September, 2007

Jedburgh Abbey, Jedburgh, Scottish Borders

The Borders area of Scotland is filled with the ruins of abbeys, monasteries, and cathedrals. At one time grand and imposing structures meant to demonstrate the power and wealth of Scotland as well as its Godliness, they bore the brunt of the conflicts with England. Though badly damaged multiple times, they were rebuilt over and again until the Protestant Reformation ended the dominance of the Catholic Church and obliterated, with few exceptions, its symbols, the abbeys and monasteries, from Scotland.

The site of Jedburgh Abbey is believed to have been used for a church long before King David I founded an Augustinian priory there in 1138. A beautifully carved fragment of a shrine found at the site suggests consecration as a Christian church occurred as early as 700 CE. By 1154 the priory had been elevated to an abbey though it wasn't until 1285 that the structure was completed. Within a few years the town and abbey came under attack and the period of sack and ruin and rebuilding continued until 1560, the beginning of the Reformation,

Today, though only the walls and a part of the tower remain, it still remains an imposing structure. As I walked up from the visitor's center I was impressed by the view of the walls and arches standing against the sky. It was a skeleton with open archways and windows set against the sky. As I walked around Jedburgh Abbey I kept looking for a rhythm and pattern that would allow me to describe the power I found in this shell of the Abbey. Walking back to the car to get my camera I turned and saw a way to explain the feeling. I quickly grabbed my gear and started looking for the vantage point that would allow me to make the photograph I now had in my head.

My camera bag usually has about 6 different lenses, ranging from a very wide angle to a lens as long as my camera will carry. I wanted to find a spot where I could look up at the church and see only the sky through the windows. I found it on the garden path leading up to the ruins. After changing lenses several times I made this image with the longest lens I had in my bag at the time. I continued to work the site and made many other images that day.

When laying out TOUCHSTONES, I had the St. Magnus Cathedral image (Plate 21), an image of interlocking stone arches. It is a solid wall and the arches are purely decorative with the space between the arches and the arches themselves carved out of the stone. I started pairing other images with it but this image of Jedburgh Abbey gave the strongest contrast. It was an appropriate pairing. One from an abbey ruin, the other from one of two surviving cathedrals. The one from about as far north as it is possible to venture in Scotland and the other from about as far south as is possible. One image of solid stone, the other an imposing skeletal outline. These still work together for me as a pair of images. The detail and the over-all, the ruin and the surviving, and two very different styles of arch holding the patterns together.