Introduction

In this exercise I have evolved my artist’s statement. After reviewing a number of statements I have seen that some can be factual, stating simply the name of the artist and where or how the images were taken.

Others are more evolved, attempting to set a context and evoke some emotion from the reader ahead of viewing the images.

I found that this later type affecting my viewing of the images that followed. This is a technique I like. I have struggled in the past with a desire to direct the viewer so much within an image that it left little space for their own interpretation, spoiling the polysemic nature of the image.

I think that using an artist’s statement to ‘set the scene’ can do all the directing I want to do and then leave the viewer to interpret the images as they see fit – I can leave space in the images and spend less time trying to cram them with symbols or directive elements.

My Statement

Stroud’s five valleys and the rivers that flow down them created a rich textile history, in their heyday housing over 150 mills.  Today, some 200 years on, that history is disappearing as buildings crumble into oblivion.  

There is hope, some of those mills are renovated and house today’s world of coffee shops and play groups but in the main, they are vanishing from sight.

And yet, there is a strange fondness of this past.  New communities spring up around the mills and retain a small part of what has gone before, sometimes using a part of the building and sometimes just the name but in either case, attempting to romanticise these new buildings by evoking a link to the past.

Is this romanticism a success?  Does it cling on to our history and keep it alive or does it mourn our loss? Or are these attempts really just wasted effort as other mills collapse before our eyes and only their echoes of a name remain.

These photographs, taken in 2022, adopt a topographic style to cast a dispassionate view on this changing landscape.