Photohastings Summer Exhibition 2021

Title of work: .-pause, look
Dimensions : Variable – 3D installation
Date Created: 2021
Medium : Archival digital prints, card forms, mirror card, various papers, mirror

Artist’s statement: You are invited to stop and pause in the act of looking; to navigate this series of cylindrical forms set in space; to be curious; to peer through and into portals; to find; to be in the present; to mirror the sensation felt when looking into rock pools, and to ponder.

The heart of this installation derived from observing reflections on the inner side of a silver bracelet that belonged to my mother, along with living by the ever-changing sea, in my childhood and now.

I seek connectedness. My interdisciplinary practice encompasses photography, sculpture and painting, brought together in sculptural objects, assemblages and site-responsive installations that invite inquisitiveness.

I enjoy the dialogue of object and image. I am drawn to material culture and am fascinated with how objects can hold our meanings and uses, including the use of domestic photography as a mnemonic device, however trustworthy that may be?

Information: Sinéid Codd Website | @sineidcodd

Title : ‘snapshot’
Date created : April 2021

Artist’s Statement: Quirky images that hint at a story yet to be told; or maybe just accidental juxtapositions of objects or people; an aesthetic in which images are like the first page of a novel: will the viewer be curious to know more in the chapters that follow?

Information: Frank Francis Instagram

Title : My Cup of Tea
Date : 2010

My cup of tea, means someone or something I like. As ritual it bonds us together sharing time and connection, whether polite or intimate. It is tradition and nostalgia. My cup of tea is a pause to clear the mind, it precedes action, to start afresh bright with energy, calm and ready.

Information: Tracy Jones Website | @tracyjonesart

Title of work: Slip
Date Created : April 2021

Artist’s statement: In Kent, the coastline at the Isle of Sheppey is brown muddy clay. Here the land gives way to the sea in sliding mud…

Whole trees slip on their sides toward the beach and still put forth springtime buds. ‘Slip’ was taken in April 2021, as part of an exploration of landscapes in the UK which seeks to find links between these landscapes and the mental health and emotional states of their residents.

Looking at coastal erosion, cliff falls, abandoned buildings and man-made debris, this series observes a lack of fixedness even in those things we imagine permanent. The natural state is constant change, whether seemingly sudden and shocking, or gradual and familiar.

Information: @wejustclique

Title of work : Saint Leonards Festival 2019
Date created : 2019

Artist’s statement: This image is part of an ongoing section of my work I have identified as ‘Seascape’. The majority of the images are taken on the seafront in Hastings and St Leonards-on-Sea,
 I like to photograph people and events against the panorama of the sky and sea. I love the way the light bounces off of the sea and creates this ever-changing backdrop, which I try and use to frame the human and man-made objects in a moment of time.

I have been a working photographer for pretty much all of my adult life, mostly as a commercial food photographer but I have always tried to continue with my own projects as well.  As a photography student in the seventies I was influenced by photographers like Henri Cartier- Bresson, Jacques-Henri Lartigue, Bill Brandt, Don McCullin, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand and others of that era.

Information: Ian O’Leary Website | @ianoleary

Title of work : Rye Harbour Nature Reserve – 2021
Dimensions : 100 x 100cm – 9 montaged images – landscape
Date created: June 2021

Artist’s statement: Do we appreciate the free things in life; beauty, nature, and open space?

The intention of my photography is to convey the extensive landscape, the diverse flora and fauna, and the unique qualities of Rye Harbour Nature Reserve. I elected to capture these images in black and white to strip away the distraction of colour and evoke in the viewers a sense of space, isolation and timeless simplicity.

Rye Harbour Nature Reserve is accessible to all. However, we must consider and appreciate that “nature gives but can take away”.

Information: Chris Coombes Website

Title : It’s Not Dark Yet…
Date : April 2021

Artist’s statement: The initial inspiration for these images came from my reflections on the past year or so and my thoughts about our future. For some, the past year has brought an increased sense of community, working from home, more family time. A simpler pace of life. However, for many, the pandemic has meant an increasingly inescapable sense of isolation, poverty and loneliness.

What will we learn from this?
It’s not dark yet… but it’s getting there…

Information: Clare Hocter Website | @clarehocterphotography

Title of work : Herne Bay
Date created : October 2018

One photograph from the series ‘Land of Cockaigne : Travels Through Brexit’ (2016 – 2019).

The whole series of 38 photographs is available as a book from Silverhill Press.

Artist’s statement: For some years I had intended to walk from my home in Hastings along the coastal route all the way to London. I began the project in September 2016. As I started planning the route it became clear most of my walking would be through Sussex and Kent coastal regions which had voted solidly for Brexit in the referendum, and as I began the walk itself, I realised the referendum result had changed my attitude to the coastal landscape I love so much.

As I walked, Union flags seemed much more prominent than I recalled previously, the multitude of ‘Keep Out’ and ‘Private’ signs which had always been there took on a sinister air, and the irony of walking for many miles on land closer to France than it is to London became overwhelming. For the first time in years, Englishness and the English landscape began to feel alien and forbidding to me, and during the two and a half years the walk took me, the country lurched deeper into crisis, chaos and an ascendant far-right authoritarian populism.

Information: Ian Land Website  |  @ian_m_land  |  Silverhill Press

Title of work: San Francisco
Date Created : 1989

Still Films

Artist’s statement: I moved from photo-journalism to film making in 2011 and found that the core concerns regarding visual storytelling informed both mediums. The influence of cinema has always been present in my photography as I have been so fascinated with the language of film throughout my childhood.

Still photographs are like vessels, and within the most memorable are references to our own lives and those of others, remembered or imagined. I strive to create images with a resonance, a narrative that extends beyond the frame. There is often a sense of the protagonist, sometimes directly by their presence in a suggested drama, but in others, by their absence from a scene, stage or set. Cinema and photography play with our relationship of the concept of time, in some ways reinforcing its linear nature, in others, disrupting this flow and offering up countless eventualities more akin to a quantum view of the universe.

“It is as if photography alone is too silent to speak. It is mute. And cinema is usually so busy moving that it is unable to stop and hear. Any moving picture that freezes the image poses some sort of question about the interrelationship of cinema and photography (and time). The film theorist Raymond Bellour talks of the ‘pensive’ moment when a viewer is presented with a photograph or a freeze-frame in a film. For Bellour, ‘pensiveness’ is a suspension, a moment of anticipation when things are in balance. Literally and psychologically, the still image causes a pause. In ‘Photography and Cinema’, David Campany gives examples of numerous films about photographers, and films that use photographs as a central part of their plots. He claims, for example, that one-fifth of all noir films ever made use a photograph as a key prop, plot point, or piece of evidence.”
Andrew Taylor –‘ Writing with images: The Film-Photo-essay’.

Information : Road Factory Photos Website

Title: ‘Living Room’
Date created : 2021

Artist Statement: ‘What is not shown is also part of the exhibition.’

The first image was taken on Thursday 25th October 2012, in my living room in Homs, Syria. The second image was taken on Tuesday 3rd November 2020 in my living room in St Leonards-on-Sea, UK.

This work forms part of ‘Site Line’, a two-year project supported and commissioned by The Syrian Resettlement Project East Sussex, designed and mentored by Photohastings artist Nicole Zaaroura. The project began in 2019, and continues to travel in altered hybrid forms throughout the various levels of lockdown restrictions. With an embodied use of the camera, the project explores shifting spaces, and conversations in time.

Information: @abkrrastan