unavailable zones

On the photos he’s taken, everything is slippery or slick. The photos have the brightness of rain water, of reflective surfaces. The landscapes, mostly coastlines and their swards, while wild and sombre, have a quality of light that comes from the freshly fallen rain illuminated by what daylight there is, tame but less aqueous than in England. Every landscape is its own daylight, and the rewards of this one is the charm of the heathery moors and the granite rocks that lie amongst them, forming the sharp cliffs, blending into so many earthen shades of red, pewter and violet. The particular charm of this rain-drenched landscape under the sunlight, a kind of silver. Lemké likes to think of this as a ‘sombre light.’ ‘The photos are organic’, is the description he imagines for them. Photos of upturned roots reveal to him his interest in dark zones—he hadn’t thought of this before. There’s the exposed, upturned roots of a pine tree blown down in a recent storm. At a glance, these roots resemble sharp knife blades; they’ve intertwined with the granite rock present on the coastline, so much that they seem to have fissured the rock as the tree fell, tearing off the part of it that had bonded with the tree itself. Things seem to have existed under pressure in the darkness for sometime. As usual, he’s been interested in what he can’t see. What he can never see often seems far more interesting to him than the things he might see.