BIO
Mark Adams is a photographer whose practice and research is concerned with landscape representation. His work explores the cultural forces that impact upon landscapes as well as the personal narratives that are woven into everyday places through walking.
He was awarded the Chris Garnham Memorial Prize for photography at the Royal College of Art in 2001. Since then he has won a number of awards including The Greater Manchester Art Prize, The International Photography Awards and the Folio Society Illustration Awards.
Over the past 20 years Mark has exhibited in galleries and museums in the United States, Europe and the UK. His work appears in Paris Lit Up magazine, Next Level, Der Greif magazine and recently in the American Landscape publication ‘Observations in the Ordinary’. He is member of Millennium Photographers Agency and Senior Lecturer in photography at York St John University. He currently lives in North Tyneside.
ABOUT THE ART
Taking its title and from Tennyson’s poem, ‘In Memoriam’ is a series of photographs that explore mortality and landscape by responding to the ancient burial sites of Dalby Forest. The project features landscapes and collected organic objects such as driftwood and eroded rock connecting two locations - the Adderstone area of Dalby Forest and the Tynemouth coast. Like Tennyson’s poem the work meditates on life’s continuity after death and loss.
Both of the sites have historical connections with the body, burial and its associated rituals. The forest contains hidden funerary sites in the form of burial mounds, while Tynemouth Bay is one of the few registered sea burial sites in the UK. The work establishes dialogue between the shifting topographies of the forest and the eroded geological surfaces of the coast, reflecting on states of change, renewal, transience and impermanence.
Placing these oblique photographs in close proximity to forgotten, commemorative locations aims to illuminate the hidden narratives of place and history, forming relationships between earth, sea, body and landscape.