Mark Adams - Waterways
'Waterways' began in 2007 as a self-funded photography project documenting the inland waterways of northern England. Images in this exhibition focus on the South Pennine Ring, a 70-mile canal network developed during the late 18th and early 19th century. The pictorial aspects of these photographs are informed by the landscape tradition of English painters and the New Topographic photographers of the United States. As with many of the photographer’s projects the images explore subtle tensions between synthetic and natural forms and are revealed through the activity of walking.
The canal is a tacit element in the work, appearing and re-appearing while functioning as an artery that runs through cities, towns, villages and places in-between. The routes taken along towpaths juxtapose pastoral beauty with industrial decline and regeneration. By tracing the region's industrial past the canal functions as an historical and geographical guide, which determines the path and direction of the photographic journey through the counties of Lancashire and Yorkshire.
Mark is a British photographer and academic. His work has been exhibited in galleries and public spaces in the United States, Europe and the UK. Mark has published in a number of journals and magazines including Next Level, Der Greif and Art Monthly. In recognition of his work, Mark received the Chris Garnham Memorial Prize for Photography from the Royal College of Art where he received an MA in Visual Communication. Currently undertaking a PhD, his research considers walking as a means to open up new dialogues concerning a phenomenological and pictorial experience of space through the medium of photography. Mark is currently lecturer in BA Photography at the University of Bolton and is represented by Millennium Images and IRIS Artistic Platform.
website - www.markadamsimages.wordpress.com
email - adams_2001uk@yahoo.co.uk
Tom Baskeyfield and Mario Popham - Shaped by Stone
Over Millennia we have shaped stone: chipped, cut, split, crushed; turned hillsides into quarries; strata into streets. Like many other towns this process is the foundation of Macclesfield. The pink and blue-ish Gritstone of Tegg’s Nose has been quarried for hundreds of years. The hill exists as fragments scattered around the town, it sits in the walls, the facing of buildings and the linings of streets. Through a dialogue between analogue processes (including large format photography, drawing, embossed rubbings, darkroom experimentation, writing, walking and talking) artists Tom Baskeyfield and Mario Popham aim to bring to the fore these layers of our shared history. As such, this work is an enquiry into the fabric of our surroundings and how we have shaped, and been shaped by, our natural environment.
Tom Baskeyfield is a multidisciplinary visual artist interested in relationships between people, place, nature and landscape. In 2011 he was awarded an MA in Art and Environment from Falmouth University for his project Of Time in Field, in which he immersed himself in the life of a field for one crop cycle. Tom has exhibited across the UK, showing as part of the Walking Encyclopedia at AirSpace in Stoke on Trent, Hevva! Hevva! at the Eden Project, Cornwall and Soil Culture at Falmouth University. He currently lives and works in Macclesfield, Cheshire.
website - www.tombaskeyfield.co.uk
email - trbinside@hotmail.com
Mario Popham is a photographer based in the Northwest of England. His interests predominantly focus on the contemporary British landscape and what it reveals about our place in the natural order. Since graduated from Manchester School of Art in 2007, he has exhibited and published works in the UK and abroad and is a recipient of the Magenta Flash Forward Award 2013. He was the subject of a solo exhibition at Cornerhouse, Manchester in 2014 for his project ‘Enduring Growth’ – a lyrical portrait of Manchester. The work was subsequently part of the group show ‘Inside Out’ in Wuhan, China. He currently lives and works in Manchester.
website - www.mariopopham.com
email - info@mariopopham.com
Jacqueline Butler - Horizon Flux
Drawing on the qualities of light and shade the work is assembled through a combination of light projection, darkroom printing and image manipulation, working with low-resolution files in 3D software. Light and the consequential shadow make visible everything that surrounds us, the physical spaces we inhabit. The photograph gives us a visual representation of ‘being’, and confirmation of having been, it makes us visible. Invisibility induces a sensation of disorientation and of loss. Photographs exude histories of light, through viewing photographs we can appreciate light and shadow from the past, made permanent through the materiality of chemical and data processing. "This consoles me, and I find that I cannot get enough of these documents of light-space-time".
Jacqueline's practice reflects on time and memory in relation to the photographic and the cinematic, exploring narrative and contemplations on the material qualities of the photograph. She works with photography, video, the artist book, writing and curation, and has a particular fascination with archives and collections (both public and private). Currently undertaking a PhD at Glasgow School of Art, her research considers what constitutes photography in the 21st Century, combining pre-photography principles with traditional and new print technologies. Jacqueline’s arts practice explores themes associated with photography, of loss and melancholia.
