Spring Snow and Spirits

Looking for magic in the shadows and the return of the river nymphs.

Greetings from the moss,

Spring but not: daylight savings time steals an hour of sleep. It may be British summertime by Easter weekend but there is again snow on the hills. In the garden, white mingles with yellow.

Today’s bird that you hear but rarely see is a reed bunting, sitting at the top of the osier, feathers fluffed against the cold. There is joy in its song.

April brings more new lambs, slippery shiny sack-slick ahead of mother’s tongue. The first born attempts to arrange its hind legs to stand for the first time.

A first daisy opens at the side of the track, perfect white petals, a small sun at its heart.

Swirls of snow thick and fast fall to low levels, but by the next morning the hill is bleached; frost and snow beat a hasty retreat before the sun.

More bird song in the chill, a triumvirate of goldcrest, robin and wren.

In a week that has mixed heavy snow showers with warm sunshine, I’ve been trying to stay in the light. As I photograph and—finally—go out to sketch again I invariably drag a long shadow around with me. I think we all do these days.

I thought I might share macro photographs or some drawings, but then my daily enquiry into the photos on my phone surfaced a print I was about to send out to a gallery. It’s from a body of work that I still hold dear.

Evoking the river spirits

Some images are indelibly stamped in our memories with time and place, and circumstance.

Little was normal in November 2020. The UK was in its second lockdown, it was my birthday and a short walk from home with my camera didn’t seem too much to ask for: there wasn’t much else I could do. It was damp and misty. Mist, missed, fenced in, locked down… word play gave me a narrative to begin the morning, my thoughts as tangled as the webs I would go on to find.

There’s a tree by the river, an alder, with a near horizontal main branch. I’ve often looked at the polypody ferns that have made it their home and thought that there is an image there; somewhere. This time round there are small webs woven, dotted with dew and glistening in the river light, and these draw me in. At f/2.8 everything else is thrown out of focus: I like the way that it softens the hard edges that the world has grown.

From camera, the files were very green and I opted for a cream-toned version. In some there is no web apparent, no trap laid, but the shapes formed by leaves and stems appeal, and even without movement there is some sense of nature’s energy. I could be lying on a forest floor instead of looking at a miniature world 2 metres up. Perhaps this is where the river spirits - the Ondine - live.

Ondines, or undines, appear in European folklore as fairy-like creatures. This water nymph becomes human when she falls in love with a man, but is doomed to die if he is unfaithful to her. Derived from the Greek figures known as Nereids, attendants of the sea god Poseidon, Ondine was first mentioned in the writings of the Swiss author Paracelsus, who put forth his theory that there are spirits called “undines” who inhabit the element of water.

One of the images featured in an enjoyable discussion I had with Valda Bailey about how we come to name our images as part of ‘Eye to Eye‘ for U.S. based online literary magazine Monologging. Two of the images found their way as limited edition prints on fine art paper to the Longitude Gallery in Clitheroe.

I could also see the series making for a handmade book, printed on Japanese paper. This is unfinished business, and I shall have to dust off my bone folder.

The work feels very personal for a number of reasons, perhaps compounded by the fact that until such time as I dig back into the hard drive, it was the last series to come from my 10 year relationship with a small corner of the River Dove in the Peak District. The time I spent being intimate with water was transformative.

Returning to the now: I’m not sure I can express this time any better than I did last year—the swing of temperature, the seesaw of hope, and the bump of shadow. Forgive me if I share these words again; sometimes, eloquence is found in the return.

May your week hold more light than shadow.

Until next time,

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