(images)
‘Distance’
Text by Louis Stopforth
A tangled mass of limbs amidst rocks,
Interrupted by a magenta shadow.
An inert body floating upright,
Alongside a strip of light-leaked landscapes.
Flowers incrementally drained of their saturated beauty,
Taped over a rich turquoise and the absolute black of photographic exposure.
The young, the old, the not yet born. Humans of all ages and no ages, caught amongst equally existential spaces. Spaces anthropomorphised in a cross pollination of vision and touch; a bed spread of wrinkled and pastel skin, rocks as angular as shoulder blades and trees with sprawling limbs. Here the immediate and the distant all appear in an ever expanding entropy of photographic life.
In ‘Distance’ we find a new body of work by photographic artist Suzie Howell unfurling itself in both the past and the present. However, it is also the world of photography undoing itself. Wishing to return to a moment in its experiential whole, and in the clutching for shorelines and reaching out to ephemeral bodies, she reveals both her motive, as well as photography itself. Contact sheets, test strips, and light leaks join the plethora of forms in her search for all those horizons, objects, and people once more. To push beyond the limitations of the single image and to translate how a moment truly is. The printing, cutting, and collaging show a maker trying to grasp for lost passages to distant feelings; to rearrange and twist the sterile functions of pure photographic reproduction for that of something far more real.
To truly depict the life of a photographer is to become lost in a labyrinth of self-referenciality. Weeks, months, and years, can be spent living amongst, and even in, your images. Pressing the shutter at any given moment in time is to be consumed by it afterwards. The processed elements - contact sheets, test strips, and work prints often scatter desks or are pinned to studio walls. In all its infinite selves the multiplicity of the photograph emerges. For the photographer, there is in actuality no separation between the shoreline and the studio, the forest and the darkroom, the place where the image was taken and the place where the image comes into being. It’s all life. In casting out for moments gone by, granting her photographs the freedom of flux, and in dissecting and re-assembling the capabilities of the photograph, a new, and more complete reality emerges. Photography here has been pinned and taped down, compressed, and woven into the fabric of her life. Or perhaps it is Howell’s life that has been woven into the fabric of photography?
For the past six years ‘Distance’ has been a constant making, and re-making of the self. It reaches out, and expands its porous boundaries in an intimacy that stretches across time and mediums, the body and the land, the decisive and the indefinite.
The expectant stomach containing life,
And the landscape with its hidden depths.
To touch the rough bark with both hands,
Or the cool water that caresses the surface.
The pink scar that marries together the delicate skin,
A suture across time.
Images coupled by tape,
And the print weighed down by the rock it holds within.
The seeing hand.
Text by Louis Stopforth
A tangled mass of limbs amidst rocks,
Interrupted by a magenta shadow.
An inert body floating upright,
Alongside a strip of light-leaked landscapes.
Flowers incrementally drained of their saturated beauty,
Taped over a rich turquoise and the absolute black of photographic exposure.
The young, the old, the not yet born. Humans of all ages and no ages, caught amongst equally existential spaces. Spaces anthropomorphised in a cross pollination of vision and touch; a bed spread of wrinkled and pastel skin, rocks as angular as shoulder blades and trees with sprawling limbs. Here the immediate and the distant all appear in an ever expanding entropy of photographic life.
In ‘Distance’ we find a new body of work by photographic artist Suzie Howell unfurling itself in both the past and the present. However, it is also the world of photography undoing itself. Wishing to return to a moment in its experiential whole, and in the clutching for shorelines and reaching out to ephemeral bodies, she reveals both her motive, as well as photography itself. Contact sheets, test strips, and light leaks join the plethora of forms in her search for all those horizons, objects, and people once more. To push beyond the limitations of the single image and to translate how a moment truly is. The printing, cutting, and collaging show a maker trying to grasp for lost passages to distant feelings; to rearrange and twist the sterile functions of pure photographic reproduction for that of something far more real.
To truly depict the life of a photographer is to become lost in a labyrinth of self-referenciality. Weeks, months, and years, can be spent living amongst, and even in, your images. Pressing the shutter at any given moment in time is to be consumed by it afterwards. The processed elements - contact sheets, test strips, and work prints often scatter desks or are pinned to studio walls. In all its infinite selves the multiplicity of the photograph emerges. For the photographer, there is in actuality no separation between the shoreline and the studio, the forest and the darkroom, the place where the image was taken and the place where the image comes into being. It’s all life. In casting out for moments gone by, granting her photographs the freedom of flux, and in dissecting and re-assembling the capabilities of the photograph, a new, and more complete reality emerges. Photography here has been pinned and taped down, compressed, and woven into the fabric of her life. Or perhaps it is Howell’s life that has been woven into the fabric of photography?
For the past six years ‘Distance’ has been a constant making, and re-making of the self. It reaches out, and expands its porous boundaries in an intimacy that stretches across time and mediums, the body and the land, the decisive and the indefinite.
The expectant stomach containing life,
And the landscape with its hidden depths.
To touch the rough bark with both hands,
Or the cool water that caresses the surface.
The pink scar that marries together the delicate skin,
A suture across time.
Images coupled by tape,
And the print weighed down by the rock it holds within.
The seeing hand.