Colliding Worlds in Torridon
On photography as healing
In January 2023 I was booked into a house again at Torridon with Paul Whiting, Guy Aubertin and Dave Tolcher. It was the same house I had stayed in with Guy, Dave and Joe Cornish the January previous but for all the familiarity it was a very different trip for me. My mum had passed away just before Christmas after a long illness and the trip turned into part of the healing process more than anything.
The funeral was to be the next week and the rough plan had been to leave a couple of days early and travel back to prepare. I had a tribute to write and there were so many thoughts passing through my mind about what I wanted to say and I could think of no better place to let them form than in a house a few feet from the beautiful Loch.
The house had a garden that led straight onto the beach and unlike previous trips I was happy not to travel around much – just walk and photograph locally. What is more my sense of confidence and independence in photography was coming back. The workshop I went on back in October the year before had kickstarted my photographic recovery. I was clear I wanted to be in places that would produce work that I would be satisfied with and I ended up having a number of solo sessions working the beach. On one such session these two images were created.
I had developed a theme called Colliding Worlds and had already made a few images under that banner based on the east coast. So this seemed to be the right kind of location to develop the ideas. The first image – the alternative image – was made a few yards from the house itself. As we stepped out over the stile in the back garden there was an area of grasses that merged into the beach. The sea frequently covered it and a particularly high tide had sculpted the grasses. I had made an image the year before one evening with the grasses and a couple of rocks but as I wandered out I realised that the sculpted grasses themselves were the subject.
Further down the beach, I came upon an old abandoned plastic barrel or container with moss growing around it. It too seemed to fit the bill and I made the melancholy main image. As I worked alone and made images – in this session and several others – I gradually composed my tribute for the following week though I didn’t write it yet. That was to come in a two-hour stretch as soon as I got home. But I had worked out what I wanted to say and the words flowed easily into a celebration of life.
