ORE

These images developed during the second lockdown. Cut off from the landscape I turned to revisiting old images.

So often we view the land as a “resource” - something from which we can extract value. We reduce terrain to it’s component parts; it is parcelled off; catalogued; priced; sold. At a time when access to being in a landscape is under threat, both from legal changes and from the constant and rising pressures on the environment, we find yet new ways to exploit it.

I wanted to look at the landscape through this cold, calculating gaze. To render it alien, unfamiliar again. In fact, bathed in unnatural light, despite the post-apocalyptic overtones, a strange beauty endures in these darkened landscapes. Skies darken to a chemical haze; black rocks become glittering ore; water becomes a liquid metal. They reflect the tension between the constituent and the aggregate: between the mineral - that which humans seek to separate out; and the landscape - resistant, whole.