The Birth of a Requiem Theme
On how the ideas of symbolic representation gave birth to an image that lit the path to Act III
The idea to build a body of work from the ashes of dieback disease at my local woods in Millington on the Yorkshire Wolds was long in the forming. It had come to me shortly after I made my first few strong black and white images back in the last month of 2012 and over the intervening years I made a point of returning most years for two or three sessions to capture images on the journey.
The idea for a Requiem had also been around for a long time but I really had no idea how to work it into the project. Mozart’s Requiem Mass was one of my favourite pieces of music and one I had listened to many times so I was well aware of the ideas and themes surrounding it. It was only at the start of 2024 that the ideas formed for a three-act screenplay as the organising structure. That meant that Act III needed to be post-crisis – having a strong sense of resolution – and it became clear to me that I could use the techniques of symbolic representation I had honed in my Mulgrave work to explore symbols of the Requiem Mass and funeral rites of passage in the trees. I verbalised the ideas to Dave Tolcher – always a patient listener – and re-read the text to Mozart’s Requiem.
So armed with a clear mission, I immediately headed back to the woods to see what happened. I initially started out looking for images in the same way as they had appeared at Mulgrave – in close-up details. I made 3 or 4 close-up exposures of the ash logs. But that wasn’t working.
And then serendipity struck. I was walking back to the car and the sun cleared the valley sides and lit up the new tree plantation at the base of the valley like a collection of candles. It only happened at a certain time of the day and I happened to be there. I was immediately reminded of the tradition of lighting a candle for the dead in the Catholic Christian tradition and I remembered seeing tables full of candles as I walked through churches. I made the main image immediately and several more variants but it was the first one that worked the best. My first abstract image for Act III was born.
