OPTIMISM, REVISITED

Spending time in Margate inspired me to develop this series of work featuring skies. The British artist JMW Turner famously described the skies there as ‘…the loveliest in all Europe’. The pictures are made from found postcards and new photographs. Some are new compositions cropped from larger images often retaining some landscape features, others are small fragments, enlarged, graded and collated together. Others still are new visual ‘proposals’ for sky, suggestions for how the sky might be perceived. Intended as a relief to drab reality they act as a hope for the future whilst simultaneously implying themes of nostalgia and memory. The pictures show idyllic moments when things appeared bright and positive, whilst only transitory these moments may also be seen as recurring and timeless. Sitting somewhere between reality and subjective ideas of ‘perfection’ the work provides a meditation on optimism which spans past, present and future. These skies may never have really existed and perhaps nether did the mood they encompass but in these pictures both can be revisited.

Limited edition artist book
24pp with card insert
230 x 153mm
Edition of 50