I’ve been sifting through some photos I took back in 1996 when I was at Glasgow School of Art. They came out of a project I was doing related to the Antonine Wall, the Roman construction which spanned the Forth-Clyde isthmus. I made a series of cycle trips to locations along the wall. The sequence of photos I’m presenting here are of the Erskine Bridge, which crosses the Clyde near the western end of the Antonine Wall, within sight of the fort at Old Kilpatrick. Suspension bridges have been another of my obsessions. There is somehow a connection between the miraculously thin concrete span of the bridge and the Antonine Wall, which was also a structure extruded beyond what one would think possible.
I am an artist, illustrator and librarian. I am currently working on a body of abstract 2D work, which I think of as a sort of phenomenological endeavour. When I'm not doing that, or sleeping, or gardening, or being dragged to social engagements by my wife, I work for the University of York Library on York Digital Library Project and the LIFE-SHARE Project. This blog will be about things I observe, or are thinking about, or want to make sense of through writing. Nobody ever reads in apart from my wife, my mum (occasionally), and someone called Dave Kirkman.
Other things about me: I'm married to Ioana, who comes from Bucharest; I don't like chocolate; I ride a bicycle; I'm a Christian; I went to Glasgow School of Art, the Royal College of Art and University of Northumbria; I'm learning Romanian (slowly); I drink a lot of tea; I just discovered a hole in my black corduroy trousers; I don't comb my hair often enough; some of my favourite films are: Sans Soleil, Ostrov, Onegin, Decasia and Andrei Rublev. That's enough. You can also follow me on Twitter. My username is Mottlegill.
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