My latest exhibition, ‘Art Trek’, at St Annes Chapel in Barnstaple (with Monika Grand) is made up of two brand new pictures from this year (2016), three pictures from a few years ago which have not made it to the printing stage before, one image re-made from the original frames, another three made for the Sock Gallery in Loughborough last October and not shown before in Devon; plus some additional oldies and goldies.
The brand new 2016 images are from Bossiney, or Benoath Cove, in North Cornwall. It’s a place I’ve known for a few years but have really grown to love this year. The beach there is only accessible on a really low tide and even a spring low tide only gave me a couple of hours to explore the amazing caves.
The two caves at high tide are from Combe Martin, accessed via my kayak just as the tide had turned to go back out. The original photographs were shot in 2014 but my computer memory wasn’t large enough at the time to enable the full realisation of the works. This year I upgraded to 64Gb of RAM and so I have at last been able to blend the crashing waves successfully.
Another picture which proved impossible at the time of taking was the Cave at Menachurch Point, which was made up from such a huge number of images that I again had to abandon it until this year. This picture has been described as ‘tomb-like’ by one of the exhibition visitors. It’s right-hand cave wall, vertical, flat and ridged, is a great example of the original sea-bed of this contorted sandstone strata.
Mousehole Cave, Cornwall – original image
The Mouse Hole, has been totally re-made for this exhibition. Although it is an extreemly popular image I have often been troubled by the saturation and unworldliness of my original finished piece shown small here. This remake, literally taking the original RAW files and re-processing them in Photoshop and Lightroom, them re-stitching has given me something far closer to the original memory of the cave at Mousehole.
The last two weekends has seen me demonstrating my process for making camera-less images, sun prints, chemical prints, daylight print, leaf works or whatever you?d like to think of them as. I did this for Art Trek, at Broomhill Sculpture Park near Barnstaple, North Devon?s open studios event at the end of June.
There was a lot of interest with over 60 people visiting on the last Sunday alone. I was making work throughout Art Trek, the image above being the best constructed image made over the first weekend. I used leaves and more from ?throw-a-way? plants and trees rather than some of the more cultivated ones planted specially in the gardens. This particular image was made using stinging nettles and dock leaves, traditionally used as an anaesthetic for the sting; these plants can always be found together and are like yin and yang, sting and anaesthetic, positive and negative complementing the traditional photographic process I was using.
Over the last weekend I made a few single 5×7 inch unique prints from columbine, elder, ash and foxglove (there may have been other leaves etc and included 2x slugs that got in on the act by accident). These I sold at ?10 each once they were archivally fixed, washed and dried then mounted on foam board. I still have some of these left for sale for ?10 with free p&p through Europe, it?ll cost a fraction more for the States. If you?d like one please visit my main website: http://www.davegreenphoto.co.uk/pages/forest.htm
This is an example of a 5×7 inch unique print made during Art Trek 2009