Lady into Hut

No longer in the family, the hut sits quietly in the hills with the effect of a monumental tomb. Defiant. Lavishing its influence, denying its love. Lady into Hut explores the overwhelming influence of this place and the loss of its creative patriarch thus creating a new legacy through the experience of being in and photographing a physical place. Lady into Hut is about transformation. Empirically being, photographing and becoming a place.

Lady into Hut - Laura Hynd

Introduction:

My Grandfather, aged 27 was holidaying with his parents in a hut set in a valley among the Scottish Hills and making a home movie of the trip. 

The year was 1947. 

He saw a young local girl and asked her mother if she could be in his film. She said yes. Mary was 17 and they started filming shortly afterwards. In the making of the film, they fell in love. They married and gave birth to my mother in 1948.

Grandad built his own holiday hut in the place that they met. With no electricity or water you are left to the green hills to survive. 

It is a simple place. The fresh burns (Scottish ‘stream’) flow through the valley.

We scattered my Grandfather’s ashes next to the hut on July 22nd 2010.



Statement:

The hut sits quietly in the hills as the valley moves and sighs, but it sits with the effect of a monumental tomb. Defiant. Lavishing its influence, denying its love.

The overwhelming influence of this place and the loss of its creative patriarch are worked through and transformed into a new legacy through the experience of being in and photographing a physical place. 

Removed from civilisation to observe, to direct ones gaze. The act and state of looking transforms ones mental attitude or view. Creating a new history. 

Lady into Hut is about transformation. Empirically being, photographing and becoming a place. Combining film stills from 1947 with my own, contemporary photographs.

“Transformation stories are the means by which we make sense of the world, how we see the connections that, ‘the materialisation of our age’ misses, and they belong to the universe that is ordered, not by reason alone, but by imagination, a universe in which change is the only constant”
John Burnside, foreword (2008), Lady into Fox by David Garnett (1922).

Laura Hynd 2014