Titled Ouessant Sorties, this work examines how even the most subtle, perhaps insignificant, details underpin major events and serve as their foundation. These details are also precise and exact. The island of Ouessant may be too well-known for the splendor of its landscape. Its spectacular marine panorama continues to attract a crowd of visitors eager to experience all the riches this place has to offer, which they imagine as far removed from their daily worries and lives. The island’s inhabitants form their support structure, while their way of life, which once relied on fishing and farming, has evolved over the years due to the economic pressures that their survival now depends on.
The impressive instability of the weather conditions, tides, and other natural phenomena seems more pronounced in the isolated world of this island. One becomes hyper-sensitive to it. This creates a disturbing sense of solitude.
I focused on the small details of island life that sometimes go unnoticed: the barely perceptible activity of plant life near the ground we walk on and the world of insects, which often preceded the arrival of humans. Persistently adapting to change in order to survive, these lives seem surprisingly stable compared to the vulnerability conveyed by larger-scale phenomena.
My work describes a series of small outings undertaken with a camera to closely study what is happening beneath our feet. Each of these operations produced a new piece. The photographs were then organized chronologically to form towers rising from the page. The results I eventually obtained traced my thoughts filmed by the camera, producing a particular and personal taxonomy that formed a curious architecture where space and place, occupation and habitation, as well as conscious and unconscious thought, were arranged.
I went to Ouessant twice to create this work (but since I had already visited the island once with my son, I already had an idea of it, free from any romanticism or idealization). I made my first stay in the spring and my second in the autumn. Although not a documentary, my work delves into the life of plants and insects from birth to death, as well as the forms and colors associated with them.
The resulting pieces form a series of images that have been exhibited in galleries as small framed paintings. I am now entering another phase, which will lead to large-format images that I will hang on the walls, juxtaposing them with each other. As can be seen in many of my works, my methods of arrangement and classification follow the logic of their structures and colors.
*Ron Haselden
