The online presence of Tim Collier. Photographer, course leader, lecturer and blogger.
I’ve been working on an new collaboration with painter and print-maker Sue Hunt for the last couple of years and we are now in a position to show some of this work and are also beginning to channel it to working within the health care sector in Wales, specifically, at the present, with Rookwood, a spinal and neurological rehabilitation centre.
I’m currently reading ‘The Nature of Autumn’ by one of our greatest nature writers Jim Crumley, seems apt just now, and came across a small piece about nature’s national flag and Mark Rothko. In my previous post ‘Clarity, Colour and Emptiness’ the last image could easily have accompanied Crumley’s thoughts on, ‘the triple expanses of sand and open sea and open sky’
The main reason for visiting Northumberland was to see my brother’s exhibition, The Resilience of the Wild, at the Customs House in South Shields.
The relationship between the cliff top and the sea has always fascinated me. The space that divides the two is somewhere we rarely venture. I’m not a rock climber and even then you’re still grounded, all be it to a near vertical incline.
Much of my work over the years has been coastal, it’s somewhere were so much is going on; so many processes and changes, it’s continual and in constant flux and has the capacity to take you into a different space and time.
I’ve always been an avid collector of books and despite now owning a Kindle (they do have some advantages), I’ll keep collecting. You commune with books, they become part of you and immersion within them is an experience that is at times intensely personal.
There are some hidden gems around, and often in your own locality, that for various curious and unfathomable reasons you have never visited before.
The piece below was written in 2005 before Gormley’s Another Place’ had been purchased outright. It will now stay forever on this part of the Lancashire coast and has altered the way I feel about it. The space has changed, and until time eventually takes its toll on these sculptures, as it will do one day in the far off future, it will no longer be what it once was. I can no longer enjoy the wildness of this windswept beach, but then I couldn’t anyway as a large part of vista from the beach is interrupted by an invasion of coastal wind farms. I suppose nothing ever remains as it was, but when Art changes a space on such a huge scale I wonder if we have got something wrong. The title of the work itself, ‘Another Place’, perhaps suggests the need for it to move and grace another shore line somewhere else in the world and remain in the memory alone.
It is, by rights, something that I shouldn’t like. Gormley’s iron men break an otherwise expansive view across to the hills of North Wales. They occupy a space that has, since the Mersey has flown out into the Irish Sea, been people less. I have known this part of the coast all my life; bird watched in all weathers. The massive flocks of Knots and roosting Pink-footed Geese have inspired me to seek out wild places in Wales and Scotland. I go to such places to avoid crowds, to get away from a feeling of claustrophobia that so often grips me in places where people mass. The open spaces along this part of the West Lancashire coast has offered me solace and although close to a large urban populace, a sanction, where it is just possible to connect with the more natural processes that make us who we are.
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