A Land Within
Rhiannon Adam, Eric Hosking, Sara Knelman, Alison Lloyd, Molly Maltman, Kathryn Martin, Véronique Rolland
As part of Photo Fringe 2024, this group exhibition curated by Jane & Jeremy, will bring together the work of artists who explore mankind’s physical, emotional, and cultural connection to the land. The exhibition seeks to encourage people to rediscover and reconnect with the natural world and with themselves, particularly in a time when digital connections and virtual spaces are becoming increasingly prevalent.
Ossa
Kathryn Martin
At the top of Itford Hill lies a forgotten Bronze Age settlement. This chalk hill, which artist Kathryn Martin views from her home and studio on the South Downs, is the inspiration behind her latest series, Ossa. In 2022, Martin discovered the settlement’s history, how it was excavated from 1949 to 1953 by archaeologists Burstow, Holden, and Holleyman. For five seasons a team of volunteers uncovered artefacts and remains that pieced together stories lost in the chalk for 3,000 years. Martin’s work focuses on the layers of life that have existed and continue to thrive on and around Itford Hill, deepening her connection to the chalk landscape and exploring the intricate web between archaeology, wildlife, habitats, history and folklore.
The title Ossa, from the Latin word for bones, stone, or heart, also refers to one’s soul or the bones of a discourse. The pristine white chalk of Itford Hill, made up of coccoliths; the skeletal remains of tiny sea creatures, represents another life layer in the landscape, which are the foundations of Martin’s subject. The exhibition also features a wall of wildflowers from Martin’s previous project, 'Come, See Real Flowers of This Painful World' (2020). These intricate and delicate botanical studies, featuring some of the wildflowers that existed during the Bronze Age and that still thrive in this Downland landscape today, demonstrate the enduring resilience of nature but at the same time reflect its fragility and vulnerability.
Website
54°0′13.176″N 2°32′52.278″W
Véronique Rolland
Véronique Rolland is an artist whose work centres on our relationship with Nature and female identity. By immersing herself and her sitters in the landscape, Rolland quietly explores the transience of the human condition and the natural world, questioning the notions of ecology and femininity, transformation and constancy.
In this exhibition, marking the 10th anniversary of the Scottish Independence referendum,
Rolland is showing ‘54°0′13.176″N 2°32′52.278″W’ a project documenting her quest in 2014 for the elusive geographical Heart of Britain. The urge to bear witness to this place lead her to create an archive of it made up of records in a variety of media, including photographs, videos, samples and sound recordings exploring the notion of the quasi scientific. Through this journey she reflects on the exactitude of place and our relationship to identity within notions of the contemporary Sublime.
Alongside, her book-installation ‘Memories of an Unknown Island’ explores the power of the imagination to construct a fantasy world, where fact and fiction intertwine. The project is about a place that does not exist. A utopia created from photographs of a multitude of places Rolland has visited that visually and emotionally blend into one and another to transform into an ideal, fictional location. This project is about an immersion in the natural world and the search of a perfect place that only exists in our imagination.
Website
Rhi-Entry
Rhiannon Adam
Throughout history, 117 billion humans have gazed at the same moon, yet, only 24 people, all American men, have seen its surface up close.*
During the pandemic, Irish photographic artist Rhiannon Adam discovered an application for the ultimate art residency: dearMoon. In 2018, Japanese billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, a noted art collector, announced a global search for eight artists to join him on a week-long lunar circumnavigation aboard SpaceX’s Starship, the first civilian mission to deep space.
DearMoon’s flight trajectory would mirror that of the world’s first manned moon mission, Apollo 8 (1968). Bill Anders, Apollo 8 astronaut and “Earthrise” photographer, famously suggested that NASA “should have sent poets” to convey the sense of wonder he experienced. DearMoon sought to fulfill this vision, inviting creative civilians to reflect on humanity from space, creating work to inspire world peace.
In 2021, Adam was selected as the only female crew member from a million applicants. Traditionally, human spaceflight has been the preserve of mankind’s most (apparently) flawless specimens, or the astronomically wealthy. Despite all odds, dearMoon presented Adam with the chance to achieve the seemingly impossible – to become the first out queer woman to venture beyond the Kármán line.
For three years, Adam immersed herself in the space industry; the mission becoming her sole purpose. She grappled with her own mortality and the potential sacrifices involved, and lived with the weight of growing responsibility as she carried the hopes and aspirations of the disenfranchised dreamers who came before her, and all those who would come after. In June 2024, Maezawa abruptly canceled the mission citing timeline uncertainties, leaving the crew to pick up the fragments of their own lives.
The work presented here blurs fact and fiction through moving images, photographs, and ephemera, reflecting on the artist’s mental recalibration as she processes an almost unrelatable and incommunicable loss, and attempts to re enter her former life after a seismic psychological shift in perspective. It is often cited that reentry is the most dangerous part of spaceflight, and for Adam, this rings true, despite never having left our planet.
This presentation represents a shrine to lost dreams and a proposal for an alternative future.
Never has there been a more urgent need for alternative voices within the space industry, and we invite you to participate in this new frontier by registering your own interest in future interplanetary travel.
