Shallow Earth
DESCRIPTION
Shallow Earth is a visual accompaniment to the novella, And Then Gone, which takes as its focus the landscape around Hadrian’s Wall in northern England. This photographic booklet explores the novella’s concern with biographies of the recent and deep past, and how the stories of these lives are now ‘flattened between the pages of earth’.
The work itself is dredged from the last twenty years of the artist’s photographic activity, including polaroids, medium format film negatives, digital photography and video. Each of these media are compressed into a ‘shallow’ earthen matrix of greys and blacks. In some instances, the resulting images veer close to abstraction, whereas others reveal submerged shapes, outlines or forms. Still others contain the artist’s own charcoal ‘figures’ — barely recognisable human marks that recall the perilous and transformed relationship between the interred bodily form and its earthly environment.