Jacqueline has exhibited internationally and her work is held in numerous public and private collections. She is currently Principal Lecturer in Photography and Director of Studies in Media at Manchester School of Art, and an Executive Board Member of Open Eye Photography Gallery, Liverpool, England.
website - www.jacquelinebutler.blogspot.co.uk
email - jacquelinebutler99@gmail.com
research group - www.familytiesnetwork.wordpress.com
Anne Campbell - Islands & High Lands
These images are from an ongoing body of work using a variety of experimental and darkroom photographic processes to explore the Scottish landscape, in particular the fragile northern ecosystems of the Highlands and Islands. Working with film and chemical processes, (layering and exposing different areas of the print by the use of bleaching and redeveloping), allows for the creation of textural layers, creating one- off, subtle yet complex images, that mirror the atmospheric and changeable weather systems, the landscape and our response to it; the transitory nature of human presence. The surface qualities can be painterly and descriptive of personal experience, or may mirror the visceral qualities of nature: they can reference the past while looking to the future. Some of this work formed part of a joint exhibition with Shetland photographer Chloe Garrick in Shetland Museum & Galleries in 2014.
Anne Campbell is a photographer and artist living and working in the North East of Scotland. In addition to teaching analogue processes at Gray's School of Art in Aberdeen, she shares a studio with five other artists, in Monymusk, Aberdeenshire. A practising photographer for fifteen years, she completed her Masters in Fine Art in 2011, specialising in Alternative Photographic Processes.
Currently Anne is experimenting with a variety of processes including Lith, Mordancage and Bromoil, combining the chemistry in unusual ways to create delicate tonal layers and interesting textures. Due to the nature of these handmade processes each image is unique, the delicate colours and tones varying with the use of different papers, chemistry and temperatures.
Anne is a member of the Bromoil Circle of Great Britain and Documenting Britain.
website - www.annecampbell.photography
email - anniecat57@hotmail.com
Matthew Conduit
Matthew has photographed the landscape around his home in Sheffield for over 35 years. He arrived at photography through a fascination with the act of mark making, the random man made marks upon the land becoming symbols and signatures of previous uses, acts and attitudes. Conduit has been continuously drawn to the city’s edges and its dormant, forgotten, ‘negative’ spaces, fragile areas on the urban borderline that were once excavated, mined, farmed, industrialised and dumped on. In the 1980’s this landscape was brutal, and his images reinterpreted the ravaged surfaces of a steel city as it fought decline and pondered an enforced economic and social side-step. More recently, the images appear to re-present a rampant, untamed nature, yet they are all post -industrial landscapes in one way or another. Their (often ancient) place names are loaded with such history.
Born in Nottingham, Matthew Conduit studied Art at Mansfield College of Arts and then completed a BA Hons Fine Art at Sheffield Polytechnic in 1981. Thereafter, he exhibited his work extensively around Britain into the early 1990’s. Matthew became Director of the Untitled Gallery in Sheffield and relocated the gallery from the suburbs to its current location in Sheffield’s city centre in 1988 (now Site Gallery). He then worked for over twenty years developing the cultural industries sector, and developed strategies, buildings and facilities to support the sector and creative producers across the UK, including the Workstation and Showroom in Sheffield.
website - www.matthewconduit.com
email - matthew@untitledprint.co.uk
Kevin Crooks - M62: The Trans-Pennine Motorway
Carving out the Trans-Pennine M62 was, at the time of its construction, one of the most difficult and ambitious road construction projects ever attempted. As motorists travel across the Pennines within a matter of several minutes, the strangeness of the M62 is easy to dismiss. Travellers can detach themselves from the landscape that they pass through, and the irreversible impact that the motorway has had on the landscape and its surrounding areas becomes unnoticeable.
"[T]he motorway [for Augé] is seen as an archetypal non-place. Yet rather than ‘being in the middle of nowhere’, the geographies of the motorway landscape is complex and heterogeneous." (Merriman 2004)
Kevin is a St. Helens based photographer who has recently won the Deutsche Bank Award for Creative Enterprise after completing an MA in Photography at the University of Central Lancashire. His work currently explores the effects of how changes to government policy, initiatives and programmes shape the lives of people within society. Since completing his undergraduate education Kevin has worked professionally within the field of photography, producing a range of projects that tackle social and spatial mobility and the politics of community. Kevin is currently Head of Photography at Carmel College.
website - www.kevincrooks.co.uk
email - contact@kevincrooks.co.uk
Michael Day - Epicentres
'Epicentres' consists of a collection of images that have been produced automatically by the U.S. Geological Survey computer systems on the event of a low-Richter scale earthquake in a remote location, in this case, Alaska in winter. Tremors that are low on the Richter scale might only be sensed by automated seismological recording equipment rather than be felt by humans. These images have been automatically generated from sensor data, and exist as automated representations of geological events that may never have been subjectively experienced.
