Contemporary Britain at Tate Britain

Contemporary Britain for display at Tate Britain

‘Towards Blackcombe’ – CHOSEN BY GREG WHITMORE

Kate Kirkwood, 46, Lake District, Cumbria

Seeing my son off to school at Foxfield Station on a morning in January, I was struck by the look of the mountains in the dull light. As I tried to get closer to the little house, the black silage bags blocked my path to the shot. They rose up slowly, seeping into my LCD screen and darkening the picture. I almost stepped round them. A wonderful old farmer once excused the sordid mess littering his yard – plastic bags, nylon string, old syringes, ribbons of old silage wrap, etc. – by cheerily telling me that it all came from the earth so it would all go back, eventually. The mountains in the background of this picture date back to the Ordovician period – some 500 million years; the house is typical of many in this area, between two and four centuries old; the oil-based silage bags are both very old and very recent. We live in all these times and photos come along like trains, but on random tracks