text by Susan Derges, Martin Hall, Charlotte Cotton
edited by David Chandler
This small but perfectly formed book is the culmination of Susan Derges’s year-long residency in King’s Wood, Challock, Kent that she undertook for Stour Valley Arts. Derges’s work with a pinhole camera and photograms is grounded in the site. She also uses the wood as a metaphor for the dark space of the imagination and for the camera as ‘darkroom’ - an interplay of the real and the imagined. Her description of her dream, Martin Hall’s natural history text and Charlotte Cotton’s essay continue this theme of real and imagined into the book. Portable and pocket-sized, this publication is a useable reference book, one that you return to again and again over the years, like a prayer book.