A brand new exhibition at Huxley-Parlour be the primary public presentation of Jamie Hawkesworth’s thirteen-year challenge documenting the panorama, structure and inhabitants of his residence nation. A celebration of individuals and place, The British Isles is imbued with Hawkesworth’s beneficiant and dignifying eye.
The exhibition, and Hawkesworth’s wider challenge, offers an alternate historical past of Britain from 2007 to 2020. This eventful interval – punctuated by elections, referendums, battle, and a pandemic – is reframed by means of the language of the on a regular basis. We see college youngsters, desolate seashores and suburban sheds, every handled with the identical sense of curiosity and generosity, prompting a mirrored image upon what up to date Britain is and must be.
The works within the exhibition are uniformly titled – all merely known as ‘The British Isles’ – in order to not reveal when or the place every picture was made. For Hawkesworth, the main points of place and time are incidental to the picture; eradicating them works to reconstruct his personal expertise of creating this physique of labor, because the sequence grew in non-linear and circumstantial methods. Stunning compositions and golden hues generate an otherworldliness, owing partially to the artist’s course of; preferring the slower, extra tactile strategy of analogue pictures, Hawkesworth shoots completely on movie and meticulously develops his personal prints. Attuned to the normality of on a regular basis life, Hawkesworth reframes the acquainted as a dreamworld, recasting his topics as its inhabitants in a radically democratising approach.
