STONEGRAVE POND

and the art of photography

The ancient pond at Stonegrave in Ryedale in North Yorkshire fails to register on the Ordnance Survey map. It's a no-where place, so dark, dank and fly-blown that you wonder why anyone would linger there. There was a violent dispute over water-rights here in the Fourteenth Century and this seems to weigh on the atmosphere of the Pond throughout most of the year. Nevertheless at dusk in late Autumn Stonegrave Pond is transformed by light, revealing depths and forms that can be by turns delicate and harsh. Then the snows of Winter purify this disturbingly beautiful place.

Fast-forward to the mid-Twentieth Century and the Pond adjoined the home of the Great War poet Sir Herbert Read who entered it through the gate of his classically formal garden. As with other poets of the First World War (viz. Robert Graves), Read would have observed military emplacements and objectives in the surrounding embankments, copses and hills. He would have heard the crack of shotguns in muddy fields, registered trees at crazy angles and seen craters in deep, water-filled depressions like Stonegrave Pond. Herbert Read was instrumental to the appreciation of Modern Art in England, in which memory, reality and the unconscious mind interact to form shapes, colours, lights, spaces and shadows. So it seems fair to imagine that Read could have seen in this landscape --which would include the landscape of the sky-- some of the naturalistic, even expressionist, forms of contemporary sculpture and painting.