Field Experiments

Field notes in preparation for exposing a cyanotype

When you’re out in the fields, literally, it’s important to be able to improvise with the available equipment and materials. A couple of pieces of acetate, a flattened out cardboard box, some bulldog clips and a mini lemon squeezer picked up at the supermarket became my latest cyanotype exposure field experiment.

I’ve been camped out in a farmer’s paddock in Hampshire with views over the growing fields. It’s either barley or oats, I’m not sure which, but each field is divided by hedgerows. It’s been quite idyllic to go to sleep watching the moon rise and arc across the sky outside the motorhome window. Sometimes the wind is so gusty it rocks our little bus from side to side, but the hedgerows that have grown into trees deflect much of the wind away and over the top.

I’ve been thinking a lot about travelling and finding shelter these past two weeks and wanted to do some final cardboard box experiments before starting the next part of my course in Oxfordshire.

I have always been drawn to travellers’ tales, both the modern day adventure travel tales as well as stories of the Roma people and travellers who were once a common sight camped in the English countryside.

The places where they stopped were called ‘atching tans’, which means the place where the fire is lit, so a good place to stop. Brightly coloured wagons or ‘vardos’ were mostly around in the early twentieth century, before that coverings for wagons were made from bent hazel sticks or other kinds of pliable growing trees that supported a canvas top.

For my cyanotype experiment I wanted to create the idea of a shelter so I choose a few flattened stalks of grass to make a curved shape for a shelter. The stalks of grass were supposed to represent these bent hazel sticks or ‘benders’. The lemon squeezer was a decorative touch which I thought would create a pattern like a stained glass window, however clouds kept hiding the sun and the print was underexposed.

When I washed out the print, it was fairly unimpressive. I looked out over the neat fields and checked out google maps for a satellite view of them showing the road to the next town. All very ordered, straight lines; strange man-made shapes that are overlaid upon the undulating landscape.

Drawing these lines as a map over the cyanotype image brought to mind the tension between ‘settlers’ or a settled farming lifestyle and nomads or those peoples who move around and rely on wild nature for survival. These tensions are thousands of years old, since agriculture first began and humans settled in villages and towns for food security and protection.

I think too, of our travels in a horse drawn milk lorry 40 years ago and how much harder it would be to do this today. Now my travels are bringing my thoughts full circle as I explore life on the move again, this time in a motorhome. I take great satisfaction from being able to make do and experiment with what materials I have to hand rather than buy expensive art papers. It will be fun to see where this line of field experiment leads…

Exposing the cyanotype print outside

The final print with drawn map overlay