I spent a lot of time thinking about the sublime for this section of the course and what it means to me.  For me it is a sense of longing mixed with trepidation, of desire for something mixed with a sense of uncertainty or danger.  I saw several examples of works that represent the Sublime; a common subject in this area is the sea as I discovered in works by Tacita Dean, Nadav Kander and Dafna Talmor.

Thinking about my own experience, as a parent the greatest day to day fear is of something happening to my children.  My daughters are of the age to be beginning to forge their own independence, with some of my eldest’s friends allowed to ‘hang out’ with others in various public spaces.  Whilst at my aunt’s recently she told me that an unexplored World War Two bomb had been found in the woods where we used to play as children and I distinctly remember as a child seeing a bra hung from a tree and wondering what had happened to its owner.  It is the attractiveness of these places that are so desirous to youngsters with their ability to stir up mixed emotions of being grown up coupled with the possibility of a sense of the unknown, even danger and the parents’ over-imaginative visions of terrible accidents and abduction that I have chosen to explore with this project.

Having seen Mark Preston’s work Zone A – A Palestinian View of Jerusalem I became interested in the cyanotype process and liked the idea of using it on a more industrial subject other than the usual delicate florals with which it is traditionally associated in art.  I also looked at the work of Dafna Talmor and liked the idea of holes in the image seeming to represent the uncomfortable, even dangerous.  Similarly, Aliki Braine uses holes in her work, this time to encourage the viewer to fill in what is missing from their own imaginations.

With the above in mind I have created a series of cyanotypes of the places children and youths like to play and congregate independently, the places where they can be free of parental influence for a short time.  Such locations are beautiful in their own way by being desirable and exciting not only for the escape from adult control but also the very fact that parents often do not really like their children playing there coupled with the sense of unknown danger.  The sign at the railway line wants of the danger of trains, a lone man walks across the deserted car park, a crudely made rope swing resembles a noose, all alluding to the fear of the parents and hint at the possibility of something going wrong.  The black circles resemble holes that allow the viewer to insert their own imaginary fears and thus the work becomes more personal.

I would like to develop this work further and experiment with cutting actual holes of different shapes into the images.  I have not done this at this stage due to the time constraints of making individual cyanotypes and the need to move on in the course.  I would also like to try burning the images and investigating other methods of destruction to find alternative ways of representing the trepidation element of the works.