Being Ox Close Wood (Summer)

In Being Ox Close Wood I have sought out a place which offers me space for deep reflection on how we relate to the world around us. Who am I? What am I? How am I to live? Issues for which our dizzying contemporary ways of living leave little time and space.

My focus is on the flow of textures and forms, structures and connections, the light and dark, the near and the far. Here, when I stand and stare, a two way conversation with the world around me begins to emerge. My photography seeks to re-present that conversation with its transient shifting of hope and questioning, and as much in the imagination as in the physically real.

Ox Close dates back to mediaeval times. Over centuries it has been crafted as a hybrid of human management and nature – and so provided both material and spiritual succour for many generations. However in today's world, the wood seems just an insignificance in the background to everyday living. Being Ox Close Wood is a personal exploration of the re-positioning of the wood as a source of earthly spirituality. A conversation with the living presence that is the wood.

The work owes much to the inspiration of Ray Metzker, an American photographer trained in the 1940's under Harry Callahan. Through his lifetime, Metzker developed a style of landscape photography where he used his understanding and control of depth of field to explore, in material and metaphoric form, the chaos and complexity of the world in which we live.

Installation Shots : MA Graduation Exhibition. To access click here