The Ponds

The Ponds (working title) is a long term film photography and sound recording project situated in a secluded location within Middle Cork.

In 2023 I set about trying to find a nature refuge. I felt that I needed somewhere I could escape humanity and immerse myself in nature. Of course this was quite impossible. We have nothing even close to wilderness in Ireland and anywhere we might consider wild is more likely desolate, having been ravaged by grazing or some other agent of destruction. The best I could hope for was a small pocket of undisturbed nature. I trawled maps and aerial photographs for any signs of a protected patch of woodland, somewhere a bit out of the way and a challenge to access. The irony was that by identifying such a place I would then set about being the one to disturb it.

I had almost given up hope when I identified two pairs of ponds near a larger body of water. The ponds seemed to be relatively undisturbed and hadn’t changed since the early 1800’s, as indicated by Ordnance Survey maps. I discovered that the ponds and their surrounds always flooded after heavy rain so the farmers just fenced off the land and left the ponds to nature. It was January 2024 by the time I first got to visit and it took some figuring out to get even remotely close to the edge of one of the ponds. There were no paths through the dead bracken, brambles and long grass. It was pleasingly inaccessible. The only footprints here were my own.

Because of preceding heavy rain I had to stop far from the true pond edge and was still a few metres back from the tree line that surrounded the pond proper. It was after sunrise on a crisp, cold Sunday morning in January and there was no human noise, just nature doing its thing. I was joined by a gang of long-tailed tits who hopped around the bare branches, a little surprised to see me. I set up a pair of microphones and pressed record. I leant against a tree and took one photograph and just listened for a while. It was heaven.