Don't Waste Words

Since one of our friends recently bought a one-way ticket to Australia to emigrate, our travel juices have been flowing fast. The urge to pack light and buy a one-way ticket is very strong! This grey February hunger for travel has also taken us back to the times in our 20’s and 30’s when we each got bitten by the travel bug and headed off on adventures. As a result, we’re making plans to return to Morocco to explore Marrakech and its surroundings next week.


One of the things that we love about Morocco is the sheer visual impact of the country. Whether it’s the colourful souks of Marrakech, the lush green oases bordering rubble-strewn roads, or the undulating dunes of the Sahara, Morocco is a photographer’s paradise.

Sahara, courtesy of Stephi

Great to read then of the new exhibition Earth: Art of a Changing World at The Royal Academy which draws on photographic and artistic responses to travel, albeit with a twist.

Cape Farewell is the trailblazing organisation founded by artist David Buckland that instigates artistic responses to climate change. Over the last ten years, the organization has packed off some of our most interesting visual artists and writers to the furthest reaches of the earth, encouraging them to create work that reflects on what’s happening to our planet.

Buckland believes that we’re trying to communicate about climate change using the wrong language – that is, through words rather than in visual images. Words and statistics may be relevant to scientific documents and analyses. In Buckland’s view, though, nothing can replace the shock impact of photography and artwork that reveals the fragility of our world.

If you saw the film of The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, the true-life story of a man with “locked-in syndrome”, you may remember the hallucinatory sequence of icebergs melting. I remember how that brought home to me the impact of climate change more powerfully than anything I’d read until then.

Photo courtesy of nick_russill

Words are fine for conveying complex information but sometimes a well-chosen image has a quite different emotional impact on us. For us, travelling replenishes our creative wells and stocks us up with inspiring images for the next months and years of our lives.

So as the quotation engraved on the wall of Millican Dalton’s cave goes, “Don’t waste words. Jump to conclusions”.

Get travelling.