║ Peter Ainsworth ║

© Peter Ainsworth,Untitled, from the series Covered, 2009

© Peter Ainsworth,Untitled, from the series Covered, 2009

<”Covered (Chanctonbury Way), 2009 is a body of work that depicts a palm tree in my father’s garden wrapped in material to protect it from frost over the winter months. The project was completed at the start of spring just before the covering became redundant as a protection from the cold weather.  The domestic garden is a controlled and contrived space, one that often has ambiguous status.  Here the natural world is explored but equally is a symbol of man’s continued desire to bend nature to human will. In this project I see the garden as a studio space or stage where I have documented sculptural forms created by my father. Inspired by Paul Nash’s late photographs in which he explored domestic landscapes in reference to  ‘object-personages’ – curious or evocatively shaped forms that seemed to resemble or take on the personality of something else- I seek to highlight the way that space can function as a matrix of unnoticed possibilities.

Thus the interpretation of the object within the photograph is dependent on projection, as the viewer may be unaware of what lies beneath the wrapping. In the photographs the plant becomes a sculptural object, the folds in the material imply jellyfish or mushroom clouds, resemble mouths, noses and eyes: anthropomorphic, faceless and silent forms.(…)”

Statement

More of Peter’s work can be seen here

║ Julieta Sans ║

© Julieta Sans, Mumi – me encantaria que gustes de mi, Dalia Rosetti, from the series Well read, 2008

© Julieta Sans, German – body of a woman, Pablo Neruda, from the series Well read, 2008

“Well Read” is a series of staged portraits of characters from a fictional book chosen by each model, be it a novel, a poem or a children’s story. The idea is not to illustrate the book but to leave the story up to the spectators’ imaginations, giving place to myriad possible interpretations.

These staged portraits invite to reflect on issues of identity and the possibilities of representation of the photographic portrait. These are images of real people in a gently directed but controlled performance: but why have these people chosen these characters and what is the story behind the image? How many facets and traits of a person is it possible to read in a portrait  let alone a staged one?

The project explores the notion that there are as many interpretations of a portrait as there are spectators, as there are of a book by its different readers. In the words of Roland Barthes in The Death of the Author: “there is one place where this multiplicity [of a text] is focused and that place is the reader, not the author.”

As we overlay our own experiences and identities with the narrative, a multiplicity of new stories are thrown into existence, and the same can be said of the ways in which we “read” a photographic portrait: Well Read celebrates fiction and the impossibility of an accurate representation in photography, the difference between the image someone thinks they project and the images we construct of one another.

Statement

More of Julieta’s work here

║ Briony Campbell ║

© Briony Campbell, from the Dad project, 2009

© Briony Campbell, from the Dad project, 2009

“This is the story of an ending without an ending.
This is a work in progress and I hope it always will be.
This is my attempt to say goodbye to my Dad with the help of my camera.

Being a good daughter to my dying dad was tricky.
I struggled to find the balance between dedication to his needs and distraction from my grief.
At first the idea of introducing a camera into this already un-resolvable equation seemed unwise,
but eventually I think it became the solution. “

More of Briony’s work can be seen here