The origins of this image are owed to an early photograph taken by Richard and Cherry Kearton. The location of the shot is easy to find: walking out from Caterham, cross the by-pass onto the chalk track of Tillingdown Lane, traversing the dip of the old rifle range in Great Dene valley, and up towards Birchwood. There’s a long, plateau-like meadow here, part of the Marden Park estate, and in it is what used to be a small cattle pond, now an untidy oasis of elder and hawthorn. Richard Kearton used to come here every year, clear out the weeds and rubbish, and use it to photograph the birds that came to drink and bathe.
In May, 1900, the cattle pond earned a small place in history when the Kearton brothers trialled their iconic Stuffed Ox mimetic photography hide here. Its success was measured in the dozen or more species of birds photographed at the pond. One shot was of an old Song Thrush that, “after sipping at the muddy water very leisurely for a while, hopped on to a flint, which formed a sort of miniature island in the pond, and stood with drooping wings, contemplating a bath”. Richard Kearton noticed the curious optical effect of three apparitions of the bird’s shape on the plate, which he published with the caption Substance, shadow and reflection. This goes some way beyond the nature photographer’s usual remit, into an engagement with photography’s purpose of recording optical events, in this demonstration of the real world as a laboratory in which physical properties may be thrown into relief with the pared-down simplicity of the parable. The photographer is here both a physicist, dealing in optical properties, and also a metaphysician, responsible for illuminating us with the nature of things.
At the time I first came across a reproduction of Substance, shadow and reflection, in the Keartons’ book Wild Nature’s Ways, I was working with found material, often from second-hand nature and garden books, in various ways. One technique was drawing line images off the wall using lengths of wool wrapped around the heads of pins tapped into the plaster, something derived from the way my grandmother used to keep a stock of threaded needles pushed into the wallpaper near her chair. The Keartons’ image seemed a suitable case for this treatment: the homespun nature of the wool-and-pin drawings reflected on the Keartons’ own methods of knocking things up from local materials; the drawings spoke of a curiosity about the nature of line, “woolliness” and the diffusion of shadow on the wall; the floating nature of the line drawings had some concord with the bird on its perch and its images on the water.
I used a photocopied enlargement of the original photo, with outlines drawn around the three elements of the image and nodes for pinholes marked, as a template; taped it to the wall, stabbed the pinpoints with a bradawl, and removed the paper. To have a suitable number of pins to hand as I tapped them into place with a pin hammer, I attached a pin cushion to an old watch-strap, loaded it with pins, and strapped it to my wrist. When I had hammered all the pins into place, three colours of regular knitting wool were wrapped around the pinheads and tied off.
The work was first shown at Coracle, and went on to be constructed in various places, on various occasions, with different combinations of colours of wool. I was pleased to have it included in Certain Trees, a travelling exhibition curated by Simon Cutts for CDLA, St Yrieix-la-Perche.
I’m thinking about this now because so much of what I do, what perhaps most people do, seems to go the other way: whatever tangible thing we start out with – a thing we like, and want to share – we reduce to image or images, we put behind a screen, we experience as something beyond reach. Words, as well as images. Substance, shadow and reflection has taken a path from its origin as a moment on the North Downs, through various two-dimensional print forms, back out into the world as something that can be touched, walked around, adjusted; something without its own light source, that depends on ambience. Perhaps I should think of returning to the cattle pond, and installing my version of Substance, shadow and reflection on a limb of the elder tree, whose seed was perhaps dropped there by an old Song Thrush.
*
John Bevis: The Keartons: Inventing Nature Photography. Axminster: Uniformbooks, 2016 http://www.colinsackett.co.uk/thekeartons.php?x=61&y=6
Certain Trees: The Constructed Book, Poem and Object 1964-2006. St Yrieix-la-Perche: Centre des Livres d’Artistes, 2006 http://coracle.ie/certain-trees-3/
Richard & Cherry Kearton: Wild Nature’s Ways. London: Cassell, 1903