The Orations of the Pond

The Orations of the Pond is a site-specific work made over a period of two years at Ashburnham Place, East Sussex.

 

In Western tradition, the idea of the "landscape", and with it the activity of looking, is an organizing force under which the land is categorized, divided, evaluated, and prepared as a resource to be employed, owned, or exploited. In ancient Judeo-Christian ANE thought, however, the land is experienced as a living, agential "other" to be befriended and met with equality and reverence. The writers of Torah, Psalms, Isaiah, and the Gospels, recognize the natural world as capable of action in the form of covenantal relationship, worship, lament, and even lawful protest. In their poetry, rivers clap their hands, stones and blood cry out, mountains sing, the land vomits out its inhabitants in rejection, and trees lead entire conversations.

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​The Orations of the Pond, seeks to engage with this natural world in a reciprocal exchange. Photography becomes the process through which agency is negotiated and redistributed across the apparatus of the camera and the surface of the print. After thought by Henry Fox Talbot, who thinks in his The Pencil of Nature of photography as a process of self-inscription of the natural world onto the plate in the camera, and Ariella Azulay, who proposes photography as an actor network of agents negotiating agencies across time and space, the act of seeing becomes reciprocal through the lens.

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To make the work, a 5x4'' view camera was set up repeatedly next to the same small lake. The surfaces of the lake’s reflection and the latent image on the camera’s ground glass plate merge in an equivalency of human-natural processes and become inscribed as a photograph. Exceeding all expectations, the great variety of resulting images reveal magical, fantastical worlds, transported via the lake's surface. The lake is telling its own story. It is an invitation to change stance from colonizing extraction to reciprocal friendship.

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In 2022, The Orations of the Pond were published as part of THE HOURS, in which they appear under the title MATINS.