PHOTO GALLERY - Bodies
OF BODIES CHANGED TO OTHER FORMS I TELL
I had not yet read Jane Urquhart’s Away when I woke from a dream in which I was summoned to the body of a near-drowned fisherman off the shore at Santorini. Suddenly I am transposed to the island of Rathlin watching Mary -- Moira -- breathing life back into her sailor. Yet my dream was distinctly set on a bay in the Aegean; aquamarine, with fine white sand and black-haired villagers frenzied on shore surrounding the washed-up body of a nearly departed young man. I was called from my reverie to his side as it was clearly my task to persuade him back to this world.
All objects and characters in our dreams represent an aspect of our psyche which requires expression and ultimate resolution. When I set out to photograph my semi-conscious sailor I did not understand that by way of giving back life/breath to the dream, I would myself need to surrender to the image.
The west coast landscape creates a universal canvas for dream imagery, and although the reference points in my dreamscape were distinctly Greek, I was able to recreate the emotional texture on the Southey Point beach. Seeing my semi-conscious sailor dashed upon the rocks was startling to me in the same way that my dream confronted the near-drowned nature of my own life at that particular time. The often androgynous quality of dream characters is fitting for such a sequence, particularly as all characters ultimately merge with the dreamer.
I was often in the water during the shoot and once again came to understand the strange seduction of the sea – how we are all drawn to our own fate in ways we cannot tell. The tide was 10.5 that evening and required thigh-height wading to get to the little bay of my choice. This means of arriving by way of a journey reminded me, as always, that it is the process, the narrative, that holds up a mirror to our secret longings and frees us from the constraints of our daily lives.
The title for this sequence comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses which Jane Urquhart so aptly quotes in the early pages of Away. I think it also apt that my Aegean/Northwest Pacific sailor should come to life with the help of Ovid’s verse.