Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

While studying photography at Manchester Polytechnic in 1975, I decided to travel to West Africa, having been photographing British landscape for several years, and wanting the challenge of a more dramatic environment.

After flying from the UK to the Canary Islands, and then on by plane to what was Spanish Sahara, I travelled west, and south, through many West African countries reaching what then was the Gold Coast, and now is Ghana.

Rested for a week or two, I set out north to cross the Sahara overland using local transport, buses, pickup trucks and lorries, for the main purpose of my journey.

Travelling through Ghana and Burkina Faso into Niger, I became very ill with hepatitis and dysentery and, unable to travel further, was brought by a compassionate German tour guide to a desert hospital in Tamanrasset, in Southern Algeria.

I lay for three weeks in bed in a darkened room, attached to an intravenous drip, my body weight having dropped to 40 Kilos. I had been experiencing subtle hallucinations. One morning, one of the local Algerian nurses came to ask me whether, with her help, I would like to try to walk to the sunlit courtyard at the centre of the hospital – which I was keen to try.

Several minutes later, with her supporting my arm, we arrived at a brilliant open doorway looking out across a courtyard with perhaps a dozen Bougainvillaea trees dazzling in the Saharan spring sunshine.

What I saw and understood wordlessly at that moment, has provided a running thread through all my photographic work since, but it has taken many years for me verbally to be able to articulate that vision.

At that moment standing in the doorway, each flower appeared as a crucible in which a perpetual struggle was taking place, between the ‘impossible beauty of the world and its irrefutable fact’.

In 2006, I was invited to join Nicky Hirst, Tim Head and Annie Cattrell as Artists-in-Residence at Oxford University – the result of a collaboration between the Ruskin School of Drawing, the Biochemistry Department and Artpoint, Oxford. I was charged with making new work over two and a half years, in the midst of the demolishment of two adjacent Biochemistry department buildings and the landmark construction, in their place, of the new Biochemistry building designed by Hawkins\Brown.

In this new work, I believe there is possibly the purest expression of my ‘Bougainvillaea’ moment in my work to date.