The Nolans

When you've been visiting a sparsely-inhabited and poorly-resourced area regularly for many years –  the Welsh Borders at Easter for over forty years, in our case – you tend to settle into certain habitual patterns. After all, there isn't a great deal to do there, other than "the usual", and as we're generally only there for a week or so every day counts. Today we'll be doing this favourite walk, tomorrow will be a visit to that town or site of interest we have always found rewarding, and so on. Consequently, it's both a surprise and instantly noticeable when you come across something new.

Last week we were heading out to a reliably good restaurant (the Stagg Inn, over the border in England) when, for reasons I don't recall now, we decided to approach it from a different direction, via the old county town of Radnorshire, Presteigne, rather than our customary route through the Herefordshire town of Kington. The borders are like that: you pass in and out of Wales and England on the same road with very little fanfare; I always find it hard to remember, for example, which of Kington and Knighton is in which country. As we drove out of Presteigne and almost immediately into England, we noticed a sign beside a grand old farmhouse set back from the road which declared that the Sidney Nolan Trust was open to visitors. The Sidney Nolan Trust? Surely not that Sidney Nolan, the Australian artist famous for his paintings of Ned Kelly and, um, not much else, at least as far as I knew? I made a mental note to check it out.

One major new surprise this year was that a 4G phone signal is now intermittently available at our customary hillside barn conversion. Two bars max, and only at one end of the property, true, but enough to carry out a quick investigation of the Sidney Nolan Trust before it faded away again. Incredibly, it turned out that, yes, it was the Australian artist Sidney Nolan, and he had lived in that grand old farmhouse – actually a 17th century manor house, The Rodd – from 1983 until his death in 1992. Who knew? We might have queued behind him in the butcher's or the chemist's shops in Presteigne, although he was probably too busy hanging from the rafters of his studio barn clutching cans of spray paint ever to do any actual shopping. We decided to pay the place a visit, not least because there is currently an exhibition of Nolan's Polaroids.

Polaroid "instant" photographs occupy a unique position in the intersection of art and photography. Many artists were intrigued by them, back in the days before digital cameras and phone cameras became available. David Hockney's composite landscapes are only the best-known of many uses of Polaroid images by artists. Their appeal is obvious: there is the magical element of instant gratification (no need to wait or waste time in the darkroom); they have an interesting and distinctive colour palette; each one is a unique, standard-sized object; they can even be manipulated in various ways while the chemistry is still wet. Plus, of course, you could take the sort of naughty photos that would not otherwise pass the censorious scrutiny of your local processor [1]. In particular, the square images made by the compact, collapsible SX-70 camera enjoyed a vogue in the 1970s and 80s (I still have one myself). So I was curious to see what Sidney Nolan had been doing with them.

The Rodd is actually a cluster of 17th-century farm buildings set in some beautiful grounds. It never ceases to amuse me that artists who specialise in what I think of as "heavy breathing" – work that eschews conventional beauties and explores more visceral horrors and fascinations, a category which surely includes Sir Sidney – so often seem to live in some enviably gorgeous house. Cultural pessimism clearly has its up side, including accumulating enough money to buy and sustain a 250-acre estate. Jealousy aside, the Trust clearly has its work cut out to keep the place looking so magnificent. As well as the grounds, there are a preserved studio, workshops for resident artists, and various exhibition spaces. The Polaroids were in a large renovated room at the rear of the main manor house, a grandly austere monument to a colder, damper mode of living. The centuries-old chill strikes you as soon as you enter, and I imagine those impressively-carved fireplaces must have been kept burning throughout the Little Ice Age by an army of servants.

I was intrigued to see how these photographs would be displayed. Polaroids come in various shapes and sizes, but they're mainly quite small, with quite narrow white borders on three sides, and the picture is embedded in a sealed plastic package that sometimes includes the empty "pod" of chemical goo that is broken and spread by the camera's mechanism. They're not easy to frame satisfactorily by any conventional means, and I was impressed by the elegantly simple solution chosen here: each Polaroid is held within a small box frame by what I take to be four tiny magnets, giving the image full protection without damaging it, as well as space to "breathe" as an object. If I'm right, I assume there is a ferrous plate or paint at the back of the box. Neat.

Photographs are supposed to have been a significant resource in Nolan's work, although you'd never guess: he's very far from the sort of representational painter who bases work on photographs, and to be honest he's not an artist whose work has ever appealed to me much. Apparently there is an archive of some 30,000 photographs of various sorts: let's hope nobody does a Vivian Mayer job on it, and invents a retrospective artist, "Sidney Nolan, photographer". He was also a user of the Quantel Paintbox, an early standalone incarnation of digital imaging, originally intended for TV graphics, but adopted by some forward-thinking artists in the 1980s, notably to produce album covers and music videos. But, like film in general and Polaroid in particular, the Paintbox was rendered obsolete by the advent of affordable desktop "personal computers", image editing software, and effective digital imaging devices. In so many ways the 1980s were a curious transitional phase between the hands-on, analogue world and the one inhabited by our "digital native" children.

I should mention that I had an embarrassing moment at The Rodd. In one of the exhibition spaces there is a small shop, in which various Nolan-related items are offered for sale. Amongst these were a few copies of an extraordinarily elaborate book, Paradise Garden, published in 1971, and combining Nolan's prints with various texts, and translucent overlays. I was assailed by my usual desire for a beautiful book, checked the price on the dustjacket and, seeing it was only £20, headed straight to the young woman (YW) sitting behind the ticket desk.

MC: Are these really for sale?
YW: Yes!
MC: Great! And only £20?!
YW: Um, no... Let me see... [checks list] Those are now £195 each, I'm afraid... [2]
MC: Ah... OK. I think I'll put this very carefully back where I found it then...

1. There's a nice catalogue of an exhibition of work by Polaroid artists, The Polaroid Years : instant photography and experimentation (Prestel, 2013).

2. Actually, not an unrealistic price. According to various online inflation calculators, £20 in 1971 is worth between £250 and £300 in 2022. I can remember paying £8.50 for a copy of OUP's facsimile of Blake's Marriage of Heaven & Hell as a student in 1973, and swallowing very hard as I wrote the cheque. Wrote the cheque! Talk about a hands-on, analogue world...