The Origins of Abstraction
How I started to understand the difference between abstraction and photographing details
This main image from Glen Etive made on the January 2011 trip to the Kingshouse Hotel was pivotal in my transition between the work of Vision and Craft and the next four years of work at Mulgrave – or in other words the journey to abstraction. The trip itself was cut short due to poor weather but this particular day was spent working Glen Etive with Phil Malpas and Dave Tolcher.
In our regular retrospectives of images on a lightbox, I had discussed with Dave the opportunities to find abstract shapes in the landscape. The year before on Rannoch Moor I had made the alternative image – a deliberate if crude attempt to deploy a triangle pattern in a picture and it led directly to one of my favourite images of that trip – the ice falls.
Here I saw the circle the branches from the trees made and could trace it with my hand in the air. It was a simple image to execute technically, just important to wait for the wind to die down.
It was always an image out of time and place. It never connected to any of my earlier images in Scotland and it was rather bolted on to the Vision and Craft book as a tail end image not a mainstream idea. But what was happening here was that I was beginning to understand the difference between distilling details in the landscape and separating object and subject. When I photographed these trees I wasn’t really making an image about a tree. I was practising symbolic representation – taking an idea or metaphor from completely outside the context of the image and inserting it into the scene. My aphantasia was probably crucial to this process – looking away from the scene simply meant that it disappeared. To remember it I had to give it some symbolic language – such as ‘a circle of trees’ – and in my particular mode of aphantasia, which is kinesthetic, remember tracing the shape of the composition using my hands.
It would take a few more months to shape – but the seeds of my Mulgrave work were born in that moment. It would take a trip to Padley Gorge with Julian Ashley to make the ideas and themes explicit – but that is for another day.
