Night Blooms, published by Makina Books, attempts through images and texts to explore the textures in the nocturnal peripheries of the city where I live. The material was gathered over five successive seasons, leaving the house in all weathers with a head torch and a compact camera. In keeping with the trajectories introduced in A Downland Index, Zawawa and In The Shadow of the Silent Mountain, the approach here problematises the practices of field work.
Angus Carlyle’s Night Blooms collects nocturnal explorations of an area of woodland close to his home on the South Coast of England. Poetic prose and photographic experiments document Carlyle’s chosen medium of running, an everyday act he has repeated across specific trails in solitude for years. In Night Blooms, public space becomes unrecognised – trespassed underfoot and collected. We encounter the smells, noises, the presence of inhabitants; bats, a nightjar, laughter, concrete. A head torch provides a prism of vignetted light and acts as a portable studio, like a lantern to the understory of a secret yet shared space. Everyday objects take on a new status – shrine-like, sinister, glowing. The exhale of breath, bad weather, a deflated bouncy castle are seemingly snatched at pace from the air. If there is a constant character here, it is the blooms which remain more familiar, unwieldily and delicate. Night Blooms takes us up high – as territory, trails and terrain overlap and collide, re-assembled glimpses offer study caught in motion.
Night Blooms presents the exquisite traces of the night-runner as artist. Often an urgent poetry of action, yet with The delicate / Appearance of wreathes of smoke. Here is the runner’s pain of mantras drained empty, but also faith in the solidity of the world –
— Mark Goodwin
Night Blooms teaches us that it is only through meaningful dialogue with our surroundings that we truly come to know them. This is an intimate, kinetic document of the South Coast woodlands; while the rest of us are sleeping Night Blooms is off, sharing moments with the night.”
— Isobel Anderson
Angus Carlyle’s woodland interventions leave the viewer with suggestions of other agendas that words and photographs cannot alone reveal
– David Moore
— Mark Goodwin
Night Blooms teaches us that it is only through meaningful dialogue with our surroundings that we truly come to know them. This is an intimate, kinetic document of the South Coast woodlands; while the rest of us are sleeping Night Blooms is off, sharing moments with the night.”
— Isobel Anderson
Angus Carlyle’s woodland interventions leave the viewer with suggestions of other agendas that words and photographs cannot alone reveal
– David Moore