Last year on November 30th, Carol and I went to Waddesdon Manor to see a seasonal art exhibit by so-called “international light artist” Bruce Munro. Well, here we are back at that time of year again and once more Mr Munro has been up to his tricks decorating Waddesdon manor. To quote the Waddesdon marketing speak:

Winter Light: Bruce Munro – Continuing our exploration of light at Waddesdon, we are delighted to be collaborating again with artist Bruce Munro in the gardens. Take a magical journey through six large-scale installations and be mesmerised by shapes, textures and colours.

Right!

Last year’s exhibition left me feeling pretty cold, and not just because it was 30th November. Several thousand second-hand pre-owned/second-use/recycled CDs nailed to the grass of Waddesdon Manor didn’t really do it for me, especially when one of those “works of light art” could really be seen only from the air. This year, I chose not to accompany Carol but let her go unencumbered to be creative by herself. Let’s face it, I’m an artistic numbskull. She did have some company, though, in the form of our friend, Rosemary, who, I’m sure, was much more appreciative than I’d have been.

Having said that, now that I’ve seen Carol’s photographic results I’d say that the eminent Mr Munro seems to have done better this year. Whereas last year there were two exhibits, both of crucified CDs, this year there are six and not a CD in sight. Carol came back with appealing shots of three of the current exhibits.

Brass Monkeys

This year’s Brass Monkeys exhibit seems to be derivation of last year’s Blue Moon on a Platter exhibit, based on optical fibres within spheres. And now, the fun. To quote the literature Brass Monkeys takes its name from brass triangles (supposedly the monkeys) used to support cannon balls on board 18th century war ships. The artistic speak continues, “… hence the saying cold enough to freeze the balls of a brass monkey”. The term I’ve heard finishes … off a brass monkey. I’ve never been comfortable with the explanation and here’s what the Oxford English Dictionary has to say on the subject.

The story goes that cannonballs used to be stored aboard ship in piles, on a brass frame or tray called a ‘monkey’. In very cold weather the brass would contract, spilling the cannonballs: hence very cold weather is ‘cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey’. There are several problems with this story, as follows:

• the term ‘monkey’ is not otherwise recorded as the name for such an object
• the rate of contraction of brass in cold temperatures is unlikely to be fast enough to cause the reputed effect
• the phrase is actually first recorded as ‘freeze the tail off a brass monkey’, which removes any essential connection with balls.

At last, an art exhibit that is also educational! Thanks Bruce. 😉

Water Towers

Time for another quote from the artistic speak.

Shown for the first time in the cloister of Salisbury Cathedral, Water Towers is an immersive installation which developed from Munro’s interest in the phenomenon of colour synæsthesia – where colours are perceived as sound. At Waddesdon the installation is 16 structures constructed from 2-litre recyclable plastic water bottles illuminated with optical fibres. This installation beckons people to immerse themselves in the spaces between the towers as they walk through a corridor of light and sound.

More education! Synæsthesia is neither a disease nor will it cause people to become unconscious. Further more, immersive has nothing to do with Harry Houdini making a last minute escape from the water towers just before his breath runs out.

RIver of Light

… is a new manifestation of Field of Light, perhaps Munro’s best known work, first seen in 2004 at his home in Wiltshire, and at the V&A and then reworked in different permutations, each created in response to the space in which it is exhibited.

So, it isn’t only the plastic bottles that are recyclable, eh? In all honesty, though at first it sounds like cheating, given the nature of these works of art I imagine they pretty much have to be reworked/re-used in order to be displayed elsewhere. At Waddesdon, River of Light, “constructed from 6500 glass spheres each threaded with coiled fibre optics mounted on individual stems”, trickles down Daffodil Valley [my phrase, not the artistic speak].

Of course, the nature of such exhibits is that they really demand darkness, or at least diminished levels of light. Timing is everything and patience may be required to appreciate them. The regular Waddesdon kicking out time of 5:00PM leaves a narrow window opportunity, though it gets wider the closer to 21st December you are. Fortunately, they do have some late evenings to help.

No elevated vantage point necessary this year so bravo! This year there seems to be more light than can be generated by condensation-dulled CDs, entirely more interesting. I think River of Light is my personal favourite. I can see why it might be Bruce’s best known work.

The weather forecast/guess for day #2 of our escape from Halloween had been questionable. We were hoping to make our inaugural visit to the WWT site at Slimbridge as long as storm and tempest didn’t stop us. The forecast still seemed questionable, a band of rain sweeping across the country, when we awoke in our Tetbury hotel after a long night in a bed whose mattress I can only liken to a rice pudding. Nonetheless, we breakfasted, spotted that life remained dry, and made the 30-minute, 15-mile/24-kilometre journey further west.

This was our first visit to any WWT site and it turned out to be something quite different from my expectations. What I thought it would be was open expanses of wild wetlands with swarms of migrating water birds doing their natural thing. That kind of habitat was certainly there in abundance, overlooked by a large collection of hides some of which were inhabited by the expected collections of twitchers with spotting scopes but there was another dimension to Slimbridge which I really did not expect. So unexpected was it that it took me a while fully to realize what it actually was. A pedestrian visitor route was marked out around a series of ponds containing water birds. The first of these, just beyond the reception, contained Bewick’s Swans (Cygnus columbianus) and Tufted Ducks (Aythya fuligula), amongst others. Slimbridge is well known for being visited by Bewick’s.  On the second pond was a gang of Common Eiders (Somateria mollissima) which I assumed had flown in.