Website
144 × 30 SECONDS (2016 – 2022)
Alison Lloyd
Talking about the video piece '144 x 30 seconds' Alison Lloyd stated it "is composed from one hundred and forty-four, 30-second video-clips shot on my iPhone between 2016-2022. Some record moments of enforced isolation during lockdown, when I was unable to get up to places like this (speaking of Barbrook Reservoir, Big Moor, Derbyshire, U.K), while others capture snippets of music, or sniffing, or dialogue. While they’re ordered chronologically, they mark different ebbs and flows over this period of time - a bit like a fragmented journal."
(Alison Lloyd in conversation with Hugh Nicholson, 2022, https://www.tgal.co/)
The composition gives an insightful look at the way Lloyd walked and observed the natural world she encountered - whether she was in the city with a sountrack of car alarms & trafffic or walking in the moors with the sounds of birds & the wind, these 30 second clips demonstrate pauses and engagement with nature.
Alison Lloyds’ practice involved walking alone, for considerable distances, keeping off the paths, striding and ‘contouring’ through moorland and mountainous areas. She composed photographs of herself with the paraphernalia of hill walking; map, compass, rucksack and vacuum flask. These tools of walking were often captured around the margins of her photographs. Lloyd emphasised this solitary pursuit by using a cable release or timer to take the photographs of herself walking, or as she liked to name it, contouring. (Extract from Lloyd's biography by the Temporal School of Experimental Geography)
“I’m keen to contest these patriarchal ways of being in the landscape – both through the photographs that I make, and the ways I make them. During my PhD, I developed the idea of ‘contouring’, which I appropriated from navigation or mapping. ‘Contouring’ reflects a desire to resist a Munro-bagging mentality, to follow the contours in the land, to enact a more sympathetic relation to landscape.
…..I think I am much more introspective in my own approach. There is a younger generation of women artists that have been vital for my research, who approach walking from a quieter, more convivial perspective. In particular, the collective project WalkWalkWalk by Gail Burton, Serena Korda and Clare Qualmann, the Walking Women Symposium organised by Clare Qualmann and Amy Sharrocks, and the practices of Dee Heddon and Cathy Turner among others.”
(Alison Lloyd in conversation with Hugh Nicholson, 2022, https://www.tgal.co/)
The film is shown in conjunction with an exhibition of Lloyd's work at John Marchant Gallery, Brighton.
Cosmic Certainties
Molly Maltman
Molly Maltmans poem and film Cosmic Certainties is a reflection upon consciousness and existence, and the ultimate unknowingness of our lives as beings upon the Earth. We began in the stars, and we will return to the stars.
Maltman is an artist, curator and publisher based in London. Her practice explores archiving, memory and the body as a living archive, taking shape through book-making, photography, poetry and DJing. She is the founder of the publishing and curatorial house 'madly awake', under which she has published the poetry anthology Tender Stains and the non-seasonal journal Collecting Memory – a publication exploring the relationship between object and memory through the archives of six contributing practitioners/artists.
Lady Readers
Sara Knelman
Lady Readers, a collection of photographs of women reading, has been accumulated slowly by Sara Knelman over the last decade. The found photographs in it are drawn mainly from flea markets and websites like eBay, places of refuge for the contents of abandoned albums and defunct press archives. To date, it includes more than 300 photographs, made from every era of the history of photography, from early stereoscopes, ambrotypes and cartes postales, to modernist graphic magazines, anonymous snapshots, Polaroids, and press prints. The vast majority of them are from the middle of the twentieth century, when the volume of commercially produced photographs—including personal records of life and formally produced press prints—was expanding exponentially.
Collecting them is a way of bringing an attentiveness to this narrow photographic theme, and in turn to the symbolic power it might hold. What might these images convey about women as readers (or as writers)—as imaginers of the world? (Extract from an essay by Sara Knelman).
Placed in the context of this exhibition the images reflect on women as readers, artists, poets, investigators and explorers.
Website
Len & Star
Eric Hosking
The photographs were taken by wildlife photographer Eric Hosking in the 1950's of Len Howard, a writer who lived in Ditchling, East Sussex.
In the late 1930s, Len Howard packed up her life in London, bought a plot of land and built herself a little house there. This was to be Bird Cottage, a place where the doors were open to the birds of the garden – Great Tits, Blue Tits, Robins, Blackbirds, Willow Warblers and many others. Len lived the rest of her life alongside her bird neighbours, with some sleeping in her bedroom and many flitting in and out all day long.
Hosking's photographs show the story of Len and in particular a bird that Len called Star. With patience, consistency and sensitivity, Len succeeds in teaching the bird to count using taps. In opening her home to wild birds, Len gains their trust enough to make astonishing discoveries about their capabilities.
Website
Railway Approach
Newhaven
BN9 0ER
Map
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1–14 November
Tuesday 11:00–17:00
Wednesday 11:00–17:00
Thursday 11:00–17:00
Friday 11:00–17:00
Saturday 11:00–17:00
Sunday 11:00–17:00