Here’s another of my Southbank photos and an accompanying haiku that I’m using for a small series of Little Gems.

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The suncast shadows
were longer than
the sum of their lives together.

This was taken around 3 o’ clock on a sunny, cold New Years day in London.  For me it was one of those ‘haiku moments’, a moment of clarity.  I love the movement in this photo – the long, late afternoon shadows stretching into dusk;  the tree reflection in the footstep scattered rain puddle;  the groups of people strolling along, each in their own worlds and always the River Thames flowing towards the sea.  The people especially capture my imagination – someone turns back to look at Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, a man sits alone on a bench, the two pairs of  lovers in the foreground are who I have written about.

But is it a beginning or an ending?  A realisation that their love is eternal, always, forevermore and they have at last found each other after centuries and aeons of searching.  Or a sad acceptance that their love has reached a limit, come to the end, grown very small.  The realisation of an ending.  Their time together is shorter than the suncast shadows.  Soon dusk will fall into another long winter’s night with no promise of spring.

I’ve printed this photo onto silk chiffon, acetate, lutrador and vilene.

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I wanted to use typescript for the text, in keeping with the reportage quality of the piece.   My typewriter script is too small, so I went online to dafont.com, downloaded ‘Fucked Olympia’ and printed the haiku onto tissue paper.

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For one of the pieces I zigzagged the photo onto fabric, made a pillowcase binding and collaged the text on with acrylic gel medium.  Next I’ll hand and machine quilt it.

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Here I used some fabric I’d monoprinted as the base and bondawebbed the photo into place. I mixed gel medium with black paint to darken around the text and then put a layer of black tulle over the piece before machine quilting it.  I put a strip of gold mesh along the bottom to give some brightness and hope.

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After the quilting, I zigzagged around the edge.

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I’ll post a couple of others when I’ve done some more work on them.