The coast of the southern Fleurieu Peninsula can be quite wild and dangerous especially when the weather is rough or stormy:
When I am walking in those conditions I experience the coastal landscape as dark and strange. Hence my attempts with granite, or rock pools to find a way to represent the dark and the strange without embracing a mystical version of the noumenal world.
This image, for instance, is an attempt to make the coastal landscape along the southern Fleurieu Peninsula dark and strange without going mystical --ie referring to a noumenal world of processes, forms, or ideas that lies behind the phenomenal world that is experienced by us.
The noumenal world can be invoked when trying to explain the phenomenal, by describing the underlying causes of the phenomenal through theoretical reason. Thus theoretical natural science refers to a world of molecules, atoms, electrons, quarks, the curvature of space-time, black holes, the Big Bang, etc. However, this is not the world of objects in space and time (eg.,rocks, sea, seaweed, rock pools etc) that I daily experience with my senses when I am on a poodlewalk.
I have also experimented with creating interpretations of my experience of objects on the coast as strange though making macro photos of seaweed:
The phenomenal and noumenal world are not two types of different worlds. Rather they are two perspectives ( or points of view) of the same world, rather than them being seperate worlds with a division between them. Photography creates images of the phenomenal world based on interpreting these objects with our cultural categories or forms of thought--eg., the picturesque, the sublime, the beautiful, the ugly---with respect to the landscape.
Dark and strange is a shift from the the summer of light to the winter of despair. Wintery images.