Wild, places. Mark Wylie (c) 2018

Transcription

1 Wild, places Wylie

2 Wild, places Mark Wylie (c) 2018

3 We cannot navigate and place ourselves only with maps that make the landscape dream-proof, impervious to the imagination. Such maps - and the road-map is first among them - encourage the elimination of wonder from our relationship with the world. And once wonder has been chased from our thinking about the land, then we are lost. Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

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40 Wild, places postscript Wild, Places is a project that has been developed and photographed during the month of October. The idea for the work came from Robert Macfarlane s book The Wild Places. Our remit was to use the subject matter of the book to develop a short-term photography project. Initially, I wanted to play on the idea of transition from the built human environment becoming overgrown and overwhelmed by nature. The aim here was to illustrate the relentless and remorseless onslaught of wildness if we humans leave a place alone for long enough. At the early stages of the project I wanted to illustrate people s attempts to eradicate the wild and emphasise our socially preferred manicured landscapes. But, I also wanted to show wildness seeping through even these attempts to manage it. I typically use a shoot it and sort it out later mentally with these kind of projects. I have faith that something will materialise at the end, even if it was not what I originally intended. This certainly happened here. A month is a short period of time to create, shoot and edit a project. This is particularly so when there are numerous other commitments to fit in along the way. As the project grew, it began to change in its purpose. I came upon the idea that the word wild can have several meanings. There is the meaning linked to nature, but there is also the meaning linked to culture and the human environment. Both meanings have a common root in the idea of wildness being a frontier of the untameable, unpredictable and dangerous. This notion of wildness being a frontier has become the most dominant theme in the final work. Around this time, I also decided to split the phrase Wild Places into Wild, places. The simple addition of a comma allowed me to split the two environments. In some ways, inserting a simple comma has also afforded me more creative freedom than I originally began with (at least to me anyway). The book has been built around the idea that each page is actually a combination of two images. The natural environment covers the built environment beneath it. The aim of this is to illustrate that ultimately the natural wildness will take precedence at some point in the future of this planet. The built environment does not show wild places, such as parties, Saturday nights out, street gangs. What it does show is environments at night where there is a potential for something wild to happen. This could be party goers heading home noisily from a pub or it could be some of the more sinister events that can occur at night. The images of places are representational, rather than literal, in their meaning. I thought that as many people live in towns and cities, particularly in the UK, what seems wild may be more about the perceived danger of a town at night, rather than the classic notion of the wilderness. For many people, this type of wild mainly exists in books, pictures and the internet.

41 The night is a like a frontier of the wild. The dark, erratic street lighting and relative quietness can be unsettling and disturbing. For many people this may feel commonly more like a wilderness than the frozen central landscape of, say, Greenland. The potential here is for danger lurking in the darkness, which for most people probably is more common as a concept of wildness. Another theme within the book is that of transitions. Nature and society are in a constant state of flux. Nothing stays still for long. The move from light to dark (and vice versa) represents this idea. The natural environment starts off at night, then gradually moves to day and regeneration. The built environment moves from twilight to night. Like most time-limited projects, after the initial uncertainties of what is going on here? subside, the project often starts to take its proper shape just at the point that it needs to end. Of course, I would have liked more time to develop the theme and expand the project. However, the point of it being time-limited is to see what can be achieved in that time frame. By and large, I am happy with the resulting monograph. However, if I had more time, then I would be able to explore different areas and got perhaps more interesting images that would have better illustrated some of the themes the work intended to illustrate. However, to use a nature analogy, this project is at an end now, its life cycle has been completed and another project has already started to grow in its place. Mark Wylie November 2018

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