Output details

Rockfalls

Southam’s solo exhibition at the Robert Mann Gallery, New York, emerged from two extended on-going studies entitled ‘The Rockfalls of Normandy’ and ‘Lyme Bay’. These studies follow on from 20 years photographing rockfalls along a series of stretches of the coast of England (Sussex, the Isle of Wight, Devon and Dorset, Sunderland and Cumbria), which are prone to regular catastrophic collapses. Each site is re-photographed over a number of years to produce short sequences, which visually examine the physical transformation of the earth and our psychological responses to change. The bodies of work explore different modes of sequencing and structuring and thus the construction of narrative.

The pictures depict the complex layering of time within a still photograph. A single image presents deep time through the depiction of the successive layering of geological strata; the depiction of millennia through the configuration of coastal formations; the rockfalls themselves refer to annual cycles of erosion; the beach configuration to lunar cycles of tides; to hourly depictions of the movement of specific tides and to the momentary experience of time through the breaking of individual waves. Short sequences of pictures further extend these temporal studies.

Over the last five years there have been a number of developmental iterations of this work, extending the research, visually reuniting the chalk downs of Sussex and Normandy, which were physically contiguous only 8,000 years ago.