BIO
My photographic practice focuses on visualising the landscape and the natural history of Northern England. My aim is to raise questions on how photography made in response to specific landscapes and natural histories can be utilised within the field of landscape aesthetics and align with the wider cultural debates about the value of the ‘local’ from an environmental and personal perspective. My practice tests out strategies that capitalise on the transformational qualities of photography. My work aims to place emphasis on the extraordinary properties of the ordinary and reveal hidden or unseen aspects, leading to a more informed, comprehensive and enriched idea of the northern landscape and its natural history. The breadth of my research trajectory continues to visualise, question and examine the broader cultural value of the ordinary and the commonplace. My work has been nominated for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize (2012) and the Prix Pictet (2009). I am a senior academic, with a doctorate from Sunderland University (2017).
ABOUT THE ART
SelfScapes presented an opportunity to reflect on my photographic practice, which has focused on the landscape and the natural history of Northern England over many decades. I elected to work on a theme of Essence and constrain my ideas, by focusing on concepts around subtraction, reduction and abstraction. I started by collecting flora specimens out in the field and returned to the studio, to investigate ideas around the photographic mediation of the natural world. I began to accentuate, heighten and exaggerate these ideas around visual intervention, by combining experimental analogue and digital strategies. Through my long-standing research with photographic archives and collections, it’s apparent that the photograph has been subject to various means of manipulation since its invention. The resultant images play on these ideas around intervention, by presenting us with an abstraction of form and colour. The process is finalised by the artwork being exhibited within Dalby Forest as a backdrop.