NEWS FROM NOWHERE

With influences from romantic landscape painting this series of photographs develop a narrative, depicting a journey through an alternate English landscape. The terrain is dominated by man-made structures whilst ‘natural’ features have been manipulated to suit human needs. The images evoke a sense of the uncanny showing evidence of human presence without inhabitants, connecting signs of halted civilisation alongside structured nature.

Digitally composited from several exposures they present stylised idealised views. Details such as clouds are repeated across several images adding to the sense of the unnatural or inauthentic. The approach challenges ideas about conventional documentary photography with an aesthetic that resembles computer generated architectural visuals. In many ways these are contrived places; they are both real and unreal, familiar yet somehow different, somewhere but at the same time nowhere.

Photographic prints, Artist's book, Postcards, 2011

Postally used postcard from the series, 2011

These contemporary photos illustrate aspects of designer, artist and radical socialist William Morris’ science-fiction novella News from Nowhere (1890) describing a utopian vision of society. The locations, mainly around East London are examples of changes taking place in the built environment. They were selected as places undergoing development portraying transience and impermanence. With a series of postcards the audience were invited to participate in the fictional journey through a synthetic landscape by becoming a recipient of handwritten postcards which were periodically posted to them.

Like computer generated architectural visuals composited from several exposures, the images present idealised views. The photographs were digitally cleansed of their real-world ‘imperfections’, aesthetically in keeping with CGI models. Each image has the same sky, a visual repetition to reinforce a sense of the unnatural.

I considered how artists such as Ruskin, Constable and Turner responded to the landscape in regard to composition, but also imbuing lyrical and emotional concerns. The Romantics contemplated that ruins were remnants of noble pre-civilisations, as memento mori, reminders of our own mortality evoking feelings of melancholy and loss. In response, I was interested in the implications of imagining ruins formed from the current landscape, future ruins. After The Resolution (2011) for example, features a large mound of earth near the gleaming glass towers of Canary Wharf, the financial heart of London, implying remnants of ruined buildings following a catastrophic event.

Extract from Temporal Dislocation and Audiovisual Practice, Paul Greenleaf, 2022

The Monument (2011)

At the Edge of the Forest (2011)

After The Resolution (2011)

The Rise of Architectural Power (2011)

Modern Folklife (2011)

Installation at The Catlin Art Prize 5th Anniversary Exhibition, The Tramshed, Shoreditch, London, 2011