Dirk Dusharme, Geoff Powell and I have an occasional series of joint projects in which each of us tackles an agreed brief and then show the results in parallel. In this case, the brief was to make twenty five photographs of the same object; it was a rich vein for me, opening up a lot of future ideas. I explored the possibilities of several different objects, producing sets of pictures from each. None of them made it to this particular finishing line, though at least one of them has spawned a project of its own. What emerged from each of them, though, was a common thread of interest in mutability and evanescence. Looking at my apple, I felt the pull of its temporary existence.
Visiting the stone circles at Stanton Drew, I took the apple with me. Stone is not absolutely permanent, but in relative terms vastly more so than vegetable flesh. Once there, other contrasts invited me: the contrast of its smooth waxy surface with the textures of the natural world, the contrast of its colours with those of rock and vegetation.
The apple is an Empire, a cross from Red Delicious and McIntosh stock, bred by the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station in Geneva about forty years ago.
It didn't have to be an Empire. Personally, I'm a Cox Orange Pippin fan. But it did need to be glossy red apple for this particular purpose, and this was the one that came to hand.
