The wave arcs upward, jade green and gleaming. British photographer Rachael Talibart has caught the water at the height of the movement, in the full thrust forward before the wave crests and creams over. And when she takes images like this one, she often comes out into the storm to catch them.
Cassandra Sohn tells me about her on a January morning in her gallery in Lenox. Talibart has been winning international attention with her images, Sohn says, and traveling the world with her long lenses. She is photographing in Antarctica this winter, as her work appears in the Guardian back home.
And this wave she saw off the South cost of England. Talibart has named the image Sedna, for an Inuit goddess and mother of the sea. Caught in this moment, the water has a stippled surface, rough and smooth at once, like the quartzite bluffs on the ridge above Pine Cobble.
And the water is as deep and clear a green as the old trees around the corner, covered to their twig ends with moss and ferns. Neil Burnell made this photo with patient care in Wistman’s Wood, a high oak forest in Dartmoor, in the early hours before dawn.
Sohn has family there, she said, who live on the moors, and she thought of the people there over generations, telling stories about the Green Man while people on the northern shores of Inuit Nunangat tell stories about a woman who swims like a whale and holds sea creatures in her long hair.
Rachael Talibart's 'Face-off' catches a wave towering against black rock on the coast of Oregon. Press photo courtesy of the Sohn Gallery
Artists on the loose
Art in the Berkshires ranges this winter from 17th century drawings at the Clark Art Institute to EJ Hill’s rollercoasters and Amy Yoes’ abstract textile art at Mass MoCA. Contemporary artwork honors Shirley Jackson’s speculative fiction at Bennington Museum, and Hilary Knight, the illustrator and co-creator of the internationally known Eloise books, comes to the Norman Rockwell Museum …
Events coming up …
Find more art and performance, outdoors and food in the BTW events calendar.
