Landshapes
Foreword
Everyone has a camera in hand nowadays. Millions of images are taken everyday, uploaded to various social channels. A well prepared breakfast, a funny cat-face, popular landmarks, they all make the cut.
The pace of life can be worrying, we're encouraged to scroll and consume images at a blurring rate, sometimes offering a hurried 'like' in exchange for the photographer's efforts. The art of consideration, reflection and wonderment is lost in this flurry of consumption.
Popular landscape scenes are photographed over and over again with no question of why or how, caught in an echo chamber of the perfect social post. I wanted to rediscover the lost art of having a real conversation with nature, for my own mental wellbeing and also to encourage others to reconnect with their natural surroundings in a meaningful way.
In the modern world, information washes over us at an incredible speed. We're bombarded by photos, videos, facts, adverts; and our attention is often awarded to the overly saturated, outrageous or most easily consumed.
Landshapes is a series of photographs that are designed to avoid the traditional notions of landscape photography, deliberately composing scenes that are closer in resemblance to abstract shapes than to any obvious landscape composition.
I wanted to refocus our vision of the landscape, replacing the repetitive sentimental views we're commonly exposed to and produce a body of work that could create a conversation based around shape and form, investigating how the eye can find solace in nothing more than tone and composition.
These abstractions are an offering to connect with the work through an idea, an emotion, a memory of time past, through the alchemy of shapes, form and contrast. They've lead me to question at what point do shapes take form and exist as a landscape and how does the absence of location affect the way we see these images.
