This digest revels in the in-between, the transitional, the presence of absence. My camera with its dials and knobs and sharp focus has taken me into the blur of things. It has taught me that because things can't be measured it doesn't mean that it isn't there. The spirit of things, the essence of our places is as real as my shutter button.
At times I felt as though the building was simply bobbing up for air before slipping back into the currents of the past. At Ashbourne - I simply let go of my anxiety and allowed the light and the building to guide me.
What struck me walking through Louth was how much cohesion is embedded within these surfaces. The town feels less designed and more incremental - shaped gradually through negotiation between utility, beauty, repair and inheritance.
For a moment, the world stopped feeling closed to me. The contract with the present felt renewed. And I found myself thinking - with unusual clarity - that I will never give up on this world while places like this, and the people capable of making them, still exist within it.
As I follow each cursive curve and incision, I begin to sense the song of the person who etched it into the metal surface. The plate ceases to be an artefact pinned beneath history and becomes something warmer and more immediate
I imagine all those characters, words and sentences made coherent, ordered into patterns that move the soul, create a mystery, or reveal a hidden truth. I think of the time span that they all encompass - from the first burst of the universe to the first man on the moon.
This is why places like Catherine Hill matter - not because they contain answers, but because they hold a way of arriving at them that seems to accommodate the flaws of the present.
I lost my dad in 2008 and I think that’s when it all started - I took his spirit out with me on my first forays into deep time; sharing with him my findings - as if he was taking part in an evolving life, a new man emerging from the chrysalis of breakdown and depression.
The service is coming to an end. I can tell by the rhythm and the tone of the minister’s voice rather than the words. I look at the strangers sat around me and ask myself, ‘where do I fit in with all of this?’
So here, in one place, we find layers of meaning and layers of firsts: movement, industry, politics, science, architecture and belief, all tied, in some way, to this ground. There’s no city like this - every layer of soil put down here is the first in the journey towards the modern world.
✨ Wondering why I ask for support?
An Anxiety of Memberships