The Natural, Rural, and Remote ran from 22 July to 2 September 2023 at Serchia Gallery.
The exhibition was conceived in response to my upbringing in Boscastle, a harbour village in Cornwall, where the coast, fields, and sea are often perceived by visitors as sites of calm, restoration, or inspiration. I am interested in examining this relationship to land, particularly the expectation that time spent in such environments should feel soothing or reparative - alongside the queer experience of navigating space, identity, and belonging within these landscapes.
Photography functions here as a form of sense-making. I work through enacted gestures of connection with the landscape - embracing play by stacking stones or flying kites, documenting sites imagined as natural sanctuaries, and recording time spent at nature-based retreats. These actions become a way to test and question ideas of belonging, care, and recovery.
Alongside the photographs, I present collections of research material and ephemera that informed the image-making process. These sit in relation to my own works as acknowledgements of how such gestures are learned, performed, and embodied within the landscape, and reflect my interest in the sharing of all, where a queer approach to assemblage can be found in the ways materials, memories, and practices come together, overlap, and coexist.
Throughout the exhibition’s duration, this research material shifted, notes, postcards, collected stones, leaves, and seed packets were added or removed. This ongoing reconfiguration reflects my evolving aesthetic research and the ways in which these materials continue to shape and inform the images.
An accompanying exhibition text, leylines, written by Ricardo Reverón Blanco, is available to read here
Research material made in January 2024.
Image above by Will Moss
The Natural, Rural, and Remote ran at the same time as Through the Mouth of the River by Feiyi Wen
