EDGELANDS - a series of 34 colour photographic print-works.
Working over a 12-month period in Nottinghamshire, England, photographer/film-makers Nick Dunmur and Paul Harrison use high-resolution digital and traditional pinhole photography to explore areas at the interface between natural and synthetic landscape. The Edgelands are a kind of wasteland considered unusable, overlooked, undefined and unattractive. These are neglected, often forgotten areas.
Edgelands starts to explore what landscape means to us. Land is more than physical landscape and environment. It is unique and has symbolic importance. It has value – perhaps a meaning as significant as its physical embodiment. British landscape and its predominantly manufactured presence affect us physically and emotionally and stimulate us intellectually, even spiritually. Edgelands are landscapes that are connected to human activity both historical and contemporary; tracts of land at the crossing point of the rural and urban.
Over time people and landscape leave distinct and permanent impressions on each other. Edgelands explores interfaces where these effects have both human and environmental resonance. The edge where the natural undisturbed meets developed/urban is an odd, neglected area; a type of buffer zone – land on the edge of both and on the periphery of much.
Our sense of something, what we experience, is our reality. How we see and what we feel about a place is how we understand it. Edgelands examines how the environment, our external world, affects us and our understanding of ourselves. The underlying theme of the work comes from its engagement with basic human issues of our place in the landscape – how and where we belong.
Exhibited at:
Wallner Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, University Park, Nottingham
July 16 to September 5 2010
[colour archival inkjet print 1000mm x 1000mm ea]
© Paul Harrison/Nick Dunmur/LIMN 2010
