Summer Exhibition at Spey Bank Studio

I’m delighted to be exhibiting again at Spey Bank Studio in Grantown on Spey, a local gallery that has been incredibly supportive and encouraging in getting me back to my creative self.

The title for this year’s Summer Exhibition is ‘The Mountains are Calling’. It marks a year since Spey Bank Studio’s first Summer Exhibition, ‘The Forest’, which was then my first time exhibiting work in almost a decade. The warm reception my photographs received gave me a much-needed confidence boost and led to me taking my creative work more seriously. This year, the theme of mountains represents a new challenge and a broader horizon for my work. I’m deeply grateful for the continuous support from the community and look forward to another opportunity to share my images.

While the theme of mountains is not completely unfamiliar to me, mostly my images centre around the forest and the river, the places I visit most. Last year I created some images titled ‘Following the Mineral Path’, inspired by a visit to Beinn Eighe and Torridon, where I found myself bringing in the form of mountains, hills and geology. This gave me a starting thought process for creating the images for this exhibition.

Mineral Path I

I knew I wanted to continue with my cyanotype work, and the physical process of creating a print. I’ve found it both meditative and frustrating in equal measure! But something that has been positive for my creative practice none-the-less. When the prints work, I love them. So, my focus became on creating images that would work well in this format, and the negatives to contact print from.

I started by delving into my archives. Before I had children I was a regular visitor to the mountains, happily hiking far and camping out, so I had a lot to work with.

Panoramic of the Loch Avon basin
Circles and copper leaf

At this early point, I was confident I would get out into the mountains to shoot images for this exhibition, specifically the Barns of Bynack and the labouring pools on Ben A’an, and of course the Tors, more so due to my interest in their geological form and texture. The Cairngorms are a ‘subtle’ mountain range, especially compared to the drama of the North West, so I was mentally seeking that crag and drama within my local landscape.

But I didn’t get out. Restricted by illness and school hours, weather and the general lack of self confidence. On the sunny and free days I wanted to pootle in the woods, I needed to! And the time ticked.

And then came the question: What makes a mountain?

OK, I know there’s a scientific way of things that affirms a mountain’s status, but I’m rarely about definition boxes these days. My feelings dictate all and, importantly, how do I connect to this landscape? So, I pondered this question…

When I see mountains I see events. Spanning time frames I cannot fathom, but feel deep in my bones. Force only seen elsewhere beyond the realm of earth. Colliding land mass, the broken shell of our planet pulling and pushing, twisting forms, twisting rock, twisting and tumultuous and massive…

I also see them smoothed over time, worn by weather, tamed and softened. Some of the oldest mountains on earth are the smallest, many no longer worthy of the title ‘Mountain’. They existed long before humans so there was no one to name them (sròn / nose, fiacal / tooth, druim/ back).

Is a mountain about perspective? About rock? About space dust and distant explosions forming this planet with its liquid core? Is a mountain about heat? About movement? Do mountains dance? Do they sway like trees, but just do so over millennia? Or, is it just a word made by a species that this spinning rock will barely remember? 

When we see mountains as solid and unmoving matter alone, we are missing their form, their dance, their story and their inevitable fate – be it sand or star dust.

And thus, my theme of Mountains opened up exponentially. Once you remove the human application of definition and perspective, there are mountains within every piece of geology on earth.

Doodles and pondering, stardust on earth.
Is this a mountain?

I did the only logical thing when making this realisation. I headed to the Isle of Eigg, which is somewhat fascinating if your current obsession is rock, and time, and the destruction/creation cycle. Eigg is primarily the result of a huge volcanic eruption on the Isle of Skye approximately 56 million years ago.

I wrote at the time: “Old craggy rock, low to the ocean, barely metres, not measured, not named. Old craggy rock that was once what we call a mountain. Worn down by the world, collapsed, struck with a cataclysmic force, now washed by salt water. Smoothed. Tamed.

I sat by the big bowl of earthly salt water, looking across to those west-coast places that first gripped me, held me tight, whispering (not un-aggressively) in my ear “these here are the real mountains”. I felt sad, in a way, for little Eigg. Or at least those, now coastal, rocks that have had such a spectacular adventure. And I wrote again, with more feeling:

Igneous bedrock. 
Old lava flow.
Memory of heat.
You came from the core.
Exploding star.
Oozed like thick blood.
You saw the sky, the geese.
You decided to stay.
The chlorophyll you smothered.
Now thrift grows on you.
A comfort.
For the path you made.
Over 56 million years.
You will be a monument.
For 56 million more.

View to the mainland, 120 Ilford HP5+

My thought process was finally aligning with what I was creating. I went back to the prints – how can I get my words to show coherently as images. Maybe this is the battle for many photographers? I stumbled across a paper, Lotka, initially just being intrigued by its texture and obvious hand-made quality. I did one cyanotype on it and was hooked. Oddly robust, yet completely translucent when wet, I thought it would disintegrate but it really held its own. I was also able to tone it in coffee, and again, it held up well.

I find something appealing within things that aren’t what they seem, perspective or presumption. Lotka paper was one of those things. It is handmade in Nepal from the Lotka bushes that grow in the Himalayan forests between 5000 – 13,000 feet. If altitude is a necessary attribute for mountainous going-ons, then consider it observed. To bring an element of the highest mountains on earth into my lowly heart-rock monuments, feels very apt.

And so, I continue finalising my images for this exhibition. Frustratingly (yet lovingly) printing and printing again until something right sticks. But now you know some of the tale that has brought them to fruition.

Thanks for reading and entertaining my thought process.
Jess ꩜

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