Into Tomorrow

Introduction to the withdrawn 2016-17 project INNERSOUND.

 

Part One, LAST MAN ON THE MOUNTAIN, tracks a protracted period where Stewart lost his Father to Alzheimer’s disease. The images are all made in the Highlands of Scotland; memories and specific locations become a trigger for the photographer to examine the relationship with his father, his decline and death. This is a fairly blunt summary of the pictures - but there is a tenderness too to this section. We lose our bearings in the mistlands of snow capped mountain tops but the pictures then fill with bright, colourful northern skies, and we seem to cross a river, towards the setting sun.

Part Two, THE STORM is suddenly and unexpectedly violent. Chaos. We are hammered, pounded repeatedly by the elements. A maelstrom of wind, snow, sea and wild spray - the raw power of the winter ocean – and find ourselves adrift in a terrible storm, all control gone, at the mercy of some greater force. Then, just as suddenly, the storm subsides, and some form of new order and clarity returns to the landscape.

“There's something original and ambitious at work here; a shard-like hard-cutting between image and place and text. Sometimes it's bewildering -- but then that's true of the places Stewart is fascinated by as well. There's a winter-chill to the mountain photographs, and a storm-ferocity to the seascapes, that's born of somewhere between muteness and confusion.” [1]

If the narrative sounds insular, it’s not. As ever with Stewart's pictures, the intention would appear to be a desire to seek out universal subject matter - sky, sea, mountains - to lure the viewer to familiar, safe shorelines - only to then draw them out into the depths of darker, more turbulent psychological territory. 

Stewart has said that the death of his father in 2013 caused a re-evaluation of his relationship with his own children, in this project Part One clearly reads as Father/Son then so in turn Part Two, THE STORM, is Son/Father; and concludes with a most unexpected regeneration. 

 “In 2016 I had deliberately set out to photograph winter storms in the North West Highlands of Scotland. What could not be foreseen was that totally unbeknown to me at the exact time I was photographing the winter storms, my son was learning for the first time of the imminent birth of his own son, Solo.” [2]

It is not always essential to know such a level of personal detail - but somewhere in the midst of all this, Stewart’s Mother suffered a stroke, briefly and terrifyingly losing the power of coherent speech. Knowledge of this does inevitably affect and inform our reading of the images in this second section.

Closing with the birth of new life, this hidden narrative of Part Two book-ends the series with a most unexpected symmetry. We are confronted with a journey where we are lost from the start; moving through through a natural world of sun, light and water, touching both the beginning and end of life - but in reverse order. And inbetween, some kind of violent, silent chaos fights itself out to a peace of sorts, with a deep sense of both seen and unseen forces at work. The voyage is beautiful and terrifying in equal measure, both gentle and cruel, and as Robert MacFarlane notes, for the viewer, this can be bewildering at times. The series ends as it began, at the summit of a snow-dusted Highland mountain – though this time not submerging into the mist - but rather we journey outwards, into tomorrow. 

---

[1] Robert MacFarlane, correspondence on INNERSOUND 29/08/17

[2]  Iain Stewart, correspondence on INNERSOUND September 2017