@mlestone Main image: ‘Barely distinguishable from straight landscape’ … Cowspines. Photograph: Kate Kirkwood
Fri 24 Jun 2022 02.00 EDT Last modified on Fri 24 Jun 2022 05.41 EDT
Kirkwood’s project is an obsession born out of a love of the Lake District and the elements. She says: ‘It’s a daunting prospect to make landscape photographs in [a place] that has been endlessly photographed, and its beauty affirmed by many masters … I wondered if there was a way to capture something else, something about the quiet spirit of the spaces I know here, to somehow describe the way it moves me, and maybe even to move others in a fresh way.’ Cowspines is published by Ten O’Clock Books. All photographs: Kate Kirkwood Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
In Cowspines beast and landscape, near and far, are inseparable as a harmonious vista. ‘It so happened that I ended up living on a farm which I share with farming families, and their cows, left in peace on the fell-top fields, were available as ready subjects, easily accessible every day during the summer. I walk out and visit them most days. After initial uncertainty, they began to ignore me and before long I became insignificant to their community life. I can spend hours among them, and have grown to revere and love them’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Starting with a sequence of images barely distinguishable from straight landscape, each new page of Cowspines reveals a fragment of separation within each composition, but never breaks the graphical symbiosis. ‘Mostly animals have been rendered marginal in our culture. Cows might be glimpsed as a herd at a distance, from the motorway or on a ramble, studiously avoided if encountered, their poo, smell and power disdained, but eventually they’re consumed, eaten, in the most intimate act of mastery’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘Close up they are sensual, huge, fragrant, warm, gentle. They don’t carry a tradition of communication with us the way horses or dogs do. They interact with each other constantly, even share tasks like watching over the nursery, and take their days slowly, grazing, resting, suckling, gazing about’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘I was struck by how very settled into their landscape the cows are; grounded, “hefted”, at home, and how beautifully the landscape around them, the hills, the clouds, the stone walls, blended with them, formed shapes and tones and textures around them” Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
‘These particular herds are a mix of breeds and their variations are beautiful and surprising, as is the ever changing light, the mood, and the backgrounds in which I’ve sought to capture them, so that I discovered an endless assortment of abstract possibilities each time I managed to get broadside to one of them and raise my camera’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
“In the same way that the backs of the living cows in my photographs become part of the landscape, so too, perhaps, in a lovely reversal, the landscape, the hills, the shapes, the weather, become living entities, their assimilation of the warm-blooded creatures in the foreground imbuing them with a similar vital force; hairy, bony, wispy, undulating life forms’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
In his foreword to the book, Joel Meyerowitz comments: ‘A guide with an extraordinarily fresh vision and new idea of what constitutes nature, and making photographs of it. Kate’s images give us that jolt of surprise, that sudden rush of breath and amazement at what we are seeing; they remind us of the power that ordinary reality has to astonish us’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Through the summer the cows become intimately reacquainted with the fields, the spaces beyond, the silences, the weather. They become very much part of the landscape. They watch, they notice, they listen, they smell, tuning in to the wind, to occasional danger. They guard and nurture their young together; they groom and jostle each other and sleep in a close group Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
Meyerowitz says: ‘She has been drawn to mingle intimately with these cows in their landscape and learned, by doing so, something of their animal nature; She understands their place and meaning in our lives, and only from their trusting communion could she discover the physical beauty of them within their landscape’ Share on FacebookShare on Twitter
