I'm just back from the bog, went out early this morning to look around and find a few different places to bury the negatives. As i was doing my this is art, I'm creating here, returning to the mother nature bosom.. a big rat ran out in front of me, nearly shit my pants. It was really huge,could have been a cat.. Anyway dug a big hole in the ground, about 3 foot deep, technically no longer a hole but a trench, and threw about half the negatives in there. Dug another hole further away and threw the rest in that.
Was looking over the images last night, as i was cutting them into seperate pieces, and did feel a trepidation about destroying the images. This is important, that these things don't do anything but represent an attempt to represent the space and the memories, the threads that join me to this space and to my photography.
More importantly is the creation of something new, something that goes beyond me, releases me from the need to hold fast the image, the space. In this way i leave the final intervention to serendipity...apart from my act of burying the images, the result is unknown, the finished image will be unfinished... My hand is now out of this process...
Was thinking about how my burying these images comes back around to the initial thinking about the space and history. The discovery of the bog men in these space, as so beautifully evoked in the poetry of Seamus Heaney. I also wanted to share the origin of the title of "Unearth" and something that influenced my way through the last 5 months. In The Moveen Notebook, the second generation Irish-American poet Thomas Lynch, asks the simple question:
‘To bury the dead, must we first unearth them?’
