Gerhard Stromberg - Two Moons
14. February 2000
The drive to Hampshire is still painful, although it is nearly four years ago when I last made this journey with L. It is a pain not of longing but of loss. Too many place names on the motorway signs read like chapter headings to the book of our abandoned love. Amersham, Hook, Basingstoke, Winchester, Eastleigh illuminate the dark landscape I drive through. The memories however are carried not by these names but by the landscape they evoke. I feel relieve as I turn West on the M27 toward a territory which is of the future, mine to claim. Coming into Brockenhurst I turn right and cross a cattle grid. A lone grey pony blocks my way. I switch off the car's headlights and we look at each other in the orange glow of a street lamp until she calmly walks away and disappears between dark thickets of gorse.
Night Sky with North Star
Digital Video, 28 seconds
876Kb QuickTime Movie
22. February 2000
Marks which we make consciously, in an effort to communicate, are the most disturbing. The brown signposts guiding me to “places of interest” make autonomous experience impossible. They force me to enter into a relationship with the Forest which is not of my choice but conceived for me. At, say, Bucklers Hard or Beaulieu, the forced presentation of the “picturesque” makes any engagement with history impossible; here it is not presented as the confused and often messy process it really is, but as a sanitised consumer product, colour-coordinated with the adjacent car and coach parks.
Later I am searching for the former airfields from which the Allies flew all important sorties to end the German rape of Europe. Merely the smallest patches remain, now used as car parks and recognisable only by their dated concrete surfaces. Miles, however, have been dug up and dumped. How beautiful and moving a monument could have been created by simply allowing at least one airfield to be reclaimed by the forest; to see the concrete surface broken first by the smallest of colonising plants and later by gorse and silver birches.
And yet, I need to loose all these thoughts before I can begin to make pictures. My relationship to the Forest must become effortless, all thoughts must become as practically irrelevant as the texture of the canvas is for a painting: primed properly it is all there, but it only carries the colour, never determines it.
To look at the world as if it was a white canvas, to forget all concepts, to see without thinking. To prime my looking at the world with ignorance of all I know and all I fear or hope.
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