Alex Boyd, The Point of the Deliverance
David Gange - The Point of The Deliverance
One of my most intense and memorable days at sea took place beneath the very same cliffs at which The Point of the Deliverance began. I was a little past half way through a kayak journey from Shetland to Cornwall. The first few hundred miles had seen far more calm days than I had right to expect. But now, with a series of Atlantic storms forecast I was confronting long waits on land and, in between, conflict with the full magnificence of the Irish Atlantic. Paddling through tall heaves of swell, with colossal rocky presences occasionally cresting waves ahead, including, eventually, the spectacular Stags of Broadhaven, I made my slow way along the North Mayo coast.
As usual, the more inconvenient the weather became, the more beautiful was the sea. Slanted light, sometimes made prismatic by spray, burst beneath corrugated ridges of dark cloud and their mirror image below: thick ranks of deep grey swell that was often skimmed by gannets. In this world of intense visual contrast, the horizon lurched from many miles away to mere feet as the walls of wave rolled in.
Like most of the Scottish and Irish west, this stretch of coast is capable of feeling both ferociously wild and gently domestic. Its stories (of which it has far more than its fair share) are part grand myth and part ordinary incident. For every jagged sea stack where St Patrick chased away an ogre, there’s a spot where a seal once seemed to warn fishermen of an oncoming storm and saved a boatful of lives. It’s a coast where human settlements were clearly built to be linked by sea; where roads are inconvenient afterthoughts. And the local stories often concern the intermixing of land and ocean worlds: the crossed paths of sea species and people. It’s striking, to a visitor, that the sea here is clearly a familiar workplace and it’s in the land - the high cliffs in particular - where the hostile or uncanny resides.
By the time I reached The Stags of Broadhaven themselves, time was short. A weather front, forecast to be bleak, was moving in and the water between the great rocks was treacherous. But it was spectacular: a chaos of light and colour. A small pod of bottlenose dolphins leapt passed: there and gone so fast it was impossible to be certain they’d been real. And there was no mistaking that this was the seals’ world: fast, black forms in the bright seafoam. Bulls lurched up towards the kayak, passing the bow within feet. They swam alongside for short spells, nostrils flared and eyes wide. They were like extensions of the waves that carried them; like dark versions of the white horses in a thousand paintings and animations. As my rising and falling grew in amplitude – undulating at least 15ft every few seconds – there was no sign that a world existed beyond the seals’ realm and the seaspray.
That night the storm hit hard. I’d abandoned my kayak by a little jetty and hitched a lift from a dog walker who dropped me at a pub, Tí Chonghóil, in the little scattered settlement of Carrowteige. I thought the bar would be quiet, but it was as chaotic as the sea itself. An eighteenth birthday party dominated the largest room. But in the back room, fishermen and other seagoers had gathered to share information about dramatic events at sea. The previous day, a Coast Guard helicopter had hit the water nearby. The Captain had been found, though there was little information on her condition, while the three crew were still missing to the ocean (sadly, none of the four survived). I settled in among the older folk, whose grandchildren were celebrating wildly nextdoor, and heard countless stories of the local waters. Some were so dramatic and unlikely I thought them embellished or imagined, though I later learned them to have been true. I heard here, for the first time, for instance, of the horrific treatment of local communities by Shell and the Irish Government during attempts to build the Corrib gas pipeline off the Mayo Coast.
There was one specific feature of the coast that the Carrowteige drinkers presumed I’d have been overawed by as I passed, but that I couldn’t even recall. This was a spectacular sea stack, known as Dún Briste: the Broken Fort. They told me of a family who lived at this spot, but who were left stranded on the rock when it split from the coast. They told me in detail about their night-time rescue in a fierce storm, using ropes from local boats. Only at the end of the story did the person telling it think to reveal that the date this happened was 1393, not, as the story had so far seemed to imply, within living memory.
But it was obviously impossible for the drama in these stories to hit home completely when somehow, in the rolling sea, I’d paddled straight beneath the sea stack – seen it, presumably – but not properly registered its presence. Later, I’d look it up online and see dozens of plain record shots of a mound of rock, but nothing at all evocative.
Despite having “seen” the rock in real life, and looked at many other photos of it, the first time I ever actually saw Dún Briste was when viewing Alex Boyd’s collodion images, including the one that’s the cover of this book. The dark-bright gentle violence of that image conjures everything the fishermen had told me of in a way that – unlike most photographs of coasts – resonates deeply with my kayaker’s experience of how it feels to be awash in oceanic elements. The thought of Alex Boyd dragging cumbersome Victorian equipment to this spot, and developing, not just taking, these images surrounded by sea roaring through Dún Briste’s clefts and channels adds yet more power to this documentation of a sea site swathed in histories.
II
Alex Boyd’s work speaks directly to me because his approach achieves the thing that I – as a historian by profession – attempt to use my journeys in boats for. This goal is a deep immersion in the specificity of place while uprooting some of the specificities of time. To use wet plate collodion is to recognise the power of tradition in the present, the significance of being a tradition bearer, and the ways in which technological advancement entails the loss as well as the acquisition of meaning. To take small rowed, sailed or paddled boats out on the Atlantic in the age of engines and motors is a parallel experience.
There are ways in which both these things are also minor parallels to the far more significant workings of community in the Gaeltacht and Gàidhealtachd: to raise children speaking Irish or Gaelic is still to work against the flow of modern bureaucracy and technology. It’s a decision that ensures access to some of the richest cultural traditions on the planet, which don’t belong to the past but are enormously important for our futures. Yet it entails difficulty and hardships in the present.
