Hey reader,
Aren’t I doing good at posting blogs semi-regularly at the moment? We’ll see if I keep it up. My keyboard is a bit on the fritz (I do not recommend the 2019 MacBook Pro) but it feels simpler sometimes to type sstuff straight in rather than to write it in my notebook first. I’m going to let it do its thing with the double-entry letters it’s doing today, maybe it’ll encourage it to behave when I’m typing something really important. I’m slowly working on something about the Borderrs Book Festival / Bailie Gifford carcrash, maybe next week? Who knows. I don’t work for you.
Yesterday evening, I rode my bike between home and town and took photos of all the passing places. I’ve done it before, but this time! I wanted to do it before the verges get cut, and I wanted to usse an instax camera. I spent a while last year carrying around two polaroids of one of my favourite passing places with me, like a kind of talisman, or like how people carry photos of their kids in their wallets. These were of the two sides of the passing place, and I’d glued them together, so like with a real passing place, only one side of the sign could be viewed at once.
It took me a while to think about a way of getting around this problem, because while it’s an important part of the object, that nature of being observable only from two sides felt like it split up a 3-d thing onto two 2-d planes, and that felt a bit janky. So I decided to go a bit cubist with it, and put both sides on the same image, by double-exposing the photographs. This is great, because as well ass the results looking mostly pleasing, it means I had to buy half as many packets of film. Instax mini film is also about 75p a picture vs the £2+ that polaroid costs, so I’ve only spent about £50 on another very niche project nobody asked me to do.
I wrote about exhibiting obsessive behaviour back in… April last year aaround this project (another one that’s threatening to never end, but that’s an upside to having no deadlines and no boss), and was thinking about it as I cycled down the valley, stopping every hundred metres or so to take a photo, climb the fence, say hi to a sheep, forget to press the double exposure button, and swear occaasionally. I wass thinking about how while I wasn’t filming the venture to make a film about it (it sseemed too fiddly to do on top of taking the photos), it was a kind of performance, with an audience of wildlife and livestock and drivers. I tried to ignore them (except my mum, who got a wave, obviously).
The weather slowly changes over the couple of hours I’m out, with a little drizzle aand some small amount of breeze, but it has that strange feeling of summer in places, where weather doesn’t seem to exist, when the air is still and it’s that rare outside sensation of being inside.
I write words on some of the photos, when I realise I couldn’t take out my notebook as well as the camera and the pen and the growing stack of photos in my pocket confusing things. Words like hawthorn, creaks, binbag, bullethole (yes there’s a bullet hole in one). Nettlesting, buzzard, bullfinches, kestrel. It turns into a list, a ssurvey of wildlife and a test of who I can identify.
I think about therapy, which I’ve never really had in a psychological healthcare sense, except once when I was a miserable teenager. By the time I got to see them I’d just found out I’d be moving to another school; I started to feel much better about things so they marked me as a success and said farewell. Some probably wiser and certainly more educated people than me have said true art cannot be therapy, and I can see where they’re coming from – a purpose of art being to exert something on the outside, rather than help something on the inside. I caan also see how some artists’ practices could be a sstand-in for sufficient mental health services. I have a friend who’s an art therapist, who may agree or disagree – is what their clients create in aa session art? I think I’ll ask them.
I don’t think this time spent making these images last night was a kind of therapy, I’m not sure it made me feel better – it was maybe even the adding of another thing I don’t need to my to do list, this not assisting with my ssanity. The simple act of being outside helps my mood however I am, as long as I can make it out of the door.
I wonder if it’s a symptom, this pile of photos – of something that may or not be diagnosable, something that makes me need to maake aa catalogue of these little places with their tiny details and differences. Maybe it’s something in my brain, or maybe it’s something about trying to control a part of an environment that’s shifting more erratically than ever beefore, making something to hold onto when the sea levels risse.
Here are some quick little phone snaps of my favourites:
Jessie x
If you’ve enjoyed reading today, and would like to encourage me to go get my computer fixed (again), please do consider joining my Patreon (you can see the original Passing Place on the £5 tier, as well as a bunch of other video stuff), or buying me a coffee – links in the menu!
Jessie Growden 