Michael is an artist and researcher based in Sheffield. His art practice is focused on digital technologies and the potential implications of their increasing entanglement with all aspects of contemporary experience.
He has exhibited and screened work in venues across the UK and internationally, including the recent exhibitions Possession at Bangkok Cultural and Arts Centre (2013), Deadpan Exchange VIII at Casa Maauad, Mexico City (2014), and Sluice__2015 at Oxo Tower Wharf, London (2015). He has participated in the digital art festivals FutureEverything in Manchester (2010) and Piksel in Bergen (2009), and has undertaken residencies with Hull Time-based Arts (2005) and PVA Medialab (2009) in the UK, and with Lademoen Kunstnerverksteder (2011) in Trondheim, Norway. He is a senior lecturer in fine art at Staffordshire University.
website - www.michaelday.org.uk
Liza Dracup - Sharpe’s Wood
'Sharpe's Wood' (2007) is a substantial body of photographic research set in a woodland situated on the periphery of Bradford, edged by pastoral land, residential properties, a production plant and fringed in part by highways. The wood is on the edge of both the urban and the rural, an in-between place shaped by two contrasting terrains. Sharpe’s Wood cannot be found by name on any Ordinance Survey map. To the uninformed eye the wood is a ‘natural’ environment, a place of the wild, with no intervention from the human hand. Photographic experimentation, reveals that the night has a unique colour spectrum, to which the eye is blind in real time. The composite colour components are a result of the varied colour temperatures of each light source. Photography has visualised a paradoxical light that appears to represent both day and night. Sharpe’s Wood is multi-layered with strata from the past and present, a place where memory and imagination, fact and fiction coalesce within a single photographic exposure.
Liza Dracup is a photographer living and working in the North of England who's photographic practice examines the wider cultural context of the northern environment, through practice-led research situated in the landscape, along with an extensive investigation of national and regional photographic archives. She is currently a PhD-Ex candidate at the University of Sunderland investigating Photographic strategies for visualising the landscape and natural history of Northern England: the ordinary and the extraordinary.
Liza's work has been nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2012) and the Prix Pictet (Earth) Photography Award (2009). She is a photography lecturer at Bradford School of Art and works at other academic institutions in the UK.
website - www.lizadracup.co.uk
email - lizadracupphotographer@gmail.com
Sabine Dundure - Tairovo
Tairovo is a suburb in the Ukrainian city of Odessa. It was constructed during the Soviet period to satisfy the increasing demand for conventional housing in the ever-growing city. For a passer-by the blocks of flats form a concrete maze, impossible to navigate or understand but for the locals it is home, often brightened up by DIY decorations and graffiti. Odessa is located by the Black sea and is well known among the Russian speaking tourists for its beautiful historical center and the seaside. The suburbs are normally dismissed as a place for sleeping and simply existing. If during the hot summers the concrete building are softened by green trees then the harsh winters show another, bleaker and somehow more melancholic face of the Soviet architecture. This work captures the small, prosaic details of the cityscape that reveal the trace of the local community, especially evident during the winter period.
Sabine Dundure is a Latvian born photographer, with a BA Honours degree in Photography from Sheffield Hallam University. Her work comprises of a mix of cityscapes and portraits that capture the essence and atmosphere of the surroundings in which she lives. Having prevously lived in the UK and Ukraine, she is currently based in France.
website - www.sabinedundure.com
email - sabine_dundure@hotmail.com
Sophie Gerrard - Drawn To The Land
'Drawn To The Land' is an ongoing and exploratory project which takes an intimate look at the contemporary Scottish landscape through the eyes of the women who are working, forming and shaping it. Working and living in a male dominated world, women have a significant yet under represented role to play in farming in Scotland. Farming some of the most inhospitable and isolated rural areas of Scotland, these female farmers have an intense and remarkable relationship with the harsh landscape in which they live and work. The project aims to explore the domestic landscape as well as the physical, following the emotional story of the land as much as the historical and geographical. The womens' personal and physical stories reflect a wider story of our national identity, and emotional relationship with the landscape
Born in Edinburgh in 1978, Sophie Gerrard began her career in environmental sciences before completing a BA in Photography at Edinburgh College of Art and then an MA in Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication in 2006. Sophie pursues contemporary social stories with environmental themes. Her work has been exhibited internationally and featured in worldwide editorial publications including The Sunday Times Magazine, The Financial Times Magazine, Telegraph Saturday Magazine and Tatler Magazine. Sophie’s work is held in a number of national and international collections. She is a founding member of photography collective Document Scotland and a member of research staff at Edinburgh Napier University. Sophie is represented by The Photographers’ Gallery.
