Where do I start? I stress about every thing, mainly because I’m trying to juggle too many things at once, I hate saying no and I then expect everything to be perfect. Taking on two arty projects at the same time without giving something else up is a good example of that! Somehow I need to find a path through all the chaos and working on composite images a c0uple of days ago gave me the idea for this. The original photograph was taken at Bixlade, in the Forest of Dean and this is layered together with a cyanotype of oak leaves and blended in Photoshop. Maybe there is a path through the chaos!
So I could have just abandoned this challenge and gone and done the ironing but I’m over 2/3rds of the way there so not stopping now! When I searched the definition for this hint, I came up with things like ‘commit to something you have undertaken to do’ and it got me thinking about a project I tentatively started a few years ago, based around the iron industry in the Forest of Dean. I had been inspired by a photographer called Toril Brancher who was appointed Artist in Residence at LLwyn Celyn when the property was being restored in 2018. Rather than documenting the restoration, she wanted to find a link between the many generations of people who had lived in the property over several hundred years and focused on the plant life around the property for her project which she called ‘Could the grass remember?’ Whilst there is lots of information, including photographs of the coal industry in the Forest of Dean, there is very little about iron, even though it had been a main source of industry for many more years, since Roman times up until the early 19th Century. What hasn’t changed though is the plant life and this is where my work had started. My thinking was that I would use cyanotype to record the plant material and where possible, photograph where mines had been and somehow bring the 2 together. Early experiments seemed to work ok but by this time, I was coming to the end of year 2 of my photography studies, covid landed and that’s when I came to a halt.
My task for today’s work was to make another composite using some of the images I had made back then and maybe, just maybe, I will pick this up again and see where it goes. So today’s image is a wet cyanotype made from ferns collected at the Scowels near Bream, at a place known as the Devil’s Chapel and combine it with a photograph taken at the same place at the same time and modified in Photoshop.
I like the image, particularly the rust or iron effect produced with some of the filters in Photoshop but the photograph taken on the day doesn’t come through clearly enough, so whilst this meets the brief, it is back to the drawing board to see it this project still has any potential.
Anne Bryson Photography 