Path to the Sea: About the Art of MJ Sharp

This post is the first of a series as 2024 RCWMS Artist-in-Residence MJ Sharp contemplates her photographic archive. Stay tuned for more!!

Standing Stones of Callanish

Outer Hebrides (Isle of Lewis) Scotland
2010 
Part of a project to photograph by the winter moon in Scotland, terminating at the Standing Stones of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides

Decades ago I had heard Jeanette Stokes mention the Standing Stones of Callanish. Most likely it was at one of the Resource Center’s yearly professional conferences, conferences I was welcome to attend even as just a very interested non-professional. I will be forever grateful that as a twenty-something trying to make sense of the world and my place in it, I was able to so seamlessly become part of the amazing community of clergy and other women that sprang up once a year at that conference center in the woods.  Everything about those conferences was illuminating and sustaining—from the invited speakers’ presentations to the entire gestalt of how the conference was run. Fast forward 20 years, and Frank Konhaus and I are co-curating and installing an extensive one-woman show at his and Ellen Cassilly’s art gallery/residency/home, Cassilhaus, to raise money to send me and my best friend to Scotland on a winter nighttime shooting trip focusing on, you guessed it, the Standing Stones of Callanish!  

Another decade passes. It’s 2019, and Jeanette once again proves crucial to an artistic undertaking. I wanted to apply for a Fulbright Scholar Award, but I was stuck in what felt like an impossible conundrum in terms of my topic. I contacted Jeanette. I told her that I wanted to reach back into the past’s darkness and reveal what was lost there, but that was a crazy, impossible thing for anyone, especially a photographer, to try to do. Still, I just didn’t want to pull together something more predictable and prosaic. Jeanette listened and without any anxiety at all said essentially, “If you feel it’s about the dark, stay with the dark.”  I thought to myself, “here is this smart, wise person telling me to chill and let this impossible thing somehow become possible, and so I’m going to do that.”  I will forever be grateful that Jeanette loaned me her assurance. As it turned out, the dark did reach out across millennia, and I was able to go do a project in the UK that was a natural fulfillment of that initial nighttime journey to Callanish.

Path to the Sea
North Berwick, Scotland 
2010
Part of a project to photograph by the winter moon in Scotland, terminating at the Standing Stones of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides

We arrived at this scenic overlook in the late afternoon of a cold, rainy, blustery day in February but surprisingly, there were still some intrepid souls out walking dogs and sightseeing. I spotted this particular vantage point right at dusk and was intrigued as all its discernible detail began to disappear with the coming blustery, rainy night. I was able to compose the picture just before the path disappeared completely from view. Placing a shower cap on the back of the camera to protect the film holder from the rain, I left it to stare at the scene for hours. I was fully expecting the camera to have been blown over the precipice when I returned to the site, but miraculously, it was still in place. It’s part of why I love doing this work that it was only after I got the film back that I saw the details: in addition to the path, there were three park benches and a golf tee in this forbidding location, and apparently, multiple ships had passed by on the horizon during the intervening hours, leaving their individual trails of light behind as witness.

Solitary Sheep

Forty-minute exposure by moonlight near Wick, Scotland (on the North Sea)
2010
Part of a project to photograph by the winter moon in Scotland, terminating at the Standing Stones of Callanish in the Outer Hebrides

There was an entire flock of sheep in this particular paddock which moved to different areas of the field throughout the night. This particular sheep, though, wasn’t as mobile as the others, and when they all moved to the far side of the enclosure to gain some protection from the frigid wind, this one stayed behind.