website - www.sophiegerrard.com
website - www.documentscotland.com
email - sophie@sophiegerrard.com
Aileen Harvey - West From Here
From the northwest coast of Scotland, the Outer Hebrides islands line the far horizon. 'West from here' is a set of seventeen photographs that follow the coast of the archipelago, looking out in twilight from that western edge towards the further west. Each photograph is a one-second exposure facing due west at midnight, taken during May and June - when at this latitude it is twilight (weather permitting). The images were made on consecutive nights, a day's walking apart, as I travelled south along the islands. The project aims to explore cultural ideas of the West and of liminality in relation to this border landscape, between land and water, bright and dark. Thoughts about departure have particular bite for this coast, with its history of forced emigration to the New World. The rules that structure the series are a framework that leaves space for chance, weather and accident to come into the work, and I see the walking as a collaborative element, a measurement of, and by, land and body both. It combines 'How far can I walk today?', with 'where is the next good stopping place?’.
Aileen Harvey is an artist whose work engages with the experience of place. Her processes of walking, photography, drawing, and writing are used to inter-relate location, time and the body. Born in London, Aileen studied philosophy at Edinburgh (1998) and Cambridge (2000), and then sculpture at Wimbledon College of Art (2008); the one subject informing the other. Exhibitions include: Bernard Leach Gallery, St Ives; Customs House Gallery, Sunderland; Karussell, Zürich; An Lanntair, Stornoway; The Photographers' Gallery, London. She has published journal articles and an artist's book.
website - www.aileenharvey.co.uk
Alexandra Hughes - Assemble / Clayotos
'Assemble' (2014), is a floor–based gallery installation consisting of an enlarged film frame containing an image of The Canadian Rockies squeezed upright by a large mound of clay that’s undulating surface evidences the artist’s touch and simulates the physicality of the mountains. A theatre light shines behind the work, referencing the sun within the image as well as projecting the image across the floor, reawakening the photograph into the present and the line between interior and exterior spaces blur.
The series, 'Clayotos' (2014-2015) is a collection of 3-D forms made from clay and positive photographic film frames of mountains in B.C, Canada and coastlines of Northumberland, UK. The light of a slide projector illuminates the collection raising questions on histories, concepts and the ontology of technologies, primitive architectures and geological specimens that frame, represent and constitute landscapes.
Alexandra Hughes is an artist with a practice in the field of expanded photography. She undertakes physical explorations of the photographic medium, moving from the 2D to 3D, bringing image and material together to redefine the photographic object, creating mixed media installations that explore our mediated relationship with the landscape and wilderness. Hughes’ installations heighten the awareness of the multi-sensory, temporal and perceptual shifts between humans, material, time and place, blurring the boundaries between landscape and technology, psychological and architectural spaces, seeking to locate where the contemporary sublime exists.
Hughes was born in Vancouver, Canada and has exhibited internationally. She is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD at Northumbria University, UK (2015-) and is a member of the research groups 'Geo Studio' (Northumbria University) and 'Ph Network' (Birkbeck University and The Photographers’ Gallery). Hughes previously completed her MFA at Slade School of Fine Art, UK (2008).
website - www.alexandrahughes.co.uk
email - contact@alexandrahughes.co.uk
Henry E Iddon - A Place to Go (Sites of mountain misadventure)
Moses said he spoke to God from a mountain, for Lakota shaman the Great Spirit, Wakonda was embedded in the rock and scree of the Black Hills. For Taoists the summits of five sacred hills gave a view over the spiritual not physical world. Mountains in many cultures, are where gods and humans meet, the axis mundi where earth rises to meet sky, where human is dwarfed into insignificance, where otherworldly light seems to glow. The landscape is not always simply a ‘place of delight’ - scenery as sedative, topography so arranged to feast the eye, nor are they always places for entertainment and commodified lifestyles promoted by TV celebrities such as Bear Ghryls and brands such as Red Bull. This work aims to go beyond the picture postcard one dimensionality that is often found when looking at a mountain landscape, contradicting the way we have been taught to view the upland landscape as a place of benign beauty.
