So, it's Saturday and I'm on top of a hill in a disused radar station, remote on the North Downs above Bearsted in Kent. Nearby is a room humming with activity, an art exhibition featuring amongst other great things the stunning abstracts of Margaret Shepherd and exquisite jewellery by her daughter Nancy Rose. The space was kindly given by Nick Veasey, and close by another room hummed with even stranger activity. In here is a big X-Ray machine, and in the dark Nick produces simply amazing images, which you can see here. Well, I say in the dark, I think for much of the time he has to stand outside whilst the humming is going on. Anyway, being very nosey, I had to snoop about amongst the detritus in the immediate environs, and came across this extraordinary sight, a VW Beetle turning itself into its own X-Ray, wedged between two peeling MoD brick walls.Perhaps at night, after the big steel security gates are chained and all the humming has stopped, the Beetle carapace lifts up and puts itself back on the chassis. And like that scene in Woody Allen's film Sleeper it starts first time ('wouldn't you just know it?') and gently cruises around the skeletal radar masts on the dark hill top.
6 comments:
All that green, algae-looking growth on the concrete walls and floor. It's almost as if the cars have been driven into the bottom of an abandoned lock.
The xray images are fascinating - I think I've seen some of the clothes ones used as book covers. I like the musical instruments. My dad was from Bearsted so I expect I wandered around that part of the North Downs too at some point.
Those x-ray images are beautiful! I will be checking out more of his work, thank you.
There's something about dismembered vehicles which seems to give them a more anthropomorphic type quality than when they're whole, for some peculiar reason. Maybe it's just that they betray their 'vulnerability'?! Overturned lorries always do it for me, if you see what I mean.
And the B/beetle carapace looks like just that.
Oh dear I think I'm going to faint. What a wondrous post. The x-ray art is sublime. The rotting VW is the suff of excitement!
Or 'stuff' even...
Thankyou all. There was more inside dark, gloomy and damp rooms. So dark in one I just poked the camera in there and took a picture with the flash on. It illuminated a pile of VW body parts in green and red, with a light dusting of bird droppings. Almost used it as my Christmas card until dissuaded from the notion.
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