Oh, You Know - Something About Framing My Shots, Or My Latest Posts, Or Fulfilling My Goals...

All Images: West Nottingham, April 2019

Much of the imagery on this Blog originates in the heart of one city or another.  At other times, the focus may be more on the suburbs.  But here, we're definitely at the very fringes of Nottingham - outside its western ring road, and right at the margin where development filters out into farmland.  

But, as others have pointed out, 'The Edgelands' are a distinct, liminal kind of territory, and just as rich in potential artistic stimuli, as the inner core of many cities.  Edgelands may be much less concentrated, frenetic, or super-heated than city centres, but they can be fascinatingly nuanced and ambiguous - often with a distinct poetry of their own.

Viewed in the right way, they can even conjure an environment in which the everyday and mundane start to feel intriguingly alien or mysteriously enchanted in some unexpected way.  This strange sector of interlocking geometry definitely felt that way, on the eerily still, and  humid day in April, when I came upon it.

Of course, if one takes a step back from all the Psychogeographic daydreaming, and thinks in purely visual terms once more, these images also provide an ideal opportunity to just indulge my love of linear geometry, with all its glorious, abstract potentiality.

It started me thinking about how, in formal or pictorial sense, a line is often just a notional boundary between two distinct portions of space, or between a space and a not-space, perhaps.  For two dimensional artists, lines are essentially a device for chopping up illusionistic space, rather than something actually perceived or definable, in the real world.  For a sculptor, however, they can become something tangible - literally delineating a portion of actual space, into which one might insert one's body, as well as one's imagination.  In a wholly found manner, that's also exactly what these goal frames are achieving - and with a pleasing complexity.

Of course, by photographing them - and presenting them via this most illusionistic of media, I am returning them to the realm of the purely pictorial.  It also occurs to me that, particularly in those three shots wholly without a background of sky or distant trees, you've pretty much got the history of Western picture-making, from Renaissance perspective, to Cubism, to geometric abstraction, playing out in a few dozen steel tubes and a patch of grass.

Back of the net...

Tunnelling In Again

West Nottingham, April 2019

I never cease to be thrilled by the immersive complexity of cities.  For a long time now, I've had a kind of fantasy about urban environments resembling vast living organisms through which one might move - like in one of those imagined scenarios where submarine explorers are shrunk to cellular scale and injected into someone's bloodstream.  Such tales always seemed merely a preposterous trope of the cheesier end of Science Fiction from my childhood [1.].  However, anyone who has experienced an endoscopic procedure involving the medical insertion of a fibre-optic device, will know that fact has rather caught up with fiction, these days.

West Nottingham, April 2019

Anyway this sense of the city as a complex amalgam of interlocking systems, networks, ducts and sinuses is always magnified whenever my camera lens is drawn into a city's subways and other subterranean spaces - as it often is.  

West Leicester, May 2019

Subways and tunnels have long held a fascination, and have certainly featured on here before, a few times.  These images include several of the latest crop - harvested recently, while considering the possible resurrection of a proposed video project on the subject, a while back.  I'm still not sure if that project will actually emerge into the light, anytime soon - although I have started shooting a bit more related footage, of late - so we'll see about that one.

What is notable is that the regularly photographed foot tunnels, and road underpasses have now been joined by subterranean and basement carparks, as a recurrent motif.  Psychologically, the implications of these might be subtly different, although I'm yet to fully analyse exactly how.  For now, they just seem to offer another opportunity to burrow into the hidden substrata of the city - either in reality, or by just imagining what might be around one of those descending corners

West Nottingham, April 2019

[1.]:  I want to imagine having watched at least one film based on this premise, as a child - the kind of thing Doug McClure would have inevitably starred in.  Anyone know whether or not I'm just making this up? 

Colour / Not Colour 9

Both Images: Central Nottingham, May 2019

It seems I've been resurrecting a few slightly neglected series on here, lately.  The images in this is post could easily fit into one of several familiar categories, including 'Yellow Things', 'Grey Things', 'Scaffolding', or 'Urban Geometry'.  All of those themes have recurred, in one form or another, at different times, over the last few years.  Ultimately though, it feels like the two images, captured only meters apart, in Nottingham, a few weeks back - best illustrate the idea of 'Colour' and 'Not Colour', played out in similarly abstracted subjects (albeit on two very different scales).  

I often tell myself not to be so predictable in my habitual selection of geometrically formal, picture-plane orientated, minimalist, quasi-abstract imagery - but then I walk past something like this, and off comes the lens cap, as if by involuntary reflex.  I guess the eye loves what the eye loves...

Anyway, he function of neutral 'Not Colours' in contextualising actual colours, is something all painters, in particular,  must come to terms with, sooner or later.  And it seems just as important a feature of the urban landscape - where drab masonry or utilitarian surface coatings often rub cheeks with saturated, synthetic (and often self-coloured) materials.  Certainly, both of these examples seem to typify the kind of artificial, industrial colours that interest me far more than traditional artist's pigments, these days.  And, of course - I'm always a sucker for Cadmium Yellow and Battleship Grey.

I often reflect how, in recent times, I've spent hundreds of hours staring at the bits of cities most people just pass by - and how I've sourced far more of my materials in the aisles of B&Q, than in any art materials supplier.