Desire Lines: A Year of Celtic Saints
Author: Thomas Joshua Cooper, Catherine Mooney, Anne Lyden
“Desire Lines is an exhaustive internal exploration of home … proposing a new Caledonia, a place bound by language and culture rather than borders.”
Using descriptions from stories about early Scottish and Celtic saints, photographer Thomas Joshua Cooper and Catherine Mooney made pilgrimages to the birth sites, death sites and places of significance to the early Scottish Christian pioneers. The beautiful, often ethereal, photographs they made once they had arrived in these places are reproduced in a format reminiscent of a Calendar of Saints, in which saints’ days were honoured – here illuminated by 79 of Thomas’s arresting black and white images. Locations depicted include Lothian, Scotland and Donegal, Ireland, mimicking journeys made first by St Enoch, her son St Mungo and his contemporary St Columba. Other sites relate to St Ninian, St Constantine, St Serf, St Mirren and St Kessog; the latter evangelised in Loch Lomond, Lennox and Perthshire and a number of views relate to his journey.
The stories of these early Celtic saints are fascinating and the corresponding landscape views by Cooper are transportive in evoking an earlier age, where the trappings of modern society are largely absent, and one can very easily imagine the paths, routes and journeys – or ‘desire lines’ – taken by these inspiring people.
About the Authors
Thomas Joshua Cooper was born in San Francisco in 1946. He was appointed Head of the Photography Department at Glasgow School of Art in 1982 and was tasked with establishing the Fine Art Photography Degree course, the first of its kind in Europe. A dedicated teacher for more than four decades, he maintained his own practice throughout. Cooper uses a large format camera that dates from 1898 and only ever makes one exposure at a given site, before developing the negative and printing by hand in his darkroom. His photographs are exhibited widely and feature in museum collections all over the world.
Catherine Mooney was born in 1963 in London. She attended Central School of Art and Glasgow School of Art, studying jewellery and silversmithing, before working in a commercial gallery in sales and publishing and later taught drawing at GSA and became a lecturer in the Dept of Critical Studies. For the last 15 years she has been a full-time career whilst helping her husband with research and running the office in his absence. Any free time is spent in the garden or with GSA Choir.
Anne Lyden worked at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for eighteen years as the Associate Curator of Photographs before joining the National Galleries of Scotland as the International Photography Curator, and then Chief Curator of Photography.