Pipes

On how the ideas of symbolic representation from Mulgrave bled into some pipes

In early 2014 I took a short break and had a few days up in Scotland. At the time I was travelling to the US a lot on a fairly stressful project so I had very little headspace for photography outside of my occasional day-trip sessions to Mulgrave. I was in the last stages of completing my Mulgrave work and I was finding new images on almost every visit.

Going back to Glencoe was frustrating. In Glen Etive, the harvesting of plantation trees had started and parts of it looked like a war zone. Areas we had explored and photographed on previous trips were now lost.

Also the weather was poor – raining a fair deal – and coming off the back of the previous year’s wet trip was not fun. I spent a fair amount of the time photographing in Kinlochleven. As well as exploring some birch trees there, I also explored the pipework for the hydro plant – walking up the track. I made a couple of images with the Technikardan – firstly the alternative image of the pipework at the pumping station. It was wet and they had a lovely sheen, though I remember the setup was tricky.

As we walked up the main track I started to look at the pipework itself. Given my Mulgrave work I was sensitive to spotting objects that have strong potential for symbolic representation. I noticed this section of pipework that had remarkable staining and I saw the main image in a flash of inspiration. The setup was straightforward after so many similar images in Mulgrave.

Mulgrave as a project had leaked into images made in several other places – including an image from the year before in Glen Etive. This concept of symbolic representation – a term I coined a few years later – has infused my photography ever since I first became aware of the potential in the 2009–14 period. It was crucial to Act III of my recent Requiem for the Ash work.