Much of Henry Iddon’s work explores upland and wilderness environments. Henry has received an individual Arts Council Grant award in 2006 for his series ‘Spots of Time’, and in 2016 for ‘Instanto Outdoors’ and has been nominated for the National Media Museum Bursary Award, shortlisted for the And/Or Book Awards as well as the Foto8 Best in Show Award. His work has been exhibited in the UK as well as Brixen/Brassanone, Italy; Belo Horizonte, Brazil and Kathmandu, Nepal and he has spoken about his work and activities on NRK TV ( Norway), Channel 4 TV (UK), BBC TV (UK) and BBC Radio 4 (UK). His work is held in collections by; Wordsworth Trust, UK; Kraszna-Krausz Collection, National Media Museum, UK; The North West Film Archive, Manchester Metropolitan University; Scottish National Screen Archive; George Eastman House, Rochester, USA; State Library of New South Wales, Australia; Banff Centre for Mountain Culture, Canada; Centre for Contemporary Photography, University of Arizona, USA.
website - www.henryiddon.com
email - h@henryiddon.com
twitter - @henryiddon
Mitch Karunaratne - Landslag / Cold Coast
'Landslag' - Icelandic land is deeply marked by history and meaning for Icelandic people. It is vital to local memory and a deep source of “Icelandic-ness”. Stories, events and memories are not just imprinted onto the land, but the landscape is part of the historical consciousness lived in modern life. Coming from a culture where landscape is the triumph of humans over nature, I was interested to engage with the Icelandic landscape – landslag – where humans and nature having an interconnected relationship.
'Cold Coast' - Ownership of Svalbard, the northernmost settlement in the world with a permanent population, has been debated since the Napoleonic Wars. Since 1920 it has been governed by Norway under the Treaty of Svalbard, which gave all 40 signatory countries the right to freely access the islands. This is only one of only 2 places in the world to be governed in this way. In recent years the Treaty has become a point of diplomatic dispute. Russian and Norway have affirmed their rights to the lands by maintaining a continuous settlement and mineral extraction sites and China is increasingly interested in the region questioning the sovereignty and ownership of the islands.
Mitch is a documentary landscape photographer, based in London. Her work is principally concerned with how stories are held within the land and the relationship between the land and regional identities. For a number of years, she has been focusing on the northern parts of the world, where she explores the process of changing relationships with the land. “It is important to my practice to find ways to explore the notions of the attachments we have to particular places, places that are rich in story and resonance, to respond to place, and working through its significance in the process of psychological, cultural and economic transformations.”
Mitch received her MA in Photography from University of Brighton in 2012 and has exhibited widely both in the UK and abroad, most recently in Norway and Italy. She is a founding member of the MAP6 collective.
website - www.mitchkarunaratne.com
Michèle Lazenby
“Yet our ears and our eyes are drawn together not only by animals, but by numerous other phenomena within the landscape. And, strangely, wherever these two senses converge, we may suddenly feel ourselves in relation with another expressive power, another center of experience.....” David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous
Michèle is an artist and academic working as Senior Lecturer in Photography at Sheffield Hallam University. Michèle curated the 'Northern Light' Exhibition.
email - m.lazenby@shu.ac.uk
J.Fitzgerald Lee - Conksbury Bridge
The Images produced for this exhibition where developed using a LiDar laser scanner. Whilst creating 3D point clouds I started to view machine made landscapes on a 2Dimensional plane and was able to compose these images. The images are taken from a point of view that no camera or machine has actually been positioned at, but the information and composition are accurate and has been extrapolated from the three dimensional data gathered at a central point within the scene.
J.Fitzgerald Lee is a practising digital artist integrating a fine art practice with freelance and industrial work alongside teaching and lecturing in digital media as Principle Lecturer in Creative Media at Sheffield Hallam University. Lee originally trained and practised as a fine art painter at Cardiff University before going on to complete a Masters in animation and visual effects at the National Centre for Computer Animation (NCCA) Bournemouth.
