of failure behind it than is normally the case.

Elusive as it is though, it has particular relevance to In Flux. Transient and ephemeral, it serves to highlight the changes that weather brings to land. It also functions as a way of investigating perceptions of the individual  in environments.

 A modified diary extract follows about the experience of  fog;

In the late autumn and winter a fog occasionally descends on the land. I was drawn to this phenomenon and wanted to experience inhabiting a study site during a fog and making work.
My motivation was to encounter a site in a changed state, other than when conditions were “normal” in terms of my visual perception of the space. I also wanted to experience a familiar space  in a new way, to renew my experience and create another layer of understanding and interpretation  of the experience of land.

The fog envelopes and hides the artist, making work, from outsiders. The space is visually enclosed and with distance the haze intercedes. Spatial awareness is dimmed. Vision may actually be closer to perception in a fog, particularly one which shifts in density, mimicking or mirroring the way our attention shifts from the near-middle and strains to see the distant.There are fewer possible interactions with the distant. No dangerous or pleasurable encounters possible. No resources to hand. Distant perception is less important, except for orientation in the wider landscape. We look to the distant to either see where we have been or may wish to go in the future. Therefore distance has a temporal quality, implying the past or future of the actor, whereas near equates with the now, with inhabiting space, identifying objects and spaces between objects. Photographs in this kind of fog tend to illustrate the perception of the distant as less relevant, literally  obscuring the far and enclosing that which is closer.

 




























When the middle ground is visible the fog encapsulates the individual inside a mobile hemisphere that follows where he or she moves. Encased it can be a comfortable space, offering silence, stillness and privacy. The lack of detail allows for ambiguities of perception in a literal sense, the degree of fog is connected to the degree of ambiguity. My experience of  inhabiting a site in fog usually falls into this category. I became fascinated by the margins of my vision, the transition between the known and the unknown and unseen. I see this as  an opportunity to make works that take advantage of marginal ambiguity presented by the fog. It is a way of investigating the perceptions I experience of the near and far directly through visualisation, using fog and it's qualities to mirror perceptual experience.


In a dense fog there is an unsettling disorientation that brings fear, of getting lost and vulnerability from the unseen foe. We are visually disconnected from the landscape, cannot interact with it and therefore cannot be comfortable in that space, in a way that we are usually accustomed to.  Our visual sense is impaired by external forces in a similar way to an actual bodily impairment. Encounters like this are very rare in my experience and yet to be worked in.

These are all the works made on this occasion. I will edit them for In Flux. The final two images below represent an interesting combination of one of the images from this shoot and an earlier experience. Placing these two unconnected locations together offer some further readings through similarities of composition and conditions.

Forms of comparisons, particularly spatio-temporal ones, between sites, time, conditions and different methods of photographic construction, offer opportunities to  bring the flux of In Flux to light for the viewer, either of a book or exhibition.

Later additional notes on 5th July 2013

These works are all no longer part of In Flux and have subsequently formed part of another body of work, entitled Hinterlands.

Welcome to In Flux

I am constantly asking myself questions that I investigate and communicate with through visual arts practice. This is one project of many and what is presented here was preceded by approximately three years of experimentation, one of which was undertaken as part of a Practice as Research Doctoral investigation through mainly photographic practice into relationships with land that is understood as sites in a constant state of change, In flux. 

There is no doubt that there is much contemporary anxiety about the environment, many questions are  being asked about the role of humanity in areas such as climate change and environmental degradation. Many photographers deal with these subjects in their practice. Investigating the ways that this is undertaken and subsequently framed by critics and theorists, I detected what I see as an underlying question that is not being addressed, fundamentally, how do we understand the environment as we encounter it in our everyday lives? How does the individual perceive and relate to the environment, to land? This relationship became, in this project, a question of what are the perceptual mechanisms of experiencing land. 

Key to this is understanding is the formation of connections to land that are developmental processes, constantly occurring through time. Increasingly contemporary life styles do not allow for these processes, as lives are lived away from the land, in built environments, inside and through the screen in various forms. Direct engagement is relegated to leisure time, when all to often the individual is a visitor, an outside observer, rather than one who engages in the environment through action on a regular basis.

 Land is not static, except when considered cartographically, as a point on a map, but is constantly changing. The individuals inhabiting it are also changing, moving temporally and spatially in the course of increasingly multi-centred lives. Human and non-human life, the animate and the inanimate, all impact on land and our understanding of  it in a complex matrix of interactions, all that form the essences of place and space. 

This research began by investigating the terms place and space in the work of cultural geographers, principally Tuan and Massey but also the  work of the archaeologist Tilley. This progressed to a grounding in the philosophy of phenomenology, through Husserl and Bergson to Merleau-Ponty, in an investigation of the mechanisms of perception as it relates to the environment as a temporal experience and the interpretation of it through photography and visual art. This, in turn has led to current interests in the view of relationships to the environment from an anthropological perspective drawing on the work of Ingold and of perception from a psychological perspective in the work of Arnheim. There are many other influences and sources in this research, that is ongoing. 

The purpose here in the context of this blog is not to present this background research, this is being dealt with elsewhere, but to present and discuss the practice that arises from and interacts with ideas and contextual research. It will on occasion discuss ideas drawn from research, particularly how it has formed and influenced the strategies of  creative processes.

Tree-fall #1 Version #1