Mark Edwards
Paddock, Ditchingham, 2011, 2011
C- Type colour print
122 x 152 cms
48 1/16 x 59 13/16 ins
10607
Exhibitions
A Green and Pleasant Land: Landscape and the imagination, 1970-now, Towner Art Gallery, Eastbourne, 2017-18 (This print)
Signed in black ink and numbered 1/3 on artist's label affixed to frame verso. In 2011 the Holburne Museum staged an exhibition of six larhe-scale photographs commissioned from Mark Edwards...
Signed in black ink and numbered 1/3 on artist's label affixed to frame verso.
In 2011 the Holburne Museum staged an exhibition of six larhe-scale photographs commissioned from Mark Edwards in response to the landscapes of Gainsborough which were to be shown concurrently.
Made around Bath and in East Anglia, these photographs illustrate Edwards's love of painting:
As Katy Baron explained in the catalogue essay: "Edwards' photographs, made using maps and detailed research, have more in common with Gainsborough's works on paper than his paintings... 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... His working method is rigorous and time-consuming, involving hours spent examining maps of the region and scouting the landscape for a place that has resonance. After a number of visits to a location and research into its history, Edwards will set up his equipment - a cumbersome 8 x 10 plate camera which is placed on top of a high ladder so that the view is elevated. The long exposure needed to capture the detail in these photographs requires a completely windless moment and Mark often makes his work just after dawn....The six works that make up Mark's new series represent a year's worth of research, travel and photography." (Katy Barron, The View from Here: New Landscape Photographs by Mark Edwards, Holburne Museum, 2011)
Writing of the present photography Barron observed:
"Paddock, Ditchingham, 2011 takes the eighteenth-century picturesque conception further. Here, symmetry has given way to a subtle visual harmony where the piebald horse is balanced by a white plastic bucket and further along, a drinking trough. Late afternoon sunlight casts a long glow across the horse's patchy coat, the back of the field and the modern buildings beyond. The lower third of the image is nothing but a tangle of wild grasses, which have an energy and graphic quality akin to an Abstract Expressionist painting. There is nothing for the eye to rest on and no visual hierarchy. The motif of the horse is an obvious visual link to Gainsborough, but his farm animals are never depicted within such mundane settings, and it is the revelation of the drama and beauty in quotidian existence that sets Edwards apart from the painter and his world-view." (Katy Barron, The View from Here: New Landscape Photographs by Mark Edwards, Holburne Museum, 2011)
In 2011 the Holburne Museum staged an exhibition of six larhe-scale photographs commissioned from Mark Edwards in response to the landscapes of Gainsborough which were to be shown concurrently.
Made around Bath and in East Anglia, these photographs illustrate Edwards's love of painting:
As Katy Baron explained in the catalogue essay: "Edwards' photographs, made using maps and detailed research, have more in common with Gainsborough's works on paper than his paintings... 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... His working method is rigorous and time-consuming, involving hours spent examining maps of the region and scouting the landscape for a place that has resonance. After a number of visits to a location and research into its history, Edwards will set up his equipment - a cumbersome 8 x 10 plate camera which is placed on top of a high ladder so that the view is elevated. The long exposure needed to capture the detail in these photographs requires a completely windless moment and Mark often makes his work just after dawn....The six works that make up Mark's new series represent a year's worth of research, travel and photography." (Katy Barron, The View from Here: New Landscape Photographs by Mark Edwards, Holburne Museum, 2011)
Writing of the present photography Barron observed:
"Paddock, Ditchingham, 2011 takes the eighteenth-century picturesque conception further. Here, symmetry has given way to a subtle visual harmony where the piebald horse is balanced by a white plastic bucket and further along, a drinking trough. Late afternoon sunlight casts a long glow across the horse's patchy coat, the back of the field and the modern buildings beyond. The lower third of the image is nothing but a tangle of wild grasses, which have an energy and graphic quality akin to an Abstract Expressionist painting. There is nothing for the eye to rest on and no visual hierarchy. The motif of the horse is an obvious visual link to Gainsborough, but his farm animals are never depicted within such mundane settings, and it is the revelation of the drama and beauty in quotidian existence that sets Edwards apart from the painter and his world-view." (Katy Barron, The View from Here: New Landscape Photographs by Mark Edwards, Holburne Museum, 2011)