Imprints: Map, Book, Image
'Enquiring out placenames, mapping, has become for me not a way of making a living or making a career, but of making a life; a mode of dwelling in a place. In composing each of the placenames instances I have given you into a brief epiphany, a showing forth of the nature of a place, I am suggesting that what is hidden from us is not something rare and occult, or even augustly sacred, but, too often, the Earth we stand on. I present to you a new word: “geophany”. A theophany is the showing forth, the manifestation, of God, or of a god: geophany therefore must be the showing forth of the Earth. In the west of Ireland there is a language and a placelore uniquely fitted to the geophany of that land, with its skies full of migrating alphabets, waves that conspire to lift the currach ashore, its mountains like teeming udders, its footchilling bogs, the donkey’s bray of its history, its ancient words piled on hilltops. My work is possible thanks to what I have grasped of the geographic language of Ireland. My work thanks that language.'
Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara, p. 164
'We are spatial entities – which is even more basic than being material entities, subject to the laws of gravity. The barest of bones of the relationship between and individual and the world are geometrical; on the landscape scale, topographical. Our physical existence is at all times wrapped in the web of directions and distances that constitutes our space. Space, inescapable and all-sustaining Space, is our unrecognized god.'
Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara, p. 104-105
'Perhaps the duty of consciousness in this regard is to be open to a maximal realization, a delicate and precise awareness of one’s spatial relationships to the world. (Try it when watching branches swaying in the breeze, one behind another.) But this awareness, if it becomes strained and muddled, soon subsides in the indiscriminate welter of ‘being at one with Nature’. Like love, it flourishes best on the very edge of loss of identity, of merging with the object; it is a dangerous leaning-over the brink of blissfully all-dissolving Oceanic, or of the seasick existential shudders. A cliff-edge experience.'
Setting Foot on the Shores of Connemara, p. 10
"Oscillating between detail and panorama, between local and cosmic, as Tim’s work does, the juxtaposition of text and image aims to unsettle the reader and reveal the strangeness of place."
Nicolas Fève, Connemara and Elsewhere