Tara Darby
16 April – 22 May
(gallery closed 23 April- 1 May)
Transition
London
E8

The dress glowed in the window as the sun shone through. Outside there was a parked car with ‘we love Jesus’ written on the window. The dress made me think of Mick, of her need to be recognised, her brief attempt to conform. The night of her party where she trades her shorts and t-shirt for a beautiful dress, the night she becomes a woman, just to see how it feels. (Tara Darby)

Darby’s Literary Journey series recounts her travels through towns and cities used as settings in great books of American 20th century literature. Her first journey followed Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and was recounted episodically on the Another magazine website. The second journey features in this show at Transition and takes her to the Deep South to follow the plot and locations of Carson McCullers’ 1940 novel The Night is a Lonely Hunter. The story centres on the experiences of a deaf man, John Singer, and the people he meets in a 1930s mill town and was the first in a string of works by McCullers to give voice to the rejected, forgotten, mistreated and oppressed. (Transition)

Allow the story to guide the journey: Surely a glorious undertaking and one that takes decisions from the traveller and allows the road, the story telling, the people and the landscape to set the pace. To tell their story.

what about the time the dog died and the house caught fire?: As each encounter is reminiscent of a literary event for the artist a real life story is unravelled, steeped in personal and cultural history and here it is beautifully documented with words and images. There appears to be no fuss taken over the photographs, no trickery of process of even light but honest, bright, natural representations of a route taken through lives and land.

More images HERE

Literary Journeys. Episode 4: Murder cycles

In Cold Blood, Truman Capote

Perry and Dick stopped at an isolated gas station near Garden City before reaching their final destination…

I am currently caught up in several stories, the reading of which threatens to take over my life but right now they are giving me more opportunities for discovery than I have had in a long time. Leading me to make new work. And why I was so drawn to Darbys’ photographs.