So what are these sketches for? Will I ever make them come alive? Might they actually walk “upon England’s mountains green”? That I can’t tell you yet: at this stage they are a form of thinking out aloud; of trying to keep things moving. A way of balancing all the background research that I’m doing at the moment, which can lead to inertia: as Vron Ware puts it in her mind-bloggingly well researched book ‘Return of a Native’, “...I am constantly fighting against the pull of historical detail that draws you back to the pathless vaults without revealing anything helpful about the human predicament today. Sometimes it seems that this is all that England is: a bottomless pit of heritage possibilities. Even peeping over the edge can make yoiu feel queasy, whether with excitement, fascination or nausea. It’s not necessaritly reassuring to the nerves at all.”
At base, this investigation is above reconnnecting with the land, and in my case that is the part of the country I grew up in, the chalklands of England. So […]
It’s a wonderful adventure when the book you are currently reading suggests the next, and the next, and the next, and before you know it you are reading about stuff […]
Some things just stick in my mind so strongly (perhaps because they reflect its internal architecture?) that I find myself returning to them repeatedly as a possible starting point for […]
Each day this week I’ll show three of the portraits I’ve just completed, now on show as ‘Photographing Resistance’ at the Forum, University of Exeter. Each tableau consists of a […]
Opening on the 15th of this month, at University of Exeter’s Forum, my first commission to create portraits, this time of researchers in the Anitmicrobial Resistance (AMR) Network. Each portrait […]
The New Forest Imaginarium is next up: opening at the end of the month in Sway, Hampshire, right in the heart of the Forest. I’m now working on the LIDAR […]
Simon Ryder 