Susan Hockaday’s abstract photos have long explored the natural world on Cape Breton Island. Her work has evolved to show encroachment on the landscape.
By: Ilene Dube
There aren’t many places left in the world that are completely unspoiled. Hike deep into the woods and you’re likely to find Poland Spring bottles crushed under a rock, a rusted cat food can in a fire pit, a bright blue plastic shard floating downstream. Even places as remote as Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia are scarred by humans who have been disrespectful to the earth.
"The sad truth is that in recent years even that wild and remote landscape has begun to show the effects of uncontrolled human activity," writes Susan Hockaday, whose photo exhibit Turning on Nature is on view at the Woodrow Wilson School’s Bernstein Gallery through Sept. 14. "Overfishing, forest destruction, pollution, erosion of habitat, even graffiti along streams hidden in the woods invasion and encroachment are apparent. I feel that my work can no longer dwell on the marvelous cadences of the natural world, but must reflect the presence of these forces."
Cape Breton is still "the most beautiful unspoiled coastal landscape, with cliffs, beaches, mountains a kind of paradise," says Ms. Hockaday, who had not yet unpacked from a trip to China as she was getting ready to leave for Cape Breton, where she has summered for more than 35 years. "It has that end-of-the-road culture and psychology. It’s a traditional fishing and farming region, but the fishing industry has deteriorated from over fishing. People in villages are out of work and the economy is depressed. Generations of young people with not much education and no work have taken out their rage on the environment."
Evidence of this is in the graffiti carved on rocks along streams, over-logged forests and destroyed stream habitat from runoff. "Young people are using the beaches as drag strips for ATVs, driving away wildlife," she adds. For hundreds of years, it was acceptable for people to throw their trash behind the barn, but as trash has become less biodegradable and there is more of it, it has become a growing problem.
Finding their way to Cape Breton in the ’70s, Ms. Hockaday and her family felt they were "going beyond the reach of human activity to a pristine paradise, like going back in time, before overcrowding."
Now, we are "living in a time where climate change and destruction of the landscape is in all media, so we’re conscious of it, and it’s not happening in Cape Breton to the same degree," she says. The Internet has made it possible for people to discover Cape Breton and buy land. On Cape Breton, these people are known as CFAs they "come from away."
Ms. Hockaday and her family were among the first ring of outsiders during a time when there was an influx of young people wanting to get away from the war. These included educated people who knew about farming, gardening, teaching, running small businesses and carpentry.
Ms. Hockaday and her husband, Maitland Jones Jr., a chemistry professor at Princeton University, were living on campus in 1970, protesting the Vietnam War. "We (faculty families) had a lot of children, no money, and were discussing the invasion of Cambodia, when we realized we had to get out of the country. So we planned to put together our money to buy land."
The group went camping up the coast of Maine to New Brunswick and Cape Breton, where the chairman of the chemistry department had a house. "He insisted it was the most beautiful place," Ms. Hockaday recollects. "We found an incredibly beautiful farm and bought it with four other faculty families." For seven years, the 10 adults and 12 children (three of them were Ms. Hockaday’s) summered there.
"We were not a well-organized commune," she says with a twinkle. As their lives changed, the group decided to sell the 400-acre farm, and in 1978 her family bought a smaller farm at the tip of the island.
At that point, there were just a handful of "outsiders," and everyone knew each other. Today the population has grown so "you don’t know the people and are not sure you want to," she says.
For an intellectual and culturally aware family, did three months without museums, bookstores, concerts, opera, NPR or Netflix ever feel stifling?
Not at all. "We took hikes, worked on the house, went camping with other families and didn’t miss TV or computers," she says. "We enjoyed the feeling of how little you need to feel comfortable, and having to invent the things to do."
While other families may have had outhouses and took showers with a bag of water heated in the sun, the Hockaday-Jones family enjoyed the comforts of indoor plumbing. Ms. Hockaday says her upbringing instilled in her the desire to make everything. If you needed furniture, you went out and chopped the wood and taught yourself carpentry, having fun in the process.
"Our standards were low if you built shelves and they were crooked, no one would criticize it. It was that kind of scavenger society."
