"Then all at once the wind fell, and a calm came over all of the sea, as though some power lulled the swell." - Homer, 'The Odyssey'
When Odysseus instructed his crew to lash him to the mast of their ship, he was preparing himself to hear the sirens' song, 'the song of the universe'. Their sweet singing, claims of omniscience and power to calm the waters, unfailingly lured sailors off course to their destruction. Odysseus plugged his crew's ears with beeswax, so that he alone could savour the seductive laments of the sirens and experience a mystical encounter with the sublime. Dreams and the sea are the closet we come to other worlds, and the solitary sea-stacks that David Parker has photographed, or sirens, as they appear to him, stand as guardians on the threshold of both worlds. For Parker the sirens' song is a call to contemplation, not action, and these images chart his fascinating encounters with an enchanted world of forgotten archetypes. His pictures are intended, siren-like, to lure the viewer into a mysterious abstract world, both concrete and ineffable.