"New technologies and 3Dimensional imaging processes frame my interest and research. Whilst using and developing these texture and object making techniques I was able to use the computer algorithmic processing for interpolation in 3D imaging software and use this to generate machine made images."
email - j.lee@shu.ac.uk
Anna Lilleengen - Metamorphosis Series I and II, (Norway, 2013-14)
In the early-mid twentieth century, French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Henri Bergson both arrived at a 'philosophy of immanence' that described the material world as underpinned by a metaphysical reality that is subject to constant and 'indivisible change'. Allan Kaprow, the American Fluxus artist, subsequently devised a series of 'activities' that referred to this as 'constant metamorphosis' and encouraged a Zen-like attention to processes of transformative change in the real, material world. The sense that processes of decay and regeneration are in themselves transient, linked and in rapid flux is the starting point Lilleengen takes in her Metamorphosis series where she juxtaposes the idea of essential permanence with the paradoxical ephemerality of matter.
Anna Lilleengen is a process-driven fine art photographer who uses the physical structure and limitations of the medium to create sculptural pieces that explore materiality and transient states of being. Based in Scandinavia and Yorkshire, her romantic images exteriorate inner conditions of the psyche and explore their reflection in the Nordic wilderness landscape.
Since gaining a MA with distinction in Time and Image Based Media at Harrogate School of Art and Design in 2012, she has held over 20 solo exhibitions in the UK and abroad, and was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Art Prize 2014 and included in their 2014 publication of “100 most exciting contemporary artists”. In 2013 she won the Vantage Art Prize and completed a collaborative residency in London with the two other interdisciplinary prize winners. In 2015 she was awarded a ‘Leeds Inspired’ small grant to produce public work in the community of Rothwell, interpreting local history, myth and legend through research, consultation and photography.
website - www.annalilleengen.com
email - annalilleengen@gmail.com
twitter, facebook, instagram - @annalilleengen
Guy Moreton - Denkbewegungen
Ludwig Wittgenstein’s solitary walks in the landscape surrounding his pastoral retreat – a simple cottage or hytte – in Skjolden, on the north-west coast of Norway allowed him to ‘do philosophy’, through what he described as denkbewegungen – thinking through walking – whilst making observations of the mountainous fjord landscape that would, eventually, give him the space he needed to complete extensive and important manuscripts on logic and language.. My own walks in Skjolden, made in collaboration with the artist and poet Alec Finlay attempted to uncover something of the extraordinary character of the landscape in Skjolden, and in doing so, reveal the contemplative side of Wittgenstein. The house no longer exists; instead the ruins of the rock foundations where the house stood – stand for the possibility and the place of thought. My photographs of these pastoral landscapes attempt to ‘bring forth’ connections posed by questions about our relationship to place, and what effect places might have on us.
Guy Moreton is an artist and Associate Professor of Photography in the School of Art, Design and Fashion at Southampton Solent University. His research engages with the cultural histories and representation of landscape, place, memory, hauntology and ruination in literature, art and philosophy. He is co-author, with Alec Finlay and Michael Nedo of Ludwig Wittgenstein – There Where You Are Not (Black Dog Publishing London). His critically acclaimed work has been published, presented and exhibited widely in the UK and internationally, and his photographs are represented in major public collections including Tullie House Museum and Art Gallery Carlisle, Southampton City Art Gallery, and the University of Southampton.
website - www.guymoreton.org
email - guy.moreton@solent.ac.uk
twitter - @guy_moreton
Simon Roberts - Polyarnye Nochi
Unforgiving and dramatic winters have often been regarded as one of Russia’s most defining characteristics. A Russian winter is redolent both of great hardship: extreme temperatures, physical privation, an atmosphere of isolation and desolation, but also great beauty. Russia’s majesty is heightened by the intensity of its winter and for centuries, the Russian winter has been romanticised by many artists from the master realists of the nineteenth century, to modern day film directors such as Tarkovsky and Zviagentsev. Using the perpetual dusk of Russia’s far North, Roberts encapsulates the natural light that was available for only a few hours each day during Polyarnye Nochi (Polar Nights), the period from December until mid-January when the sun remains below the horizon.
Simon Roberts (b.1974) is a British photographer whose work deals with our relationship to landscape and notions of identity and belonging. He originally studied a BA Hons Degree in Human Geography at the University of Sheffield, a subject which has helped inform his subsequent photographic practice. One commentator has described his photographs as “subtle in their discovery and representation of forms of cultural character, which exhibit a disciplined compositional restraint, a richness of palette, and wealth of narrative incident.”
