Monday 24 December 2012

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.