Edgelands – Paul Hart

Press release about the new exhibition of work by Paul Hart at the Fen Ditton Gallery.

Paul Hart, Macmillan Way, 2018. RECLAIMED

‘Few artist photographers have turned their critical lens on the Lincolnshire Fens: one of the most productive yet haunting agricultural landscapes in the UK. A land that is, in art historian Isabel Bonnet’s words, “disfigured by (the) brazen productivism” of modern life. Yet, for the past decade, the Fens have become for Paul Hart, the central focus of his art resulting in three major photo essays/books, published with Dewi Lewis, Farmed, Drained and now Reclaimed and a growing sequence of compelling black and white images that have won him major awards including the inaugural Wolf Suschitsky prize in 2018.’

‘Fen Ditton Gallery and independent curator Amanda Game have worked closely with the artist to select key images from this journey to print and present in this new exhibition Edgelands. Each of the selected black and white images – carefully composed with medium and large format film cameras, hand-printed by Hart on fibre-based silver gelatin paper – reveals the artist’s characteristic ability to focus attention on an overlooked everyday beauty of this intensively farmed land. But his observations are also acute in other ways, exposing something of the unstable relationship between land and man in this ever-shifting, reclaimed waterland.’

‘Too often the model of landscape photography has been to manufacture rural idylls or Romantic dramas. The precision of Hart’s work has created a new and more critical potential for photography of land.’

The opening times are: Friday 18th – Sunday 20th September, 11am – 5pm; Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th September, 11am – 5pm. Other times are available by appointment. Contact here to book

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