Arts showcase - Orkney in the frame
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This month, Orkney-based photographer Alistair Peebles describes his recent work.“Road Works began when John Glenday and I started to look at one of the photographs I’d taken last year in Cromarty. We had been emailing ideas to one another for a while, but things started to take off from that image. It’s of an overgrown tennis court, and shows evidence of the attempt that someone had made to clear the weeds – in effect making a path. “While John turned his attention to the weeds, I soon realised that the history and present condition of the old court had given me a picture which combined, neatly enough, two of my main interests to date in photography, and so I followed that direction. “Previously I had been curious about boundaries and defined spaces, but at about the time I took this picture, the connections between those spaces – the moral conventions and geographical facts that we know as roads – had also begun to interest me. “This interest is partly historical. I’d been looking into the history of the famous Brig o Waithe near Stromness, and had learned in passing that in 1876 a proposed railway between Stromness and Kirkwall had been thought capable of making money if every local person made one journey per year between the two towns. If they made two, so much the better. At the time there was one mail coach three times a week. By contrast, on one day in the summer of 2004, a total of around 7,000 vehicles were recorded as passing a certain point outside Kirkwall. The population is slightly less now than it was 130 years ago. “So I was also thinking about the way that we all use roads now – why, at what cost and what possible benefit – and also about the energetic conviction with which we make and maintain them. “Which is about more than just rocks, laws and trouble getting to work. The precision and semiological intensity of a major road works can make it resemble, for example, the interior of a baroque cathedral – or any other marvel of spatial and symbolic organisation. “Ed Ruscha’s Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations implicitly links driving with the road towards (and of course away from) Calvary, and I soon began to realise one could hardly avoid a sense of the sacred in thinking about roads – and indeed about weeds, as you can see from John’s work, where religion often plays an important part. The parable of the tares and the wheat, for example, or a page from The Pilgrim’s Progress that’s growing the weed called Shepherd’s Purse; and, discovered in a page about inmate culture in psychiatric institutions: ‘The waters compassed me about, even to the soul; the depths closed me round about, the weeds were wrapped about my head.’ “But getting back to dry land, and roads, and driving off the ferry from Orkney, there is something awesome about the improvements recently completed on the A9 at the Caithness-Sutherland border. Seen on the way south, the hardcore drainage details have the talismanic force of standing stones. I noticed too that the big road works near Tore earlier this year had the numinous cathedral-like quality I was referring to above, and who can pass without a sense of wonder that great female symbol at Ardgully? The local goddess depicted as a roundabout sign. |
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Alistair Peebles |
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His most recent exhibitions have been Pictures (shown in Orkney), A Turn in the Road (with Cromarty Arts Trust), both 2005, and in 2006, with John Glenday, Road Works (shown in Orkney and Shetland). Among other projects he has been working with Kathleen Jamie on photographic illustrations for the forthcoming US edition of her book, Findings (Graywolf Press, due out April 2007), and he is currently seeking a publisher for his own book Fingers Crossed. |
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