Tellus Bibendum Tortor

When I started work on our new website hosted on squarespace the stock imagery in the template I chose was rather in-keeping with the spirit of The Five Andrews and I wanted to keep all of it. This one I did keep; we like to work with what comes to us and we specialise in site-specific work. Consider this a site-specific blog post.

This photo of a gannet has no pother articular reference to The Five Andrews, but it so happens that this summer I spent 3 days in the far south-west of England.

On one sunny, calm day I took a ride out in a small boat from Polperro and noticed one or two individual sea birds on the rocks. I traced the graceful glide of one that took to the air, it circled, hovered, folded back its wings and plunged from a height of about 20m into the sea. 

This was a special thing to behold - my first sighting of a gannet - and to witness one dive! Aside from the striking beauty of the dive, these are astonishingly elegant birds to watch it flight.

That's why I've decided to keep this sample image, and the 'Lorem Ipsum' text in the post title that designers use as sample text. The Google translation of 'Tellus Bibendum Tortor' is 'Earth Heading'.

Andrew Downs

Vessels

Some of the orignal stock imagery in the template of our new website appears to be of vessels not dissimilar to Thames barges. Both Nic Sandiland and I are from south Essex which norders the estuary of the River Thames and I'm familiar with this type of traditional craft as being part of my local heritage.

The sample photos, one of which I've kept here, depict calm scenes in some estuary or other stretch of water where work is underway in the distance - in this example perhaps maintenance of fishing nets. 

In the work of The Five Andrews we're often interested in creating a hermetic scene in which we perform activities which have the rituality of routine. Because we derive these activities one way or another from our imaginations, they are opaque and may appear absurd. 

Like mending nets on a floating pier, these kinds of performed activities are associated with special clothing, a measured pace and constraining rules.

Andrew Downs