I don't know about others, but my
most common experience of the landscape is being overwhelmed. Sometimes I'm
overwhelmed with sensations, sometimes the visual overwhelms, and there are
times when it's so overwhelmingly callous and indifferent that it inspires fear.
Sometimes it's as overwhelming as love. Mostly I'm overwhelmed by its mystery,
its unknowableness, its otherness.
The Map of Love series was conceived
as my way to try to understand and express these feelings and to wonder at how
a poet is shaped by the landscape, as Dylan Thomas obviously was. And, also to
find a way of expressing that swirling miasma of impressions we receive from
being somewhere. There is the experience of now, the experience of time, of
growing up and being shaped by our environment and, later, of finding our
reflection within it. The series is named after Dylan Thomas’ first volume of
poetry.
It’s as much as about Dylan Thomas’
places as it is also about our places. There is, I hope, to be a universality
rather than a specificity. A joining together not a pushing apart. That's one
thing visual art can do well - bring us together in shared understandings and
shared insights. The communal, the human is something that's important to me in
my work as a landscape photographer. It's not that I'm dismissive of the
landscape as a physical entity, but that I believe we really see and appreciate
it through the ’lens’ of both our own and other’s experience of it.
Cwmdonkin Park is somewhere I once
knew well. More years than I care to remember have past since I lived just
around the corner. These were my green days (as Thomas would have it), I was a
student and it was a time when I actually had time.
I spent a lot of time in that park;
it had a magnetic pull above the desire to escape the cold, damp and loneliness
of my student digs. (Although it was a time when going for a walk was often the
cheapest way of getting warm.) Part of that magnetism for me was its history -
of the part it played in the childhood and the shaping of Dylan Thomas who grew
up at 5 Cwmdonkin Drive, literally across the road.
Walking was also part of my makeup.
I'd been a dog owner and my regular routine was a mile in the morning and five
miles in the afternoon after school. I wonder if there's a connection between
dog ownership and landscape appreciation and landscape photography? The dog (a
Lassie style collie) had to stay home when I went to Swansea; there was no room
in those digs. I regretted that, but walking was so much a part of my routine
that it didn't cease abruptly.
That park on my doorstep became a
regular part of my life. And it was such a wonderful park, nothing like the
ill-mown scraps of dog-shitty grass with a few scrappy trees that was familiar
from my past. Not only was it the park of Thomas’ childhood it was like a
child’s imagining of a park. There was the old fashioned drinking fountain, a
green painted metal scallop shell with a little brass tap. There was the
mock-Tudor pavilion, all half-timbered black and white yet clearly Edwardian
like the surrounding streets. The paths wound in great sweeping curves around
the hills that seemed to shelter it from the world outside. And there were
trees; not scrappy afterthought trees, but deliberately chosen, varieties,
mature, graceful and trees. Sheltering, obscuring, enclosing trees that said
this part of the park is mine even on the rare warm days when it was busy. But
my greatest memory is that view. Swansea being a city on a hill overlooking a
large sweeping bay that stretches out the Mumbles, is dominated by this view.
It's inescapable and it's completely transfixing.
The park frames that view; it's a bowl
shape scraped out of the hillside and at the far end, through the trees lies
the ocean, once again framed by the three ’islands’ of the Mumbles. Inevitably
I took my camera - I'd already been a keen photographer for a dozen years or
more. And it was in that park I made my earliest steps in self-expression
through photography; albeit, in retrospect, naive, romantic steps. I'd had no
formal education in art (I still don't) neither did I have a great insight into
art at that time. Although the brash colours of the Glyn Vivian Gallery were
beginning to suggest something important beyond and maybe within.
I'm not really a photographer of
views, views are a sort of lowest common denominator of landscape photography,
they place one in the landscape nothing more. And even then I can't remember
photographing the view. I knew I had to include it when I returned 27 years
later (yes it's been that long!).
The park today is sanitised, theme
parked; the local authorities have tried (and to my eyes failed) to make it a
tourist destination on the Dylan Thomas trail. In my day it may have been rusty
and down at heel, but at least it retained its connection with the past. It
seems to have lost those quiet, intimate corners, replaced by plazas of
’artist’ designed paving and a Dylan Thomas lookout (read inappropriate
triangular shelter). Even the toilets have been rebuilt in an easy to clean and
utterly antiseptic modern style.
It threw me; I'd gone with a
preconception that was dashed. I had to return a second time when I'd recovered
from the tremor of not knowing, or maybe misremembering. So, although this may
not be an award-winning (ha!) image that lights up social media (ha again!),
it's sure to be my most personal in the series.
In truth, I made a simpler, more
accessible image here, but it failed to express what I wanted it to say. It's
my past, Dylan Thomas’ past thrown together with a sadness at ’progress’. I
can't think of a better way to represent the multiplicity of thoughts than
through the multiple exposure; disrupting reality and time and the complexity
that suggests being overwhelmed. And, of course, the one thing they can't
change is that view.
Click on the image to see it larger
