I am fortunate enough to take in a hay meadow as part of the daily dog-walk.
A visit to the Gary Fabian Miller ‘ADORE’ show on Bristols Harbourside during April of 2023 impressed upon me, the significance of the passing of time when observing my surroundings. As Garry’s ‘Sea Horizons’ photographic studies of multiple view across the Severn Estuary toward the South Wales Coastline demonstrate, a single viewpoint undergoes sometimes subtle and at other times dramatic changes in colour and mood as time passes.
During the following month of May, I began to focus on the daily changes that were starting to occur within the hay meadow I was walking through. I began to stop at the same position every morning and point the camera in exactly the same direction and capture the onset of competition between the native flora over the next thirty days.
It wasn’t long before a close succession of yellows, purples, browns and whites of the various hay meadow species were being added to an increasingly rich, complex and harmonious colour palette on an almost daily basis.
At the end on the month of May, the photography stopped and I began to consider how best to use photographs to represent the changes I had experienced. I decided to select nine photographs including those taken on the first and last day of May that I thought were best suited to represent the colour transitions of the Hay Meadow over time. I then experimented with modifying these photographs to best reflect an increasingly complex species-driven colour palette. I eventually decided that the most effective way to to this was by pixelating each photograph into 150 x 150 pixel squares. Perhaps this is also a way a visiting insect would see the meadow through it’s compound eyes?
And here is the result ‘Nine days in May’ showing the gradual changes to one small area of the hay meadow throughout May, (to be read from left to right then top to bottom).
