Proposal

Landscape relates originally to the way in which painters would create a ‘landscape’ real or fictional this would be constructed by the artist, this pictorial creation of the land was often an idolised/ romanticised view of nature. One such artist that had this view on nature was John Constable, his landscapes idolise the everyday landscape/working countryside, Paintings such as the famous Hay Wain looked at the working countryside and show a harmonious relationship between man and nature, this painting was created as the landscape was changing, the working countryside was disappearing and the industrial landscape was expanding.
In this modern age the industrial landscape is dominant, the idolised view of it has retreated into national parks and other such havens. Using photography as a medium to base my work in a specific place I look to create work that idolises nature through constructed landscape, with nostalgia for the lost harmony of man and nature.
Creating these images involves masking or blocking parts of the landscape to construct a picture that reduces the presence of man in industrial landscapes. In a similar way to Magritte’s La Condition Humaine series the masking/blocking out parts of the landscape, manipulates it to my own means, however still hinting to what’s behind.
I am most engaged with the idea of my relationship to nature, and how that has manifested itself in a yearning for the idolised view of nature, photographs such as that by Gustave Le Gray are examples of this. It would be possible to seek such places and record them for my own memory, however the landscape of my home has been greatly influential in the development of ideas and thus attempting to create this view in such places has come naturally. The landscape of my home is not an idolised view it is an industrial landscape, power stations, human activity, this is captured in my photographs and has therefore raised issues relating to that of the environment. Although I do not dismiss such aspects of my work they are not directly engaged with because my work is not chiefly created to challenge current environmental issues.
The body of work that will develop out of these ideas will be contain many smaller photographs with a few larger prints the expected outcome at the end of this body of work will be large format prints, A1, A0 or larger, this large scale will be implemented to create a sense of scale within the landscapes. I will utilise both film and digital techniques and also digital manipulation where needed to create desired effects, printing will also be explored alongside different camera types, digital printing and also darkroom development.