Exhibition / 28 Oct – 15 Dec 2017

Land/Sea

Mike Perry

Land/Sea (Tir/Môr) is a major new solo exhibition by Wales-based artist Mike Perry, with an accompanying new Ffotogallery publication. Perry’s work engages with significant and pressing environmental issues, in particular the tension between human activity and interventions in the natural environment, and the fragility of the planet’s ecosystems.

In his continuing series Wet Deserts, Perry is looking at the negative impact of monocultural land use and over-intensive cultivation, and the process of ‘re-wilding’ by which nature reclaims its biodiversity. Responding to George Monbiot’s description of the rural landscape as a ‘shadowland, a dim flattened relic of what there once was’, Perry believes that years of an ‘agribusiness dominated dogma’ combined with unsustainable agricultural policy need to be challenged by new thinking around what is good for the human spirit, biodiversity and the planet.

Alongside Wet Deserts, Land/Sea includes selected works from his Môr Plastigseries, in which he collects and forensically photographs plastic objects such as bottles, shoes and packaging washed up on the beaches of West Wales, inviting us to consider the environment impact of consumerism and the erosive power of nature.

At the Venice Biennale 2015, as part of the Azerbaijan pavilion Vita Vitale, Perry installed a cabinet of plastiglomerates, stones comprising intermingled melted plastic, sand, shells and other beach sediment he had collected. The objects appeared seamlessly integrated with our marine ecosystems, inviting us to consider the new materiality of our living realm and its technological capacities. Over the last five years, the artist has built up a large collection of these hybrid synthetic/natural objects and photographed them as single images often arranged in formal grids.

Inspired by 1960s/70s minimalism, Perry’s photography avoids the campaigning rhetoric of straight environmental documentary. Rather it poetically alludes to what we might be leaving for future generations, adding a contemporary narrative to minimalist abstraction. The artist explains:

“My intention is to reduce the objects to their pure formal states separating them for a moment from any meaning beyond their sculptural presence. I present the objects as grids or in line sequence emphasising the infinite choice offered by our consumer culture and to provide an aesthetic framework where colours and forms can work off each other”.

Land/Sea (Tir/Môr) is a Ffotogallery Touring Exhibition, curated by David Drake and Ben Borthwick.

Mike Perry

Mike Perry’s photographs examine the interactions of landscapes, nature and industrial society. Over the last 20 years his practice has focused on Britain’s National Parks and increasingly the immediate surroundings of Pembrokeshire where he lives and works, questioning the romantic mythology of national parks as areas of wilderness and natural beauty. He uses large format photography in order to simultaneously capture the painterly tones and aesthetic qualities of the landscape’s surface as well as detailing the impacts of humanity’s exploitation of nature for commercial gains. Series of smaller photographs show objects found in the landscape at 1:1 scale, capturing the effect of natural processes on the surfaces of industrially produced materials. Discussing the tension between the seductive surfaces and worrying content of his work, he commented that ‘as well as highlighting the overconsumption and pollution they show nature’s ability to shape our world whether we humans are here or not’.

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