The calmness associated with the eerie is something which certainly appears in my collage work. Images do not necessarily jar, but at the same time describe a gentle disjunction, the deja vu sense of something recognised yet not fully fixed in, nor reclaimable, from the memory; a retinal after image. The doppelgänger, the "repetition and doubling" which Fisher describes and are associated with Freud's theories on the unheimlich; the uncanny or the unhomely, are certainly visible within my work. So much for ghost story tropes, (think of Roger Moore's double in The Man Who Haunted Himself, 1970); my doppelgängers are squarely located in the home, in the familial and the familiar. For me, they represent family members and friends or objects which mirror those which are acutely recognisable; for I both live with and interact with them daily. As I've written previously, an important element of my image-making involves carefully searching out these mirror images within the vast repositories of images on the web.
The eerie, in Fisher's terms, have always been fertile ground for the visual artist. A painting by Casper David Friedrich, Monk By The Sea c.1809, captures the occasional eerie-ness of being in the landscape perfectly for me. The paintings' conventional tonality is reversed; normally the distribution of darks and lights within a landscape painting will determine that the sky generally lightens as it meets the horizon, but in this work, the sky is strangely dark at that point and seems luminous above, almost as if lit from within. There is light where there should be none...after all, the scene is a brooding stormy one.
The eerie-ness comes from the lack of what should be there; darkness. "Why is something here, when there should be nothing"?
Suilven, one of the most iconic and difficult to approach mountains in Scotland lies deep within a peaty, bog ridden landscape within the Coigach in Sutherland. Its ascent is a serious proposition according to most of the guidebooks, which is true; I've climbed it several times, always an arduous task. After a wet summer, almost autumn, I climbed this hill, an intrinsic part of my childhood landscape, becoming in doing so soiled in the 'clagg' of the peat bog path; impossible to avoid. On reaching the Bealach Mhor and attaining the top, I was astounded to come across an individual clad in a pristine white suit, sitting reading a book. We did not acknowledge each other as I passed and I left the hill after a period, but with a deep sense of uneasiness, one which I carry to this day. This episode, after four decades has passed, still brings on a disquiet. I question its veracity. I'm sure it happened but with the telling, the passage of time and the sheer strangeness of the encounter, it has become easier to share the skepticism of those that listen to the tale. Weird.