New directions: Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen.

Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen is my new long term project. If you don't know the area it's the valley immediately below the peaks of the Brecon Beacons above the Neuadd Reservoirs. After the tight, claustrophobic confines of ’Mametz Wood’ it feels vast and empty, it is a wind-blasted wilderness and I'm finding freedom there.

It's an area I know well; I visited it frequently many years ago for what was probably my first ’proper’ series, the Islands Project. This, though, will be different.

I learnt many things from Mametz, not least the limitations of social media - how dare I share art that's dark, difficult and metaphorical. Art has no more reason to be uplifting and cheerful than TV should always be Downton Abbey.

So I'm thinking yet again of changing my relationship with social media; people there, for the most part, don't want to be challenged, it's leisure time and they'd prefer cat videos thank you very much. I'm not yet sure how this will pan out, but you can expect more posts to be in the form of blogs and less of them.

The second, and perhaps more pertinent thing, I learned from Mametz was the value of photographing a small area, repeatedly over a long period of time. It's not exactly the first time I've approached my work like that, but it was perhaps the first time it really sank in -just how valuable it is to an artist.

Also, if we listen to the advice of Mike Jackson

 and Chris Tancock who are in my humble estimation both producing ground breaking work in landscape photography (if you'll forgive the pun), then long term devotion to a place is the way forward for the more serious landscape artist.

I'm disinterested in the ’low hanging fruit’ of new locations that barely scratch the surface. They tell me nothing about the place, the photographer or the way we interact with our surroundings.

If we stop to think about how many (perhaps the majority) of us first became interested in landscape photography - by recording the places we've visited or hiked past - then perhaps it's unsurprising that so few stop to question this approach. It feels entirely natural, organic and of course easy.

Yet what if there was a way to not only improve the depth and originality of our photography, but also find it more satisfying? For that to happen we have to question our assumptions and ourselves. It won't be found on the ’well trodden path’. Art has the potential to tell us something about ourselves, those tiny insights can be a great nourishment to the mind, something no end of pretty sunsets can ever hope to accomplish.

Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen is (for now at least) conceptually free. That's a major challenge to someone who's worked for many years within the bountiful confines of conceptual ideas. I'm going there without preconceptions, ideas or external motivations, but to explore through the artistic space of not knowing. Of course, you'd be right to say that is, in itself a concept! It's something I feel I need after 13 months of exploring the psychological trauma of war and it is something I need to do for the furtherance of myself as a landscape artist.

The artist and writer Emma Coker in Tactics for Not knowing: Preparing for the Unexpected (2013), wrote

‘Artistic practice recognises the practice of not knowing, less as the preliminary state (of ignorance) preceding knowledge, but as a field of desirable indeterminacy within which to work. Not knowing is an active space within practice, wherein an artist hopes for an encounter with something new or unfamiliar, unrecognisable or unknown’.

(Emma Bolland has written a great piece on this.)

One of the difficulties with finding that “field of desirable indeterminacy” is breaking down the barriers of received perception. Breaking out of the way of seeing and expressing ourselves through what we've seen, made or been told previously. The feeling freedom of that vast area is one of the hindrances; it's so easy to stride purposefully onwards ignoring the detail of what is there. Repeated visits are the key here, to break that mindset, to get the clichés, assumptions and received wisdoms out of my head.

I've been visiting the area now for about a month, and haven't shared any images because they felt stale, uninspiring and from someone other than myself. Finally I feel I'm starting to find that space where I can start to think afresh, and more critically see afresh.

I've been delving deeply into the art of not knowing and there is light at the end of the tunnel - just barely glimpsed. I've no idea how this will progress (which I should think of as a good thing) it may falter at this one image, it may take a wholly divergent path or I may find images to complement this one. The one thing I do know is that after a month I've barely scratched the surface. So for now, here is my first image from Cwm Blaen Taf Fechen.

A very personal pilgrimage.

Today I'm going for a walk, following a route (to the best of my memory) I last took with my grandfather, up to St Mary’s Vale and over to the Rholben below the Sugar Loaf above Abergavenny.

Walking with my granddad always seemed like saying goodbye, he resented the way old age tricked his mind into believing his body could still achieve when it no longer could. He would complain frequently and recount the achievements of his youth, the ease with which he could reach the peaks. In my hazy memory walking with my granddad is forever autumn, both literally and metaphorically. There was bitter regret in his voice and whining wail of resentment, a proud man looking and sounding pathetic. He struck me once with the metal dog lead when I protested, inconsiderately, that I didn't want to go for a walk.

They were quite distant as grandparents, emotionally reticent, both to my mother and her two sons. Walking became a form of escape from the tight air of that house on North Street. There was always an atmosphere there I could pick up as a child, old, stale, cold. Something haunted that place and it didn't only live in the dark turn in the stairs before the relief of the electric light switch.

So walking became an escape. Even if it was often with a bitter, resentful old man. Old paths have old memories, places aren't immune to imagination. Yet there was always the prospect of returning to the back parlour, warm, and the only room in that echoing house that seemed safe from the chill aura. There would be a heavy, lard-based tea and a nap after the excitement of televised wrestling. The entertainment of Methodists.

Many years later my mother tearfully and far from sober told me the secret. I'd always slept soundly there, at least after a period of vigorous horizontal running had thawed the icy sheets. A diet of exercise, lard and sugar would probably do that for me today. Bed too was an escape, of comfort, especially after confronting the dark turn in the stairs. I could picture the walks in my head and marvel at their beauty in comparison to my home in a dark, coal-stained valley.

I still have that joy for the hills, not the summits my granddad resented, but for the slowly curving angles of the lower slopes, the cool shade of the trees, the constant opening and closing curtain of views. It's little wonder my mother felt the same, despite her polio-afflicted leg. There was more than just freedom and escape; there was life and breath that may have been denied her when my grandmother tried to suffocate her with a pillow. In the bed in which, many years later, I had slept.

When others talk of the landscape having history, or even, more prophetically, memory, you will have to forgive my inclination to find it remote, impersonal. We bestow these things on the countryside, it's not inherent. Except perhaps in deep geological terms, or the hand of man tilling and chopping. Essentially it's Romanticism, a construction, as is mine. The landscape holds no memory, we do.

So today I'm going for a walk, or maybe it's a pilgrimage; to remind myself of the comfort of those hills and why they are the breath of life. As Paul Gaffney might say ’we make our paths by walking’, and our beds to sleep in.