A photographer who examines the interactions of landscapes, nature and industrial society, questioning the romantic mythology of national parks as areas of wilderness and natural beauty.
My photographs examine the interactions of landscapes, nature and industrial society. Over the last 20 years my practice has focused on Britain’s national parks and increasingly the immediate surroundings of Pembrokeshire where I live and work, questioning the romantic mythology of national parks as areas of wilderness and natural beauty.
I use large format photography in order to simultaneously capture the painterly tones and aesthetic qualities of the landscape’s surface while detailing the impacts of humanity’s exploitation of nature for commercial gain. My series of smaller photographs show objects found in the landscape at 1:1 scale, capturing the effect of natural processes on the surfaces of industrially produced materials. In these images the objects become poignant symbols of the entanglement -- both literal and metaphorical -- of human consumption, waste and nature. At a time when climate breakdown and ecological collapse coexists with a global pandemic that draws attention to the importance of the natural world to human physical and mental wellbeing, I feel my work has acquired added urgency.
My work has been exhibited at National Museum Wales (2012,2016), The Royal Academy of Arts (2014,2018), the 56th Venice Biennale (2015) and Foundling Museum (2016).
In 2017 I was included in the British Arts Council Collection exhibition British Landscape and The Imagination at Towner Art Gallery. My solo exhibition Land/Sea received Arts Council Wales touring funds and travelled between Plymouth Arts Centre, Ffotogallery, Mostyn and Aberystwyth Arts Centre during 2017-18, and will open at Thelma Hubert Gallery and National Museum Wales’s Oriel y Parc in 2021. I was awarded a Creative Wales Award in 2015 and represented Wales at the 2018 Interceltique Arts Festival in Lorient, France.