Important relationships

Fox Talbot invented his ‘photogenic drawing’ process in 1834 and ten years later published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. There is nothing like Elisabeth Vellacott’s drawings to make you impatient with Fox Talbot’s terms. Photography, which freezes an instant in an instant, is neither nature’s pencil nor any sort of drawing. The more you study Vellacott’s delicate drawings of English and Welsh landscapes, the more you become aware of active, stretched-out time, the time nature has already taken to create this motif and the time taken by the artist to draw it, during which nature is still alive and changeable. This is even more true of her drawings of flowers and plants, with their much briefer time-span, made in her old age when she could no longer leave her house near Huntingdon for the Welsh hills or the shores of Anglesey and the Scillies. In this centenary exhibition at the Redfern Gallery there is an exquisite drawing of a cyclamen, its roots earthed in a tight white bowl, its soft leaves and tendrils seeming almost to push out, writhe or droop as you look.

Three drawings made at Llanthony in Wales are hung on one wall. ‘Mountain Drawing, Llanthony’, ‘Misty Mountain’ and ‘Rain in the Valley’ all depict bare hillsides with few obvious features except their contours, their turfy texture and some small trees grouped on the lower slopes. Mist blurs the details of the second, a light squall of rain is crossing the third, but in the first the only sense of change and life seems to be in the relationship of the swollen slope in the foreground to the harder-looking ridge behind. Relationships, as she herself pointed out, are the key to her work: ‘For example, the relationship between the solid earth on which we all walk and the different, perforated density of the trees, pierced by light and space; or the hollow broken shore, shaped by the alternate flooding and withdrawal of the sea.’