Cambridge Garden Diary: May 2024.
The room where I am sitting is in darkness.
A midday sun struggles to penetrate the thickening leaf screen that overhangs the lattice window by my chair. On one side mock orange leaves crane forward, eagerly seeking light. Their premature scent-flowers were long dropped in February. On the other side buddleia and pyracantha muddle together in a tangle of fading purple and white. Their July butterfly flowers are already browning to seed-plumes. Autumn berries are swelling to pregnant green in anticipation of over-wintering birds.
Draping over everything white bryony nets reach out tendrils like snake tongues, as if testing the air. Entwined with spreading tentacles of convolvulus they engulf the host of self-seed weeds that are thrusting through cracks in ornamental paving in the front garden.
I peer out into bright sunshine. A brown butterfly I do not recognise is warming itself on a sun-yellow dandelion, wings splayed wide, ignoring a large foraging bee. Fragile silken threads spun by an unseen spider link shrivelled seedheads of spanish bluebells to aphid-gorged spikes of garlic mustard. In a cream cup-flower, trapped in strings of sticky dew, a small un-named fly struggles to break free.
How can I know enough to clear it all away?
‘Where the Bluebells Sing’ is part of an ongoing longer-term visual art project ‘Living with Weeds’.
The portfolio is underpinned by a loose narrative referencing of the children’s fairy story ‘the Bluebird’ by Maurice Maeterlinck:
A ‘fairy of light’ visits two children in a very poor family. She tells them if they want to help their family to find ‘The Bluebird’ that is the source of all happiness. They travel far and wide through lands of darkness, heavenly paradise and misty seashores. They find and cage many bluebirds. But the birds all escape or turn black.
In the end they discover the ‘true’ bluebird at home.
It consists of four ‘classical’ diptychs and triptychs of ten digital montages of close-up of weeds in my garden photographed between April and July 2024. My aim is to inspire a reconnection with everyday plants and creatures in places where we have some influence. In my case this is gardens, verges, parks and local nature reserves in Cambridge where I live. But with global implications for all of us, wherever we live. There is no inevitability about fairy-tale endings.
Sustainable Strategies
May to August 2024
Sustainable Strategies aims to:
- expand my awareness of, and my ability to develop effective strategies for the production, dissemination and consumption of your practice that are innovative, creative and sustainable.
- introduce me to the many and varied contexts in which the photographic image is published, and how its form and physicality influences how it is received and understood by critical and non-specialist audiences.
- consider interdisciplinary approaches in the making and presentation of my creative output, explore new materials, processes and creative strategies as appropriate to your practice and specialism.
- assess my practice in relation to economic and environmental sustainability, and devise strategies and workflows that are conscious of material consumption and work towards a carbon-neutral impact.
Inspiration