Becoming sculpture

Beauty, heritage and decay - three words I keep returning to when I'm thinking about my photography practice. I haven't found better ones to define what appeals to me.

I've been to some places which represent this combination of qualities perfectly. Old Car City in White, Georgia, is one. This is another. It's the old gasworks at Carrickfergus, now a museum and visitors' centre.

I was there a few weeks ago. The guided tour was very interesting, but I fear I wasn't a terribly good visitor, always lagging behind everyone else, taking photographs while the rest of the group was already at the next station listening to the guide. Sorry about that.

It doesn't take much for an industrial installation to become sculpture. And it doesn't take long for disused industry to become a secret gallery of old masters. Such a privilege to round a corner and see such beauty.

Trains

I spent a happy couple of hours with my camera at the Ulster Transport Museum today. I'm not interested in trains in a trainspotterish type of way (obviously I am way too cool), but I do love old trains in a sculptural, metalwork, design-ish sort of a way. Again, they tick my boxes of heritage, beauty and decay.

One of my great-grandfathers worked for the Midland Railway in the early years of the twentieth century. His role was looking after the horses in the railway yards, but I like to think that he might sometimes have climbed up into a train like one of these and admired the beauty of the brass work - and the hammer marks which make it human - just as I did today.

Rise

Today I had a second attempt at photographing Wolfgang Buttress's fabulous RISE sculpture on the Broadway Roundabout. Or the Balls on the Falls, as it's more colloquially known. I was fortunate with the light and the range of potential angles - within about fifteen minutes I got clear, light blue skies leading to the beginnings of a lovely sunset. All much better than my failure two weeks ago, when I forgot to bring either a rain protector or a lens cloth for my camera. And raindrops kept falling on my lens.

RISE is a lovely example of the structural principle of tensegrity, which I'd never heard of before today, but is really quite interesting. The structures which it informs are elegant, airy and strong - it's worth doing  a little image search using this term.