‘
Night Motorways', a series of photographs by
Fergus Heron, is featured in the current Exhibition, 'Night: A Time Between' at the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol.
The exhibition presents work of artists from the seventeenth to the twenty first century that demonstrate a persistent pre-occupation with night, but with also a relationship to both urban and rural landscape. Curator and participating artist Janette Kerr writes, "The night show brings together artists whose work explores human association with nocturnal worlds. Some address night as an aesthetic intangible, some as an expression of naturalism, Romanticism and the sublime, while others draw upon the rich cultural legacy of narratives, metaphors and allegories associated with the nocturnal imagination."
Of his contribution to the exhibition, Fergus Heron writes in an artist statement: "Night Motorways is a series of photographs that developed out of simultaneous interests in representing a particular confluence of urban and rural space and a desire to develop a means of picture making that perhaps enables some new questions to be asked about the genre of landscape photography.
Our experience of landscape is something that is as much mentally constructed as it is physical. Both of these are deeply affected by night. Banal spaces connected to, but not immediately a part of urban settlements become physically and psychologically altered. By day, they are spaces to which we would not cast our gaze, by night they are transformed into those that might absorb it.
The motorway is a transitory space that is at one somewhere and nowhere. At night it comes into being visually through its own illumination. It renders its surrounding landscape visible only by degrees.
Photography is essentially, at least technically in its analogue manifestations, dependent as much on darkness as it is on light. It can also be an art about representation and absence. Both the visible and the invisible are features of photography.
At night the act of photographing and its relation to time changes. It is an activity both slow and fast - multiple short exposures, made with a view camera at moments the motorway is absent of vehicles, combine to produce an extended exposure. In turn, only an impression of the space is yielding to the camera, returning to an illusion of the momentary. Activities of transportation become implicit.
Like photography, the motorway is a product of industrialisation, made to fulfil demands of convenience and speed. When viewed at night, in the photograph, the motorway emphasises perspective, repetition, contrasting darkness and light. It appears as both a modern and outmoded space, familiar and at the same time, strange."
Other Participating Artists are Darren Almond, Tabatha Andrews, Henry Bond, Ergin Cavusoglu, Konstantin Chmutin, Susan Derges, Dan Holdsworth, Reece Jones, Jannette Kerr, Eileen Lawrence, Chris Lewis-Smith, Danny Markey, Hughie O'Donoghue, Robert Perry, Sophy Rickett, Kim Seung Yeon, Anthony Shapland, Alice Stepanek and Steven Maslin.
The exhibition runs from March 22nd until May 11th 2008. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition is published, featuring essays by Steve Poole, Principal Lecturer in History at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and Lily Markiewicz, an Artist and Writer working with Photography and Video. Further information on the exhibition is available at www.rwa.org.uk.