In blending a traditional method, which is so painstaking and challenging, with subject matter that maps the histories and stories of Gaelic and Irish coastal worlds, The Point of the Deliverance therefore stands as a protest against the presumed order of our present: it attests Atlantic shores, so frequently marginalised by urban modernity, to be the centres of the world.
The ways in which much of our society takes current urban experience for granted have allowed for a host of dangerous developments. ‘Nature’ has come to seem to be a special interest rather than the medium through which humanity moves. Ecology has come to seem distant rather than the basis of our kinship with everything around us. Coasts that are thickly marked with culture are labelled ‘wild’, and few people are aware that the waters round an apparently isolated sea stack are likely to be named with greater detail and precision than the streets of a city centre. Ways of life that do appreciate these entanglements of nature and culture – such as those contained within the small languages of the Irish and British islands (Gaelic, Irish, Welsh, Shaetlan and other forms of Scots) – have been perceived as ‘traditional’ rather than ‘modern’. Even the names of the greatest poets of these traditions are far too little known in English-speaking culture.
The result is that it’s remarkably difficult for people born and bred inland to really comprehend coastal life or the coastal environment. And this isn’t a new development. The shores at which saltwater and freshwater, land and sea, human and animal, past and future interact – and where millennia of human activity are often visible in ways rare elsewhere – became, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, extremely difficult to represent effectively. Admiralty charts depict the water while ordnance survey maps cover land, yet no familiar form of chart is able to visualise the many processes that happen across that boundary. At the same time, the convention of taking a bird’s eye perspective for all official mapping entirely misses out vast cultural arenas such as the cliff face.
There are ways, then, in which The Point of the Deliverance acts to plot some of the things our maps can’t see. Like Brian Friel’s Translations, or Tim Robinson’s Stones of Aran, it locates the blind spots in conventions of representation that were established in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and it uses technologies that are themselves steeped in tradition to etch imagery into empty or invisible spaces on the chart.
Shores are sites at which the most important questions of our time loom large. They’re at the cutting edge of conflicts concerning the ownership of land and the rights of communities to counter the vast financial clout of both traditional landowners and the new threats of commercialised greenwashing and the least well-thought-out instances of rewilding. They’re places where repeopling, cultural and linguistic revival, and new awareness of the ecological significance of good stewardship of ocean, are all important changes that are part of how our present can redress the great injustices of the nineteenth century which led to famine, clearance, and the massive contraction of languages.
Alex Boyd shows us in collodion an artefact of the Mayo battle with Shell: “Strength in Community” painted across an Erris roof. When he does so, the mixture of subject and medium drags our present into conversation with two centuries. Shell’s ability to wield the “official” written material of science against the oral knowledge and community stories of people who lived on the coast, showed how much urban society still, in the 2000s, valued only material deemed “official” and dismissed all other manifestations of what knowledge and tradition mean. Boyd’s image makes it impossible for us to miss the continuity between famine, clearance and the corporate hierarchies of the present.
Like all neo-collodionist images, these are images about time. They reject facile visions of “progress”. They force us to look again at the things “progress” attempted to discard, and to see the dignity in those traditions - whether small scale crofting and fishing or the lives of the cliffmen of Aran. They lead us to ask what other understandings of the directions of change might be possible. Knowing, as we do, that the great acceleration of uninhibited economic growth is over, it feels necessary to look to the past, and especially to those places, communities and linguistic groups who were seen as threatening to the “improvement” and “integration” of commercial, urban society. Just as many crofters today look to historical methods to undo the damage to the landscape generated by twentieth-century industrial farming methods, so these collodion images work on the imagination to draw productive new relationships between the past and present.
III
That, anyway, explains why the body of work in this book speaks to me with the fierce eloquence it does. There are multitudes of other possible responses to it. They don’t have to rely on a sense of past injustices inscribed on historic landscapes. One of my favourite aesthetic features of this work is the way it combines the characteristics of a host of photographic disciplines and genres. The most obvious is the way that these are clearly portraits of landscape, using techniques of the former to capture the latter. The second photo of Dún Briste here is a case in point. The rock stands proud of the sea: vivid and robust, with every geological striation or sea scour as charismatic and storied as the deep wrinkles in a character study of an old fisher man or woman.
But there are also, here, small elements of abstraction that lend texture and depth to the otherwise figurative realm of cliffs and sgùrrs. These artefacts of the collodion process help these photos convey all the atmospheric grandeur of current coastal painting, like the rich half abstract seas by Ellis O’Connor.
The combination of multi-layered texture, with compositions that emphasise depth, produces a strong response of its own. This occurs before the mind works through the histories and place lore of a region. It’s an intense desire, from wherever in the world the reader views, just to step through into the island realm depicted. It seems so easy. Take, for instance, the red cuillin [plate ?]. The impression of rain on the lens makes clear the physical and emotional sensation of stepping into the scene; the intensity of focus on the mountain makes it feel like a destination, while the darkened peripheries make that destination seem the object of desire built over a long day’s stomp; and the silvered boggy ground produces a distinct impression of how earth and water will sound beneath the feet.
I’ve never seen photographs that give me a greater sense of connection to the land- and sea-scapes I love the most than these do. To sit down with poetry by Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley Maclean) or Moya Cannon, with a cup of tea or dram of Talisker, and with Alex Boyd’s photography, is the best way I can imagine of thinking myself north or west from my armchair here in Birmingham.
