the desire to be there
Richard Butler
Opening Event :
Friday 15 November 2024, 5:30pm – 7:30pm
Opening Dates :
Thursday 14 – Wednesday 27 November 2024
10:00am – 5:00pm daily*
* 10:00am – 12:00noon on Final Day / Wednesday 27 November 2024
“Fourteen thousand six hundred and three days had passed since I last saw the sun rise through the storms over the Ravenswood hills. After all that time – and finally – I saw its beauty. Without knowing how much. I missed it so.”
– Richard Butler
the desire to be there is an exhibition of photographs by Richard Butler at the Long Gallery, Salamanca Arts Centre.
The photographs were made across an 18 month period ending in December 2023. The motivation for the series was artist Richard Butlers’ return to Launceston after a four decade absence.
Not long after his arrival he stood on the deck of his Trevallyn home and through the storms and rain saw glimpses of the misted hills far across the Tamar Valley. The view evolved without repetition each day. It held his attention as a magicians trick captures the imagination of a child. All that mystery. All that wonder.
At dawn during the day and at each days’ end for eighteen months Richard stared into the swirling weather. He saw and photographed the thinly raked light against the shadows in the thunder clouds. He loved the blankets of gold and cyan coloured mist covering the foothills of Mt Arthur, Mt Barrow and Ben Lomond. Those daily weather events provided a personal revelation. He had assumed the weather in the valley was relatively constant across each season, but was shown the colours and tone at every second of every day were remarkably different.
The experience both beautiful and mesmerising. The weather and all of its symbolism had found him and opened a new awareness. “Until recently, I have not wanted to photograph the land”.
But the land informed his thoughts on the connection between place and identity. Richard felt a sense of longing caused by the passing of unretrievable time. Everything seen today would not be seen tomorrow. “On the really wild days everything is at work. All crashing. All at the same time” Richard wrote in his note-book. “The poetic nature and interplay between time and light; of line and colour; of space and the graphic flatness of the East Tamar valley walls – these are the walls we are climbing. The walls which must be climbed.”
“We long for connection with a permanency beyond ‘our us’.”
For this series, Richard has used colour negative and colour transparency film. He scanned the film in his studio and produced the digital files in-house. The printing of the images was a collaborative effort, in part due to the size and other challenges in handling each print. “I wanted the images to be big, almost falling off the sheet. When you stand in front of them, I hope you will stare into their colours and just wonder.”
When a small light-sensitive piece of film is shown the world by old lenses that film provides a beautifully imprecise response. “I love film – it is just like the weather – and rejects any notion of predictability” He feels the story-telling elements of film are ideal for this interpretive folio.
The most exciting photographs in this folio are those where more is inferred and less is shown. Contrary to larger format photography and different technology platforms – it is what isn’t in the photographs that Richard believes is critical. “Absences liberate. Absences provide opportunity to reflect and dream. The essential elements are interdependent and together with imagination, are interlocutory. With a bit of luck magic can happen.”
