Vines

I took some images of old grape vines that were clinging to the ancient walls of the kitchen garden at Waddeston Manor in Buckinghamshire. The little suckers that had held the vine fast were still stuck fast to the wall even though they were not supporting anything any longer. There were shrivelled red leaves and stems still clinging to the vine, but any grapes had been picked of had dried and dropped to the ground.

For some reason, this image had a sense of gothic melancholy.

 I love the texture of the ancient wall behind it and the fact that even though it looked decayed and dried up, it would flourish and bear fruit again next spring.

This was in the same garden but on a different wall which was much warmer and more golden.
I carefully sliced a section out of the image and multiplied and manipulated it to create a truly Gothic
 image. I was thinking about the themes of life and death and how they are side by side in our daily lives. We know that we are all going to die but don't really want to talk about it or be reminded of it. The dried out vine looks dead but retains beauty in its stretching tendrils and curving stems.

I wanted to create symmetry and a sense of harmony from the dead- looking vine.
This has a SteamPunk look and I love the delicate little red tendrils like veins carrying blood to the dried up, parched twigs.

Whilst reading The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kinsolver, I found this passage that fits well with this series of images. She was describing the forest of the Congo.

'Vines strangling their kin in the wrestle for sunlight...
'A choir of seedlings arching their necks out of rotted tree stumps, sucking life out of death. The forest eats itself and lives forever' (Kinsolver 607/8)

I hope I have created a sense of that wrestling and a hint of evil lurking in the twisted stems.
But the bright red stalks represent the vibrancy existing alongside the dead.

The sandstone that the vine is clinging to has interesting marks and scratches on it which have added to the texture of the background, making it look like pale grained wood.