Prints £85 for A3 size
The photograph is above the Aletsch Glacier in the Swiss Alps. Around 4,000 metres, so peaks below are still formidably high. I walked around then suddenly felt uncomfortable. It could have been a cornice, not a snow field, and there was no way of knowing. You take a train to Aletsch intended as a tourist not a walking experience. I wanted more than that, but realised it was somewhat dangerous.
This Conceptual Art took longer than usual to create. I spent half a day arranging Egyptian gods relevant for my idea, to see if it worked. Except it’s not entirely an idea. It’s a feeling, an intention, leading somewhere I don’t know in advance. Height and what it means. Looking down, how that changes mood and intellectual perspective.
I like the Egyptian gods for being more abstract than Greek gods. You can’t relate to them humanly because they are not human. I will use them some time, but working with this photograph my thoughts turned again to The Wasteland and the line “In the mountains, there you feel free.”
Once again, I had the great poem to work with which became interesting in literary terms.
Focussing on a theme is a good way of approaching complex writing. You can’t absorb it all at once so concentrate on a character, symbol or a few lines and see where they lead. That’s how poems are written. Details are constructed then arranged into a whole; you recreate this in imagination.
There’s an important line in The Wasteland, arguably the centre of the poem but occurring at the end. “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Eliot constructs his words against despair. We can do the same, albeit less dramatically.
“I sat upon the shore” he says “Fishing, with the arid plain behind me.” He is fishing for meaning, as a mythological and aesthetic project.
Explanation is sometimes needed, but for this Conceptual Art I’m not going to do that. The symbol answers are in The Wasteland.