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.

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