Source 116 - Autumn 2024 - The elements.

The elements – Earth, Air, Water, and Fire – as described by Empedocles 2,500 years ago, are still relevant categories for thinking about our ecosystem and more particularly the way we are damaging it. As Conohar Scott writes, talking specifically about Fire, our assumption that we could harness combustion for our own ends without any consequences now looks hubristic, in a way that Empedocles would have recognised. Scott surveys the approaches photographers have taken to record uncontrollable fire’s devestating consequences.

Holly Birtles is concerned with Fire, Air and Earth as embodied by volcanoes. Her photographic practice incorporates performance and making props. Volcano Mother presents moments from backstage rehearsals and a pseudo theatrical production in which the cast contemplate and practise their role as selected volcanoes. Their roles include stratovolcanoes, shield volcanoes, lava domes and calderas (the large depression formed when a volcano erupts and collapses). Julia Tanner introduces the work and comments on how "The humour and theatricality of Birtles’ wearable props – a fetish dress, Judo belts – invites the perverse and the improbable into the normally sober discussions of ecological vulnerability".

Water is the key element in Sam Laughlin’s Spinning Away. Made in the Severn Estuary using large format black and white photography with exposure times ranging from five minutes up to two hours, these works were born of "a desire to be closer to the moon, to feel its influence". Laughlin relinquished control over much of the image-making process, giving agency to the moon, allowing it and tidal water to interact in front of him and the camera. Martin Barnes introduces the work and how in it "We seem engulfed in a primordial, dream-like space of deep and cyclical time".

The nature of Earth is the subject of Shane Hynan’s Beneath | Beofhód which explores the culture and landscape of bogs in the Irish midlands. Beofhód, an Irish word meaning "life beneath the sod", evokes the primal, totemic place of bogs in Celtic culture. The work traces the remnants of industrial peat harvesting and the ecological imperatives that have created tensions between the remaining small-scale harvesting of the bog and the need to protect and enhance peatland habitat and biodiversity. Hynan has become involved with the Community Wetlands Forum who are trying to help communities enjoy, manage and protect their wetlands for present and future generations. In Hynan’s work "a comparison of human and geological time contemplates the legacy of our actions on our environment".

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