“My Biological Camouflage works came about largely by accident – but once their possibilities were glimpsed it seemed as though some peculiar but inevitable chain of disturbances had opened among the deserts, mountains and forests of these tourist photographs: hallucinated portals, fusions of our most intimate physical structures with the landscapes we desire to seamlessly inhabit. Disruptions inside a world where the sublime had become a function of advertising…” [Holcombe, 1981]
I: Malaya, August 9th 1944. 4.36am.
This is the end. We are on night watch, out on the deck in the quiet of early dawn, my colleague sleeping off his own four hours’ duty while I pace the ship’s length, attentive to the pitch-blue dark as it fades from the night cloud and sea-mist like a back-cranked film that shows indigo dye leaching from the close weave of a pink linen cloth. There is nothing to do but listen to the water repeatedly raise and lower the steel hull, be lulled by the rhythmic creak and grind of riveted metal in the gun turrets and silenced engine rooms; nothing to mark time’s passing but the rhythmic, mechanical noise of a generator far off inside the ship. Occasionally I notice the smells of diesel, grease and oil that permeate every point on the ship, so deeply that they only register at all when a coastal breeze offers some other scent, gone in the very instant it arrives. In that dawn silence, there is no-one awake to confirm what I feel and see is real when the ocean’s surface, the lightest band of water at the low horizon, the particles of the air itself, all begin to flicker and change, as if I’m observing Brownian motion in the heated liquid on a glass microscope slide. Very slowly, these soft vibrations become violet sparks and white glitters, plankton, cilia or those red blood-lights that strobe on the black screen of a closed eye at night. My skin tingles. Light flows backwards to its source.
II: Paris, September 16th 1964. Noon.
These walls have the texture of skin, the cement between their stones like the edges of enlarged cells. The bark of trees, too, and paving-stones and roads, the display cabinets of chemist’s shops and hyper-markets, the windows of system built flats, the slabs of the white concrete flyovers that curve space over the suburbs. There are fresh sights everywhere, a kind of infection or inoculation, as though some undeclared war between the old and new possibilities of the city has broken out and continues beneath what we see without our ever really noticing. The chunks torn by war from the old city are repaired, one by one, but the scars heal into new forms. What was once a three storey house built of pale brick is now a fifteen storey office block bolted together from steel, concrete and glass. Where old views over rooftops were clear from third floor balconies, now a street of plate glass windows and printed signs admires its own reflection in the curtain wall of some new development of chrome and neon. Brightly coloured packaging and synthetic fabrics, all here, now, yearn for some future, as yet unknown, to come and greet them, smooth their raw edges, transform things made in anticipation of unrealized possibilities into things that truly belong in the world. Colours grow more intense by the day. The world seems open to the transformations we have called into being.
III: Nottingham, December 23rd 1965. 4.30pm.
The Christmas decorations and lights glow faintly in the early darkness. The wet surface of the paving stones, the lightest band of sky at the low horizon, the particles of the air itself, all seem to flicker and change, as if I’m observing Brownian motion in heated liquid on a glass microscope slide. Very slowly, these soft vibrations become violet sparks and white glitters, plankton, cilia or those blood-lights that strobe on the black screen of a closed eye at night…
IV: Exeter, January 2nd 2002. 11.15pm.
When I consider the age where I grew up, walls were dark with soot, smoke filled the air, men hung aimlessly around the streets for lack of work, poverty flourished like buddleia in a broken wall and prospects reached a vanishing point as distance from some chance birth-right of wealth and opportunity increased. After the first disturbance, that charged space in the air I saw in Malaya as the war wound down, then glimpsed again from time to time later, in a market square or glass tower-block’s wall, on entering a sunlit garden which darkened as though in anticipation of a thunderstorm, or among the clouds as I looked out over a view of green hills and new housing estates, over hospitals and schools, playing fields and public parks… those disturbances like water swirling, where normal vision melted under some unseen intense white heat…I was assured that change was possible. When I consider the present, those disturbances long ceased, litter piled in squares and behind the railings of flower beds in padlocked car parks, in front of the decayed sills and boarded windows of abandoned houses, men hanging aimlessly or sleeping in bus shelters and doorways for lack of work, poverty once again flourishing like buddleia in a broken wall, prospects diminished to vanishing points as distance from chance birth-rights of wealth and opportunity increase… it is as though the direction of time has reversed, a black oil leaching into the tight weave of some white linen cloth, turning every thread unfathomably dark.
V: Malaya, August 9th 1944. 5.15am.
Very slowly the atmosphere changes, air grows heavy, birds fall silent, as during a solar eclipse. Electricity seems to charge the iron railings and rivets of the ship where I stand. My body’s weight, my feeling that gravity binds my feet to the deck, all lift, gradually, as darkness draws itself clear of the sky above me and light flows backwards to its source – pours through a soft cellular tunnel, a point where the familiar view turns itself inside out, funnels itself like a whirlpool from the still ocean surface into clouds that, even as their colours grow heavy, become weightless. I know instinctively that this is happening not just here and now, but simultaneously, at many points around the globe. I know these portals connect, like cells in a bodily organ, like nerve tissue wired through the brain… My attention is drawn from me, stretched like light entering a black hole, passing through the seemingly infinite possibilities of this space that has now opened and held itself open in front of me, maybe a few hundred yards or a few miles out to sea, it’s hard to read the distances involved and barely matters anyway. The ocean warps, a frame of film trapped between the clear lens and tungsten flame of a projector. Clouds fold in. Water buckles. White light spreads from a still point on the horizon and overwhelms everything. This was the beginning.
Wayne Burrows 