Ghosts in the Wood
posted by Cptn
If you do go down to the woods today - or any day before September 14, and the wood in question is Haldon Forest, then you could be in for an excellent surprise. Suspended amidst the seering pines (if that’s not Coleridge, what is?) is a whole exhibition from photographer Mike Smallcombe, who explores those shared primal fears: forests; the dark and (not surprisingly) ghosts.
Called Ghosts in the Wood, there’s a whole fairy tale (of the Grimm variety) meets ‘travellers’ meets Bat for Lashes in his ‘hyper-real’ photographs of masked, lonely and desperate figures.
Mike tells Olivier Vergnault in What’s on South West: “People are so urban these days but there still is a fear of the woods ingrained in them, dating from the times when the forest was home to bears and wolves.”
And art exhibitions, oh my!
“It’s about creating contemporary fairy tales based on a shared mythology and our basic fear of the dark.
“Pine forests are alien to Britain. They’re dark, scary and not very welcoming. When Red Riding Hood was attacked by the wolf she was probably walking in a pine forest.”
We first caught up with Mike after he won last year’s eco prize at the Exeter Phoenix for one of the images that has made it into this exhibition.
If he succeeds in highlighting our Blair Witch fear of the wood, he also has managed to entice us to interact with the forest in a different way. To throw images in our path and off the beaten track, that will definitely haunt us - in both good and more eerie ways.
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If you liked this story, you could buy us a coffeeSeptember 11th, 2008