Surely her standards were not as low as she suggests. Ms. Hockaday comes from a family of artists and architects. Her mother’s cousin was Buckminster Fuller and, growing up in St. Louis, she watched him build domes. "He was an inspiration, a real visionary."
Her father studied architecture under Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius and taught at Washington University. Her brother and two uncles were architects, her mother studied through the Art Students League and was a photographer, her sister a sculptor and her grandfather, Clark Voorhees, started the American Impressionist movement in Connecticut.
"Growing up, my sense was that everyone did this stuff," says Ms. Hockaday, who has studied printmaking and papermaking and worked in collage. She studied photography with Emmet Gowin at Princeton University in the ’80s, before she realized photography was the medium she wanted to work in.
While Ms. Hockaday’s images are about the degradation of the natural world, do not expect Let-Us-Now-Praise-Famous-Men style documentary photographs. Rather, these are flowing, rippling images of watery views of nature, rich with color and abstraction. In one we see a tangle of blue-gray branches, a bright green Monopoly-style house along with wires in human-made colors of pink, orange and turquoise; even the house shape is somewhat askew, as if this object is at odds with the harmony of the universe. In another, we see various media over blue-brown ripples of water, suggesting sunglasses or a bikini top, along with tiny fingerprints. Perhaps this could be titled "After a Day at the Beach," with all the debris that remains behind. All had come seeking nature’s gifts the roiling ocean, the broad expanse of sand and destroyed it in their devotion to it.
Some of the other images have lattice work or markings like meters over them, as if humans can measure nature, dissect what has formed naturally, inexplicably, with immeasurable beauty, as if such things could be quantified and duplicated.
"Turning on Nature 4" looks like the results of all that Prozac and Viagra that is supposedly winding up in our waterways (and you thought it was just clogging your spam filter), with blue-green waterways laced with lines connecting orange and white capsule shapes.
Ms. Hockaday admits there’s definitely "dangerous stuff" represented in this image. The line drawings were based on X-rays she found around the house, and the dashes signify something dangerous is going on.
Once her children were old enough to have summer jobs, Ms. Hockaday would go up to Canada a month early and open up the house, having the freedom to experiment with her art. "And I really wanted to experiment," she says. "I wanted to make big gestural drawings on etching paper, put it in the river, and photograph it through the water. I loved the sense of freedom, experimenting and creating ways to record the environment and turn it into abstraction."
Using ink on paper, Ms. Hockaday, who had studied etching at Yale, would create a pattern of ripples and put it under the water, holding it down with stones. She would photograph this as a double exposure with something else, creating two patterns with movement and flow. The artist even experimented with collages under water. She was like a small child, playing in the river, creating "collisions in nature."
"Patterns tell you how nature works," says Ms. Hockaday, who still uses film and does not manipulate the image after making her double exposure. "Buckminster Fuller used to talk about how bubbles formed, amidst chaos, in perfect order."
She says many people don’t understand the process of discovery in art. "I set up a situation where I don’t know what the outcome will be, yet it says what I want to say, though I don’t know what that is beforehand."
In addition to studying art, Ms. Hockaday studied human physiology at Vassar College and worked for a time as a medical illustrator. "I love the way things are put together systems in bodies, organisms and plants it’s so beautiful and precise, yet a whole lot of random activity is going on," she says. "But as soon as you have structure, there’s destruction."
Ms. Hockaday and her husband have just moved from Princeton to a renovated barn in Hopewell, where Mr. Jones plans to host a jazz performance in December.
Meanwhile, Ms. Hockaday has spent the past few years working on aerial photography. She has two pilots who regularly take her up.
Flying around the Garden State and the coast, as well as Long Island, Manhattan and Staten Island, she tapes the passenger window open with duct tape to the wing, then leans out, removing the shoulder harness, for the shot. "My husband says, ‘I don’t want to know about this,’" she says. "But I’ve discovered a whole other huge subculture and it’s fascinating."
Turning on Nature, photographs by Susan Hockaday, is on view at the Bernstein Gallery, Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Robertson Hall, Princeton University, through Sept. 14. Gallery hours: Mon.-Fri. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. There will be a closing artist reception Sept. 7, 5:30-7:30 p.m. (609) 258-2222.