Writing by Beverley Carruthers

It is dark. We are in the darkness, (Can you hear me in the `darkness shouts John Berger) we can smell the dampness mixed with the sensation of dripping, the thick rock surrounds us. Our senses are magnified. We are not just below the rock we are within the rock. It takes time for our eyes to adjust but slowly we start to see ……the bear, ….the lion, …..animals all around us.

We are in the Chauvet caves in France. Famous for its 25,000 year old cave paintings.

John Berger is telling us that the hunter/painters who made these cave paintings saw themselves as being part of the herd of animals they hunted. There was interconnectedness between human and animal not understood today.

I am now sitting in my sister’s kitchen she is heavily pregnant and upset, her husband has just shown her a photo from the newspaper of a woman who has given birth to a half dog half human baby. She is asking me if this could be possible. What about the Minotaur, Harpies, Sphinx, Fauns? All these creatures made of a blend of human and animal if they exist what stops her from giving birth to something similar.

These are all mythological creatures I suggest to her and these things could not happen in real life. But I am not so certain.

In Iceland the wind is so strong I can hardly keep the car on the road, I am with Berthora and Thor. We are trying to explore the imaginary animal within us, the animal that could have been in this landscape if humans remained as fluid as the landscape it inhabits. The kind of creatures Ovid talks of in his Metamorphoses ‘from beast to men, from men to beast, but always it keeps on living. As the pliant wax is stamped with new designs and is no longer what once it was, but changes form’

The memories of such creatures are in all of us from folk tales told to us as children but for my family even more so, having grown up with fishermen and their tall tales of the sea. Mermaids never far from our minds. Borges in his Book of Imaginary Beings tells us ‘the zoo of mythological creatures is never ending as the combination of creatures is infinite, only limited by our boredom or disgust.’

I am nervous, the weather is bad and I am responsible. They don’t seem to be worried- they are excited. We get out of the car I know where I want to go I’ve been here before many times testing, shooting, looking.

We all feel the landscape it seems primal unformed, not yet settled.

We walk to the water’s edge. Berthora excitedly jumps onto a rock a little out into the water. She falls and slips deep into the freezing cold water. I quickly pull her out, strip the wet clothes from her body, wrap blankets around her, dress her again and give her lots of hot tea. We are in the car again, not a single photo taken. We decide to go where the earth is hot. We drive along, the car out of control. We crawl on our hands and knees up the hill sheltering from the wind. It will blow us over if we stand tall. Are we at the border of our condition as a human being?

There is no need to ask them to perform they are only trying to spontaneously survive out here we take some photographs. I am the photographer I gain some control over the situation, composing, exposing, talking, and making sure to do what is needed. Images emerging from the earth. This process is repeated.

It is only through this repeated action that eventually I start to see.

I am now in darkness this is my own cave, the place of imagination. The smell of dampness is replaced by the smell of chemicals, but the sense of trepidation remains. My ‘Off Cells‘ are activated and the process of becoming begins. The enlarger is on wheels, moving around like a caged creature, controlled by motors, the lights/eyes flashing on and off, the image becoming visible on the wall where the paper hangs. It is in the silence that the images emerge, the new creatures are born. The darkroom is this cave, Plato’s cave.

The cave where creatures are born.