I’ve been on my feet continually for four days, and my right knee has decided it’s had enough. I hobble to the top of the stairs clutching my water bottle, a flask of soup and the camera, but it doesn’t take me long to realise there’s no way I’m walking a mile and a half to the gallery this morning. Despondent, I sit on the wall outside and call a taxi – another cost to add to the spiralling budget for this exhibition I really didn’t want to do in the first place.
I’m tired and grumpy. I limp from the taxi up the dodgy alleyway to the gallery entrance. I’ve arrived earlier than usual, so I have a little time after opening up to compose myself before anyone else arrives. My knee’s decided to settle down since I spent all that money to placate it, and I promise it I’ll remember to sit down more often today. I know I’ll forget once I’m in the zone, but it’s the thought that counts.
It’s early March 2024, and this is the second Three Photographers’ exhibition. I don’t know it yet, but it’s also the early rumbling of my first brush with COVID-19, which will knock me flat within hours of packing up. I’m not supposed to feel so negative about having my art on display in a public gallery, but virus-induced exhaustion and grief are beginning to catch up with me. I’ve already been ill three times in the short weeks since my mother’s death.
I take a few deep breaths and decide to walk round the gallery as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. Here are the sublime photos of the meadow I grew to know and love so well during lockdown, seen through eyes very different from my own. At the back of the gallery are the glorious images of people waiting in line to view a dead queen’s corpse. Who but us Brits would queue with such style and such stoicism?
My co-conspirators and I have expended much effort in persuading visitors to circumnavigate to gallery clockwise, which is probably why I’m travelling anticlockwise now. I still feel ambivalent about my own contribution to the exhibition. Small Stuff – a celebration of insignificance. A slightly ill-prepared celebration if I’m honest, but the last few months have been all about accepting that there are circumstances over which I have no control – death, food poisoning and the rail network for starters. Nonetheless I find myself drawn in, this time not by the photographer’s skill, but by the breathtaking beauty of a tiny hover fly suspended from a flower.
The arrogance of the human species often leaves me speechless. We delude ourselves that we’re in control of this incredible planet we live on, but our part of it is no more than a superficial layer. The truth is that even entomologists with years of experience are not 100% certain how many different types of hover fly inhabit a meadow. There are whole worlds within this world that we know almost nothing about.
One of the things I love best about macro photography is that I can line up a shot of the tiniest creature on a blade of grass, yet when I get home to view it on a bigger screen two or three of its far smaller neighbours, invisible to the naked eye, appear. This ability to see into miniature worlds has enthralled me for as long as I can remember. Even today, the sense of awe can still short circuit the grumpiness, so when my fellow photographers arrive I’m ready to smile and put the kettle on.
The very last stop on my reverse circuit of the gallery is my blurb – the explanation of my choice to photograph insignificant objects and creatures, from reels of thread to honey bees, for my corner of our exhibition …
One Christmas, many years ago, my parents gave me a dolls’ house. It wasn’t new, but it had been refurbished with love. My father had fitted individual electric lights in every room, while my mother had dressed each of the dolls exquisitely. I fell in love with the tiny furniture, the miniature household items and the dolls.
I was a solitary child, living almost wholly in my own imagination. I kept a pet rock in the garden, and a sliver of flint that might have been an ancient arrowhead in a box in my bedroom, alongside an acorn cup. These insignificant things were hugely precious to me.
As years passed, I put away childish things. Life became dominated by the important, urgent and significant. My lack of success taught me that I’m by nature a sower of seeds rather than a reaper of harvests – someone who nurtures small things and learns to let go of the results.
My seventieth year has been dominated by the slow demise of my mother. The gradual fading of this once strong woman has gifted me much time for reflection at her beside, while soothing her as one might a fretful baby. Never in my life has insignificance been thrown into such sharp focus. The smallest knock of my teacup on the bedside cabinet could wake her in a panic. The touch of a finger on her cheek would reassure her. The achievements of a lifetime at the helm of a family, a career and a community had all melted away to leave behind a frightened child, still reliving the unresolved trauma of wartime evacuation.
Through all this, the creative urge held and nurtured me. The morning photo walk along the quayside in Ipswich. The afternoons among the autumn trees in the park behind the care home. And above all, coming back home to the small stuff. The insects in the community garden, the objects that clutter my home now just as they did the bedrooms of my childhood, and the sense that no amount of important, urgent or significant can ever be worth more than the insignificant details that make up a life.
Small Stuff is dedicated to the memory of
Pamela Eileen Hulford (2nd October 1929 – 7th December 2023)
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