these watery things

My life is going through a lot of changes at the moment. These are changes which I have instigated. Things are shifting. It is exciting, but extremely unsettling, and there are times when I question my motives for stirring up the waters. I question why I am constantly compelled to confront what is real and safe and solid. Sometimes it helps me to express these…

reaching for star dust

I love photographing seed heads. It’s a mild obsession of mine. They are a popular subject these days, it seems, appearing on everything from kitchenware to lino prints. I’m a big fan of Angie Lewin’s lino cuts especially. I think it is a bold simplicty in their structural form, and  an unassuming elegance which makes them so enticing and lends itself so well to…

tell me a story

     © Robert Frank, Mabou 1997 – image reproduced at Mutual Art opening line Stories are necessary, enchanting, evocative things; but they can also be the means by which our dreams are traduced or defused, defiled or filed away. We learn to read sideways. We learn to read by the light of secret planets and signs. Excerpt taken from From one state to…

winter’s reverie

I II © words and images Emily Hughes, 2015

frangipani flower

  … a little burst of sunshine. © words and image Emily Hughes, 2015

powder puff dreams

I found this unusual flower on my trip to Sri Lanka where the hotel grounds were scattered with them. After some research I discovered they are from the tree ‘barringtonia racemosa’, otherwise known as the ‘powder puff tree’. They really do look like exquisite little powder puffs – dreamy, light and graceful. I love the way the festive shocks of vibrant pink and gold contrast…

self

chrysanthemums woman self – November 2014, Sri Lanka © images Emily Hughes, 2015

breathe

When I push the shutter release, I close my eyes. (Annelies Strba, from Shades of Time)   breathe, 2014 I have done a lot of reflecting during this holiday period. I’ve read a lot of blog posts and facebook updates about fresh starts and being thankful and realising what’s important, and all that. I’m not knocking any of it. It’s all good and true, of course. It’s…

scapelands

In order to have a feel for landscape you have to lose your feeling of place. (J.F. Lyotard, from “Scapeland” 1989)   In his essay “Scapeland” (1989), Lyotard apprehends a sense of landscape as a kind of non-space which defies topography, history and geography. His is a bleak picture of a guarded, clandestine, unreal, uninhabitable space without destiny. For Lyotard a landscape is a violent,…

grace

    There is a quiet sort of grace in the gentle ebb and flow of the world around us; the sparse, sinewed kink of flowers against a stone wall; the comforting swell of a hilltop on a mountain walk; the twist of the dying roses’ sepal artfully languishing in an old glass beer bottle of a busy café. Even the merest ripple in a lake on a still…