His work has been exhibited widely with solo shows at the National Media Museum, Bradford, Museum and Multimedia Art Museum Moscow and resides in major public and private collections, including the George Eastman House, Deutsche Börse Art Collection and Wilson Centre for Photography. In 2010 he was commissioned as the official Election Artist by the House of Commons Works of Art Committee and most recently he was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society. He has published three critically acclaimed monographs, Motherland (Chris Boot, 2007), We English (Chris Boot, 2009) and Pierdom (Dewi Lewis, 2013).
website - www.simoncroberts.com
instagram - simoncroberts
twitter - @simoncroberts
Andrew Robinson - An Idea of North
'An Idea of North' brings together images from photographic projects undertaken over the last 30 years in Northern England, Scotland and Ireland, alongside related ephemera and collages created from reworked appropriated imagery. Presented as an extended sequence in book form the work questions the construction, through film, photography, story and personal history of an idea of north as both a physical and psychological landscape.
Limited edition 54 page B4 book digitally printed on Evolution Uncoated 100gms and KeayKolour 300gms.
Andrew’s photographic practice investigates notions of individual and communal identity through a visual anthropology of people, place and trace applying creative strategies that integrate still and moving imagery along with text, audio and found materials. A BSc Hons degree in Geology from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a spell as a post-graduate researcher informed the development of an interest in time, place and visual narrative. Since graduating with distinction in Photography from the Royal College of Art Andrew has undertaken numerous arts commissions and residencies leading to exhibition and publication and has worked on research and consultation projects in a range of settings.
Andrew Andrew is a Senor Lecturer in Photography at Sheffield Hallam University teaching on BA (Hons) Photography and MA Digital Media Management; honorary treasurer and membership secretary for the Association of Photography in Higher Education; and founder and curator of the online photobook resource ‘Photobiliophile.co.uk’
website - www.anthology.co.uk
website - www.photobibliophile.co.uk
email - andrew@anthology.co.uk
Sonya Robinson - The Refusal of the Image
As an adopted twin I am driven to rewrite a history without beginning, to endlessly make and re-make images in an attempt to find an image, an image from childhood, the first image. On this slate, this tabula rasa all images slide and disappear. Photographing images using black Perspex initiates a tolerable distance from which to negotiate a non-image that must find its idealising form. Through tangible images that serve to cover an underlying reality something is disclosed as essentially undisclosed. The process of photographing a surface that reflects can be likened to the idealising principles of The Claude Glass – a tinted convex mirror, commonly used to produce a stable, reflected image of landscape reminiscent of the paintings of Claude Lorrain. The most common colour for a Claude mirror is black. In Arnaud Maillet’s 'The Claude Glass – Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art '…the black mirror provides a light similar to that visible during an eclipse… they induce an eclipse in "seeing''...' (2004, p. 213)
Sonya's research considers the unnameable and unrepresentable origin of the ‘image in trauma’. Research is informed by psychoanalysis and continental philosophy, relating issues of loss, desire and origin. Strategies of distanciation, performative intervention and aesthetic defense negotiate a tolerable distance from which the image in trauma is to be approached. Sonya is an academic, artist and writer. She studied for an MA in Fine Art (Media) at The Slade School of Fine Art. She is currently Senior Lecturer MArt/BA (Hons) Photography at Sheffield Hallam University. Exhibitions include Doverodde Book Arts Festival IV + Symposium – 2012, Denmark. She has delivered papers at I Wonder, What is Wrong with Alice? Nostalgias: Visualising Longing, November 2013, Margate and The ‘Afterlife’ Of Photography, Symposium: Alice Culture: The Endurance of Wonderland, Tate, Liverpool, 19th November 2011
email - sonya.robinson@shu.ac.uk
Theo Simpson - the land of the day before
Theo Simpson lives and works in the North of England. His work reflects on mythical themes relating to landscape and industrial heritage. Often probing the instability of the post-industrial landscape through the examination of materials, ruins, objects and experiences encountered and created.
Simpson’s work has featured most recently in: Palladian Design, exhibition at RIBA (2016), Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography (Phaidon 2015) and journals Mas Context and Photoworks. His work is also held in various international public collections including the V&A National Art Library, Fotomuseum, Winterthur, Royal Institute of British Architects and the Tate Artists’ Book Library.
website - www.theosimpson.co.uk
email - @theo_simpson
Ravinder Surah - Living Things (Blue)
There is a profound link between beauty and fear, we sometimes fear what we love and love what we fear. This body of work expresses a love for the woodlands, something I fear in its darkness but also embrace and love within its golden light glory when kissed by the sun. Here I used my camera to capture the erratic movement felt within myself when exploring the woodlands close to dusk. There is a sense of ambiguity that promotes a notion of uncertainty as to what you are looking at, and like a Rorschach ink blot test things seem to merge as imagery jumps out at you from the photographic surface.
