Losing Ground

This research project Losing Ground creates a series of psychological landscapes, which operate as metaphors for a climate of anxiety. The work is presented as an artist’s book containing a poetic after word by writer Mary Ann Hushlak with whom she has collaborated on the project.

Inspired by the writings of TS Eliot, Ulrich Baer, Julia Kristeva and Michael Ignatieff, the work is intended as a comment on a contemporary sense of dislocation, apprehension and loss, inherited from the historical traumas of the 20th C.

The photographs can be construed as 'symptoms of disturbance' (Barthes, Camera Lucida).

The project investigates details within sites of neglect, marginal zones, overlooked areas, which function as metaphors for a state of inner unrest. These are places with which man has interfered and then departed.

Throughout the series, there is a dialectic between erosive factors and the relentless power of nature, an exchange of energy, where plants engulf and suffocate objects, structures, and each other.

Each image represents a jolt, a small seizure, a glimpse into sudden turmoil, as if experiencing ‘spasms from the dark earth’ (Ted Hughes: 'The Daffodils', Birthday Letters).

The language of clouded focus is employed to heighten these sensations. The piece explores through the metaphor of an untended and tangled landscape an experiential descent into what Eliot calls the world of 'perpetual solitude'.