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| Hursley Hill, 2011 |
Mark
Edwards creatively approaches the subject of English landscape over time, as
well as how that landscape has altered both in reality and as an ideal.
Edwards, similar to Gainsborough both share the same love of the vernacular
landscape and the desire to be immersed within it. Gainsborough’s love for
landscape photography was obvious throughout his career, in the same way that
Mark Edwards’ love of the genre can be seen through continuous meditation on
the landscape of England today.
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| River Bungay, 2012 |
Edwards’ photographs, made using
maps and detailed research, have more in common with Gainsborough’s works on
paper than his paintings. Edwards has to discover his subject-matter rather than
create it digitally – the contemporary photographer’s equivalent of
Gainsborough’s constructed models. The similarities and differences between two
such very different approaches to the landscape are partly the result of
historical distance but also the fundamental idea of what art should be:
Gainsborough chose to imagine his landscapes using a series of elements which
he returned to throughout his life whilst Edwards’ is concerned with truth to
nature and his emotional response to that reality. Each of Edwards’ landscapes
has a great personal significance, which is intimated but never fully revealed,
and which is part of an intellectual and emotional journey.
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| Poringland 2012 |
Mark Edwards has a specific order for photographing. His
work is very time consuming and precise. First he spends hours examining a map
of the region to find a place that has a significant meaning. After that he
will visit the landscape and do research into the history of the location. He
will set up his 8’’x10’’ plate camera and place it on top of a ladder – this
way the view is elevated. He uses a long exposure for these photographs to
capture the details so he needed a completely windless day, and he usually made
his work just after dawn. Edwards work started off with uniform grey skies to
make his work clinical, forensic and silent. His newer photographs, however,
show a new visual shift. The sky is almost like a painting with blue skies or
cloudy skies.
Gainsborough and Edwards both made use of a similar
composition where the trees frame the distant city and there would be a scrubby
or rocky foreground which leads the viewers eye to a dominant middle ground.
There would usually be a misty landscape in the distance.
Edwards’
photographs of the English countryside are taken through a camera lens which
mediates the space between the photographer’s eye and his subject-matter. Could
Gainsborough’s light-box-like painted transparencies be seen as a kind of
proto-photographic impulse? As both artists deliberately immerse themselves in
nature, their respective artistic processes simultaneously create a remove: a
space within which aesthetic and critical contemplation, and personal
reinterpretation takes place. It is interesting to consider what Gainsborough
might have done if he had access to a camera.
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