The work of fine art photographer Ravinder Surah creatively explores the human condition combining ideas of vulnerability with the philosophies of metaphysics to create complex engaging artworks that aim to stimulate the emotions of the viewer. He explores the human condition utilising a creative mix of both direct and abstract representations to challenge the viewer’s perceptions and to ultimately provoke thought and reflection on our relationship with both nature and society.
Using video and still images to display how susceptible we are to the elements surrounding us, Surah also directs emphasis on his own anxieties and personal feelings as a stimulation to drive his perplexing work. Surah explains ‘Without comfort we fall into the hands of nature which feeds us with life but which could also suddenly surrender us to our deaths; without security humanity would struggle to exist’.
website - www.rndgphotography.com
email - rndgphoto@gmail.com
twitter - @rndgphotography
Jonny Sutton - Ultraviolet Landscapes
Since the conception of photography, the medium has been a meeting point for artistic practice and scientific exploration. Using propriety forensic equipment,Sutton seeks to record images unperceivable to the human eye capturing ultraviolet light beyond the limits of our vision, a type of light which for decades photographers have gone to great lengths to avoid. As these rays of light scatter and diffuse in the atmosphere, the artist captures ethereal landscapes which could never exist outside of the camera. Distant objects become lost in mist normally invisible to the human eye and textures and shapes become softened by the process.
Jonny Sutton is a contemporary artist working primarily with lens based media. Sutton’s work interrogates our ideas about the world around us, exploring the central contemporary themes of nature, technology and the everyday. Using various techniques Sutton re-presents the world around us, allowing us to observe it from a new perspective. Particularly of interest is the way in which modern technologies are rapidly changing our relationship with imagery. As content becomes more readily available, accessible and highly disposable, the way in which we interact with it evolves, having a profound effect on the development of an increasingly digital society.
Sutton’s work has been exhibited widely, most recently at SIA Gallery and Millennium Galleries, Sheffield; as well as having featured on numerous websites including Beautiful Decay, Nerve.com and Daily Inspiration. Currently working on a number of artistic and scientific projects in the North of England, Sutton is available for freelance work in art, photography and consultancy throughout the UK.
website - www.jonnysutton.co.uk
twitter - @JonnySutton
Patrick Wichert - Northern England
This work is taken from a new body of work entitled “Parallel Landscapes” which is the result of a two year project exploring in parallel, the landscapes of Northern England (my current home) and Southern Germany (my first home). Ultimately these photographs will be contained in a extended bespoke photobook titled “Parallel Landscapes”.
I’m concerned with narratives which present themselves in familiar landscapes, mostly those of Southern Germany and Northern England. These are intuitive explorations, a persistent routine of drawing with a (passive) lens, often those sea-and landscapes which resonate considering their role in the history of Europe. I respond to the light and describe with it a melancholic drifting, recalling memories and historical events. I walk for convenience and attuned to my rhythm of thought, this I can accommodate close to my wider family and professional tasks. Now I spend most of my time in Northern England where an increasingly familiar landscape has been emerging in my photographs. It also is becoming part of me. In seeking familiar, unimposing and moderately scaled environs I indicate skepticism with the grand gesture, the overwhelming emotion. My approach is normally contained within a straight realist aesthetic, resulting in tentative elementary documents
email - p.wichert@shu.ac.uk
Chi Yan Wong - The Unpredictable Landscapes
This series of images explores the creative potential of working at the boundaries of the technical processes of photography where the representation of the landscape subjects breaks down to create evocative distortions that mix abstracted surface with photographic depth. The series consists of four sets of four Polaroid images (one set is presented here). Each set was shot at a different time and in a different location resulting in variations in colour, pattern and shape with some images referencing early photographic processes and others influenced by abstract painting and art photography. Every Polaroid image created is a unique object that is both a representation of the landscape portrayed and a record of the making of the image. The photographs capture more than light and form, they also record the temperature of the location through the fragility of the chemistry. Even though the landscape may be distorted or only partially rendered, due to the instant nature of the Polaroid process the images still maintain a direct connection to the location in which they were produced.
Chi Yan Wong is a photographer based in London with a strong interest in analogue photography, working mainly in 35mm black and white film, Polaroid and alternative processes. Chi’s practice consists of landscape and still life photography and the work she creates his characterized by its strong yet sensitive visual style and subtle qualities. She is passionate about exploring a range of techniques and experimenting with different photographic processes working at the boundaries of the medium.
email - chiyan_wong@hotmail.com
twitter - @cywongphoto
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