It’s cold. You’ve been sleeping, god knows how long, on a thin white sheet and pillow. Standing, you look around. Snow drifts at eye level, high enough to cloud the view, but for some strange reason, no lower. You walk north of your tousled bedding, just a couple feet. There’s an edge. And beyond that, a darkness so deep, not even gravity goes near, not even sound, not even dreams.
Carl Jung called these psychological tundras Shadow, that unconscious part of the mind where experiences too unpleasant to face or remember tuck themselves away. Recovering even one of those experiences can occupy a lifetime. I sometimes think that an artist ventures to the edge of the Shadow not to recover what’s been lost but to acclimate to the darkness—to look without fear.
It’s what I sense and admire in Tracy Templeton’s photographs. I wouldn’t want to find myself in Templeton’s snowy edgelands, not even in a dream. The outskirts of the human mind are far less forgiving than any Everest. But clearly Templeton comes here often. Therefore, we see her Shadow as she sees it—not completely inhospitable, but soft at the edges. You can almost hear the nocturne in the nothing.
A “mind of winter,” said Wallace Stevens, can look out at the bare places and behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is” and not imagine any misery on the brink. A mind of winter, in other words, can look into the Shadow without fear. And if that’s true, then Templeton’s otherworldly encampments are certainly worth our frequent visits.
—Collier Brown