Continuing our exploratory wander, we began seeing birds from Africa, Asia and South America. These were not migrants but were effectively a collection of captive specimens of various waterfowl from various parts of the planet. When they exercised their wings, we could see that they were clipped. This was essentially a waterfowl zoo collection.. This was an aspect that I had most certainly not expected. Visitors could buy packets of grain with which to feed the birds and it was a good facility for attracting families, thus generating an income for more of the year and from a wider audience than the die-hard twitcher. It was very well done, we thought, and found it quite enjoyable. Since I find it nigh on impossible to sit in a hide with a spotting scope for hours on end, I number myself amongst those that it does a better job of attracting. Had I looked at the map, I’d have twigged sooner – the area was called World Wetlands.

The return route took us back to the Eiders. I had begun the day thinking that Eiders were rather dull, black and white birds with a rather unattractive wedge-shaped head. This impression was based purely on books, though, since I’d never actually seen one in the flesh/feather. Certainly the males are largely black and white but in their breeding plumage they have a beautifully suffused pastel pink blush to their chests and a delicate but obvious pale green nape. They look quite stunning. The black cap extends below the eye and tends to conceal it, making them quite difficult to photograph. The eye really does need that magic catch-light.

The Eiders have another endearing quality. The male’s’ mating call to the female is a cooing sound, first rising then falling. It’s a sort of, “oo–OO-oo” sound. It has been more amusingly described as resembling one of late, great Frankie Howerd’s trademark noises, along the lines of “oo-er-missus”. The call’s delivery – the Eider’s that is, not Frankie Hawerd’s – is accompanied by a backward toss of the head. This is a shot of the male in mid-coo to a prospective mate. [Here is the RSPB Eider page with an audio of the call.]

Our visit to Slimbridge catapulted the enchanting Common Eider into my list of favourites.

October 31st is my most feared day of the year. It’s bloody Halloween and I absolutely dread it. When I was a child Halloween was just an innocuous date on the calendar that passed without notice. Halloween used to be perfectly fine, a non event. Then our inexorable march towards Americanization screwed things up such that we are now forced to endure the yearly ritual of the infernal “trick or treat” brigades. These days, I almost literally live in fear at home approaching the evening of October 31st, fear waiting for knocks on the door to be faced by swarms of Satan’s Little Disciples demanding sweets with menaces.

I suspect that our big commercial organizations were mostly to blame for promoting trick or treat as a fun thing to do. They have a vested interest, after all. Now, in the same vein as my other pet dislike, Christmas, the shops fill up with Halloween costumes, along with otherwise useless (i.e. unsalable)  pumpkins, both of which the parents of the trick or treaters must buy, and vast quantities of tooth-decaying sweets and chocolates of various descriptions which the victims of the trick or treaters are expected to buy in order to placate the little monsters. How many sweets is one expected to buy? How many groups will arrive and what size will each group be? Are we going to have enough sweets? How many otherwise unwanted sweets will we be left with? One year, we had a basketful of chocolates waiting by the door, only to have nobody turn up – it was probably raining and I was greatly relieved. The real winners are the commercial organizations catering for the nonsense. I object to the commercial pressure to join in and I object to the psychological pressure placed on me by my peers to join in. A phrase such as “I can’t stand Halloween” is frequently met by the All Hallows’ Eve equivalent of the “bah humbug, you old Scrooge”, that is typically slung at folks who dislike the commercial claptrap of Christmas. At least for Christmas, we are being pressured into spending money on our own family. Halloween forces us to spend money on unwanted products for complete strangers.

Just say NO to Halloween!

We said no to Halloween this year by organizing an evening away in a hotel. This is a depressing time of year, anyway, for those of us with an interest in insect life but one saving grace can be autumnal colours. Carol enjoys an autumnal photographic expedition to Westonbirt Arboretum with its impressive display of Acers. Westonbirt is about a 90-minute drive away, so could be done easily as a day trip, but it’s in the same direction as another venue that we’ve long wanted to visit, the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust centre at Slimbridge. Migratory birds are another saving grace of autumn. So, our plan was a night away in peace between visits to these two venues. We booked into an hotel in Tetbury, packed our gear and set off.

There’s another gotcha that I’d forgotten around bloody Halloween, bloody half term. Westonbirt is always busy at this time of year but today the ratio of kids to adults had increased noticeably. So had the noise levels. It’s always a challenge getting photographs of the autumn colour unpolluted by people but today there appeared to be some kind of event organized to engage the little ones. Despite my own reticence to get near kids, I think this was a great idea; I’m all for getting the little monsters more in touch with nature ‘cos they mostly grow up into acceptable adults and our nature will need their support. This event, I suspect, involved collecting leaves of different shapes and colour, and, with kids rushing at trees to grab said leaves, this made photography extra difficult. Nonetheless, we wandered around, selected targets, stood patiently for several minutes at a time and eventually managed a few shots attempting to capture nature’s colourful autumnal splendour. The colours actually seem a little later this year compared to our previous visits and there was quite a bit of green still around. Actually, in some cases, the green made for a pleasant contrast.

An abstract approach can produce an interesting image but I find it largely a matter of luck – must practice.