wild goose chase
carry on
I think the thing I love the most about Fiona Crawford Watson’s still life photographs is that they’re so deeply personal. There is, perhaps, nothing particularly personal about a grey stone or a scattering of saga seeds, but the placement of that stone and those seeds—that’s a product of wit and whimsy, of intuition melded with deliberation, of overcoming the familiarity of the object to find in it a new and novel sort of beauty. That’s where the art is, that’s where it becomes personal.
There is so much at work here. There’s a touch of Aristotelian gravity—a feeling that everything you see within the frame is in its natural and inevitable location, that it’s been placed exactly where it’s meant to be. There’s a hint of Scots practicality—making use of what’s at hand, but insuring that almost everything is at hand (“Hold onto the bit of string, there’s a good girl, it might come in useful someday”). And there’s the suggestion of individual memory—a feeling that every item you see has meaning, even if the meaning is only known to Fiona. In each and every one of these still life images one senses harmony and order has been found rather than imposed.
What’s not immediately obvious about Fiona’s photographs, though—what only becomes apparent after a long period of seeing these images—is that these aren’t still life photographs at all. Oh, they look like still lifes—the tranquility, the harmony, the way all the elements are arranged just so. They look like still lifes, yes—but they’re not.
They’re self portraits.
Blog photograph copyrighted to the photographer and used with permission by utata.org. All photographs used on utata.org are stored on flickr.com and are obtained via the flickr API. Text is copyrighted to the author, greg fallis and is used with permission by utata.org. Please see Show and Share Your Work
