Artist's Statement
It’s so hard to write about photography succinctly and also really hard to sound like I don’t take myself far too seriously, the problem is that photography is so many things to me. I did not always know it would become my life and career but I can’t remember I time I did not take photos and my relationship with it has evolved so much over the years. A wonderful artist, and my teacher at the time David Drummond Milne once told me photography was my truth, I believed him and built my life around it.
I love the way the photograph and the camera draws our attention to a subject, micro or macro and encourages us to notice and often question.
As a creative person to say that you are inspired by nature and the landscape has become a bit of a cliche but it has been the case for the work shown in this website. Over my life I have gradually moved further from the suburbs and spent more and more time outdoors among flora and fauna. I developed a strong desire to express the notions of how it feels to be outdoors, yes the sights but also the experiences of the other senses. Maybe it’s only normal that having such a long history together I would butt up against the edges of traditional photography but I was frustrated by the insufficiency of the 2D digital images I could make of the landscape. Encouraged during my MA course I began to explore how to convey the motion of the landscape and add layers to my images.
The alchemy of photography is one of its huge draws for me, I love the autonomic nature of many of the techniques, especially analogue and traditional techniques. Perhaps my place as a photographer is sometimes just to cultivate the fertile situation, get out of the way and allow images to create themselves.
My ongoing interest, or itch I can’t scratch, is in producing work that expresses some of the intangible things about the natural world, the slow but relentless pace of change. The feeling of being insignificant in the face of weather and seasons totally beyond our control, awestruck and grateful all at the same time.
Much of my experimentation has come to rely on fusing traditional, slow photography with other methods; often aiming to be both representational and expressive or tactile at the same time.
The images you see on this website are mainly the products of my experiments, many use traditional contact printing techniques. Some of the more pleasing results are available to purchase on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ChrisElizabethArt
I love the way the photograph and the camera draws our attention to a subject, micro or macro and encourages us to notice and often question.
As a creative person to say that you are inspired by nature and the landscape has become a bit of a cliche but it has been the case for the work shown in this website. Over my life I have gradually moved further from the suburbs and spent more and more time outdoors among flora and fauna. I developed a strong desire to express the notions of how it feels to be outdoors, yes the sights but also the experiences of the other senses. Maybe it’s only normal that having such a long history together I would butt up against the edges of traditional photography but I was frustrated by the insufficiency of the 2D digital images I could make of the landscape. Encouraged during my MA course I began to explore how to convey the motion of the landscape and add layers to my images.
The alchemy of photography is one of its huge draws for me, I love the autonomic nature of many of the techniques, especially analogue and traditional techniques. Perhaps my place as a photographer is sometimes just to cultivate the fertile situation, get out of the way and allow images to create themselves.
My ongoing interest, or itch I can’t scratch, is in producing work that expresses some of the intangible things about the natural world, the slow but relentless pace of change. The feeling of being insignificant in the face of weather and seasons totally beyond our control, awestruck and grateful all at the same time.
Much of my experimentation has come to rely on fusing traditional, slow photography with other methods; often aiming to be both representational and expressive or tactile at the same time.
The images you see on this website are mainly the products of my experiments, many use traditional contact printing techniques. Some of the more pleasing results are available to purchase on Etsy https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/ChrisElizabethArt
