Output details

DarkDayLight

Whilst untertaking a residency in Banff (2006/7), I was invited to have a solo exhibition at the Instituto Veracruzano De Cultura, Mexico, which offered me the opportunity to extend my work to an international audience and bring to a level of conclusion, research undertaken in various contexts in the preceding years. DarkDayLight (2008) comprised twenty-six framed black and white silver gelatin prints of landscape made in Canada, Scotland and Ireland over a two-year period. This body of work advances two main areas of research enquiry: a) a testing of the place and future of analogue photography in the digital age and b) an interruption of the male-dominated representation of landscape through the photographic medium. Landscape has a long history within photography, from the early pioneers who attempted to capture a virgin landscape, to the recent saturation of traveller and tourist images providing proof of having ‘been and seen.’ But what is the place of landscape photography in contemporary art practice? My interest in the preservation of analogue photography resonates with the position of other artists such as Tacita Dean, whose work Film, commissioned for the Turbine Hall of Tate Modern 2011, acted as ‘a call to arms’ for artists, filmmakers and writers to challenge the decline of the analogue medium and resources. Like Dean, my research demonstrates the specificity of analogue and highlights its distinctness from digital technology but does so specifically in relation to landscape and with the particular intention of using the traditional medium to intervene in and reclaim this male-dominated genre. The output is supported by another exhibition of the same work at La Galerria del Sur, Universidad Autonoma Unidad Xochimilco in Mexico City (2008) and In 2009 I successfully used this body of work to apply for a highly competitive Artist Award of £15,000.00.