Espy Photography Award
MARCH 4, 2014
On show during March at Elysium Gallery, Swansea, as part of the 2014 Espy Photography Award.
AONB #BLOG
On Beauty
MAY 4, 2013
Just back from the printers, and delivered to Copeland Book Market's installation for Site13 at Duffle, Stroud.
On Beauty
MAY 24, 2012
From Pablo Helguera's highly amusing Manual Of Contemporary Art Style (2007):
Beauty. This is a taboo subject in the Art World, usually employed with negative connotations. Claiming to see beauty in something arouses suspicions, since the assessment of beauty tends to be regarded as [coming] from someone without selective taste. It can, however, have great impact when one evokes the word as a metaphor, or in describing a work that is decidedly repulsive.
Zero-In
APRIL 29, 2012
From NYT:
"You have to forget about the idea of the spirit of the place," [Jeff Wall] says. "It's one of the big, consoling myths of people who live nowhere." Starting in 1980 with "Steves Farm, Steveston", in which he photographed a subdivision marching onto agricultural land, Wall has, in his landscapes, zeroed in on an equipoise between the natural and the man-made. In a Wall picture, the industrial structures that inhabit a harbor or the lofty pine that has survived suburban sprawl is no more or less "natural" than the other aspects of the scene.
"Unattractive Regions"
APRIL 27, 2012
Victor Hugo, in Les Miserables:
To observe those outskirts [of the city] is to observe an amphibious world, trees giving way to rooftops, grass to pavements, furrowed fields to streets of shops, rutted lanes to human passions, murmurous nature to the clamour of mankind... Hence the fascination, for those of a thoughtful mind, of a stroll through unattractive regions...
S.Z.
APRIL 27, 2012
Wastelands
APRIL 27, 2012
Paul Shepheard in The Cultivated Wilderness:
The wilderness is what was there before the humans came. The wasteland – which was once the same thing – is now something else: cultivation gone feral.
"Entropy Tourism"
APRIL 26, 2012
Walking in the landscape is now a cultural activity in itself, especially if the landscape is somehow corrupted. See also, Laura Oldfield Ford and, of course, Iain Sinclair's "entropy tourism".
The Storyteller
APRIL 26, 2012
At The Edge
APRIL 25, 2012
Beginnings
APRIL 25, 2012
This, from Richard Mabey (in The Unofficial Countryside):
Our attitude towards nature is a strangely contradictory blend of romanticism and gloom. We imagine it to 'belong' in those watercolour landscapes where most of us would also like to live. If we are looking for wildlife we turn automatically towards the official countryside, towards the great set-pieces of forest and moor. If the truth is told, the needs of the natural world are more prosaic than this a crack in the pavement is all a plant needs to put down roots.