These exercise reflects on the way in which I see the land, what influences do I have and how this change the subjective way in which I see the landscape.
My Influences
I grew up in a city, Stockport (part of Manchester) but at the age of 16 joined the RAF where I moved around for 12 years before then starting work in London. In 2012 I moved to live and work in Dubai for four years where I flew somewhere in Africa or the Middle East almost every week, destinations including South Africa, Kenya, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Ghana, Nigeria, Qatar, Oman, and Saudi Arabia. In 2016 I returned to the UK and worked in London again before moving to the Cotswolds in 2018, although I still work in London.
I think that this rather nomadic lifestyle has meant that I have never really formed a strong attachment to any single place. I have never found myself yearning for “home” and instead I have grown used to making my home with a focus on my immediate surroundings alone. Outside of this space I have taken an interest in the local cultures I have seen and I have enjoyed seeing the different types of landscapes in those areas.
Two characteristics have struck me the most and this has been my enjoyment of wide open spaces and of being up in the mountains, also because of the vastness of being there. These are the places that I feel free and away from pressures.
In more recent years, where I now live in the Cotswolds but work in London, I feel a distinct release of pressure as I leave London and get back to the countryside. I probably feel more at home in the Cotswolds then anywhere I have felt at home before.
I have noticed a couple of reactions in this regard.
- I don’t like anything that seems to be putting that feeling at risk. Modern engineering and building that destroys the Cotswolds AONB or its heritage is something I rile against.
- My wife, born in UK but whose earlier generations of family are Indian often feels out of place in a very white English countryside which is in very stark contrast to where she was born, brought up and considered home which was North London
In both of these points, I felt a very strong affinity to the work of Ingrid Pollard (Pollard, n.d.) who talks of both these issues and makes them the basis of many of her photographs.
These issues are things that I started to touch on in my earlier assignments but I feel that my research into Pollard and also to Melanie Friend with her images from the series The Plain (Friend, 2021) has helped me realise that the creativity required to capture these issues and feelings are not so much a need to up my game on the aesthetic appeal of my images, but more about careful consideration on how to show the point of what I am trying to say whilst at the same time leaving enough space for the viewer to explore their own thoughts. I intend to reflect on this further in my practice.
What I have also realised is that I will have unconscious bias in both these areas and so if I am creating work to highlight different issues to these, then I need to watch that I do not confuse myself, my images or my viewers with mixed messages.
Bibliography
Pollard, I., n.d. ingrid pollard photography. [online] ingrid pollard photography. Available at: <http://www.ingridpollard.com/> [Accessed 1 August 2021].
Friend, M., 2021. The Plain — Melanie Friend. [online] Melanie Friend. Available at: <https://melaniefriend.com/the-plain/> [Accessed 23 July 2021].