Here is some more work from this year’s graduates from Goldsmiths University, London. Exhibiting work both collectively and individually, Hannah Davis and Kate Duncan presented beautifully emotive photographs and videos compiled over two trips to North Wales and Anglesey.
As well as her work with Hannah, for the final degree show, Kate Duncan built a floor-to-ceiling installation. Like a huge tree-trunk cage, it encased a rotating projection of a quiet forest moving from dusk til dawn, giving the whole room the effect of dappled woodland sunlight and drifting shadows. Hannah’s solo work consisted of sensitively lit photos shown by an array of projectors and light boxes.
Here are a few examples from the North Wales and Anglesey joint project, ‘Brick, Slate, Sea’. It was displayed in a tactile, lazer-etched, wooden-covered book. They tell us more about the piece and their collaborative process.
The photographs in the book were taken on the first visit made in November 2010, an exploration of three places, lead part by chance and part by a book on wild swimming in Wales. A disintegrating old brickworks and port in Porth Wen, Anglesey; an old slate quarry near Snowdonia and a pine forest that turned into a sandy beach at the end of the world.
The book is a record of two people looking, individually and collaboratively; the photographs belong to one or the other of us, but are presented as a collective account. Through exploration we became interested in an industrial history of each place, picturing the factory worker, the quarry worker and the lighthouse keeper.
Our experience was then shaped by these imagined past actions of industry and man, and through the current state of entropy where nature had started to reclaim the land.
‘Brick, Slate, Sea’ documents our journeys through diaristic snapshots and a more traditional approach to landscape photography.
Kate Duncan and Hannah Davis collaborate in the mediums of Photography, Video and Installation; enjoying the odd adventure to great British coastlines … ’Rock, Forest, Sea’ was born out of a 70s inspired Welsh roadtrip, like our mothers used to go on, the kind of holiday we never appreciated until we grew up.
Hannah does all the driving, and Kate does the music. The project ‘Rock, Forest, Sea’ includes a 36 min split-screen video made in the locations in the book, extending on the idea of the recurring elements in each place.
© Hannah Davis and Kate Duncan, 2011
