searchingtoseedancing with light
Posted on July 20, 2015
Sometimes it’s fun to play around with the theme of ‘writing with light’ and create something a bit abstract using long exposures. Festival time is the perfect time to do that, with all the lights and bright colours. I was literally dancing with light here, experimenting to see what explosions of colours, shapes and patterns my camera would record in time to the beat of the music.
© images and words by Emily Hughes, 2015
scapelands
Posted on December 30, 2014
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, disruptive force; like a freeze frame of a camera it seizes time, interrupting the linear narrative and the order of place (1989: 216). It is impossible to describe with words – somehow they become cumbersome and heavy – which are powerless because the landscape has already worked on the mind, dissolving it, and has “made it vomit itself up towards the nothingness of being there” (1989: 20-21). […] I often feel that the act of taking a photograph is intrusive, almost aggressive […] The negation of place which is landscape is violent in its passivity. It is there, yet it arrests us, and denies us something at the same time.
[extract from an essay I wrote about in-between space in 2002]
© images and words Emily Hughes, 2014
seed head study
Posted on October 30, 2014
I love shooting macros at this time of year. Autumn is such a rewarding subject, just as nature is settling, cocooning; turning inwards for the long winter ahead. I never tire of photographing seed heads either. Endlessly captivating, they offer forth their generous, basin-like heads, sheltering a bounty of tiny jewels secreted within. These ones looked still young to me, and they stood out, green and proud amongst a scene of quiet decline around them.
© images and content Emily Hughes, 2014
the dreamer
Posted on October 16, 2014
‘interrupted by a daydream’, 2014
The Dreamer
by Rainer Maria Rilke
Dreams: as vivid in my eyes as orchids.
Like them brilliant and opulent,
like them drawing through the giant stem
of living sap the juices of their strength,
like them flaunting an absorbed life-blood,
revelling in the fleetness of the minute,
then, in the next, pallid as the dead.
And when, softly, worlds pass overhead,
do you not feel their winds, flower-scented?
Dreams: as vivid in my eyes as orchids.
Yep, still here, still daydreaming …
This is the latest image in my in defense of daydreaming series, which is taking me in interesting directions. You can read more about it and find all the images in my artfinder shop.
© images and content Emily Hughes, 2014
Beach days (III)
Posted on May 28, 2014
Beach days #4
Beach days #5
I’ve been working on this beach series for the past couple of months. I started work on it because a gallery owner local to West Kirby (where I grew up) liked some of my layered work, but wanted something coastal. I’ve struggled with naming them, though (it’s always a problem!), because even though they are all from very specific locations, they are deliberately quite abstract.
For me, working with layers give me greater freedom to explore the local environment: the texture, colour, form and atmosphere of the landscape, and (hopefully) create something fresh and new, which is at the same time recognisable to its particular location.
These two images are from Sidmouth, which is a place we visit often as a family because my dad and step mum live there. The children love the beach, and searching for crabs in the rock pools.
You can find the whole series so far on my website, or in my artfinder shop.
© images and content Emily Hughes, 2014
beach days
Posted on April 18, 2014
beach days #1
beach days #2
© images and content Emily Hughes, 2014
opalescence
Posted on March 31, 2014
It’s been an up-and-down few weeks, and I haven’t been as active on here as I would like to be. Getting the time to post is proving more and more difficult, unfortunately. I went back to my little skeleton leaves, and decided I hadn’t quite finished with them. I had a feeling they would work well as layers. I use this technique a lot in my images, and it’s a surprisingly creative and enjoyable process in which unexpected things often emerge. Here, it served to enhance the shimmery opalescent shades – which were just the merest suggestions before – to create something light and lustrous, and a little bit summery.
© images and content Emily Hughes, 2014
sketches
Posted on March 11, 2014
Spring surprises me every year. Like a switch being flicked, the sudden buzz and hum of life at volume jolts me into attentiveness. As the earth shakes off its heavy, muffled cloak of winter, a veil lifts from my eyes, and instantly they start to sketch shifting forms cast by the wayward light. As the sun shone on our little garden yesterday, we dug to find relics buried amongst the clusters of sprightly iris and anemones proudly splaying their pert figures. I instantly loved the bare little skeleton leaves, which quivered gently in the breeze as they generously sketched and re-sketched their intricate framework against a canvas of rich coffee soil. I like to think the earth kept these little treasures safe for me, just waiting for the light, and for my eyes to open.
© images and content Emily Hughes, 2014
searchingtosee 
