PAUL KENNY (Born 1951)
SEAWORKS
The roots of my work lie in repeated visits to remote beaches, annual, almost ritual repeat visits to specific sites. These journeys began in 1974 whilst I was an art student and travelled around the remote North West Scottish coast and islands. I have expanded my horizons and now work with material from other shorelines, notably the North Northumberland coast where I now live and work and the North West coast of County Mayo, Eire.
The work, building on themes developed over thirty five years, tries to find the awe inspiring in that which is easily passed by and contains issues of fragility, beauty and transience in the landscape; marks and scars left by man and the potential threat to the few remaining areas of wilderness. Looking at the micro and thinking about the macro. I aim for each print to be a beautiful irresistible thought-provoking object.
I have for many years made studio works using material gathered from the landscape, stones, shells, and driftwood etc. In common with many people, I have always brought home treasures from the sea; pebbles, shells etc. They act as an aide-memoir, bringing the landscape into your home so a mere glimpse or touch might recall the feelings of being alone on a remote beach.
I (naturally) tended to bring back to the studio particularly beautiful objects to photograph, so in order to challenge myself and my thoughts about the landscape, I began to make works out of increasingly insignificant material collected at random rather than highly selected. In 1999 I made a series of works called ‘A day at the beach’ which were studio works made from (literally) a random handful of beach material collected after a walk on a beach, arranged and photographed in the studio.
Out of this work came the idea to find the most trivial and insignificant thing from which to make beautiful and thought-provoking work. I started to bring sea water back from my trips to remote beaches and it took about four years to fully develop techniques where I can construct a negative made of sea water dried and crystallised in an organised manner on clear acetate or glass plates. I call them ‘Seaworks’.
My work is photographic in outcome. Originally the work was made by traditional techniques, monochrome negatives and silver gelatin prints. Over time the ‘negatives’ were largely replaced by ‘constructions’. These constructions, usually on glass plates, are composed of a variety of collected material, flotsam and jetsam, scraps of sea borne plastic and metal, seaweed, pebbles and seawater. The constructions were placed in an enlarger and used to make exhibition prints. The constructions are ephemeral, extremely fragile and have a limited life. Any editions had to be made at that moment as the very process destroyed the ‘negative’ as handling and the heat of the enlarger lamp altered and degraded it.
The demise of wet process photography in the face of the digital revolution, and the rapid shrinking/disappearance of my favoured materials coincided with a search to introduce colour and scale to my work. The greatest spur came when in 2007 the Forte factory in Hungary closed and production of their printing paper ceased. It took me almost two years to research the possibilities in digital image production in order for me to feel comfortable that I was equally in control of the technology as I was with analogue processes.
My working methods vary greatly but in general the works start with a drawing or some text describing an intention. The glass plate constructions can take weeks to create, there are many, many failures. The balance between success and failure is a knife edge and their production is a battle between my intention and natural forces. I have worked for three weeks on a piece, only to find that a particularly humid day returned all the dried seawater to beads of liquid as it suck moisture from the air.
The constructions are either photographed traditionally and the negative scanned, or more commonly the glass plate is now placed directly on a scanner. Initially I was reducing the scanned image to monochrome and then adding colour as one would by toning a black and white image, sepia for example. But as the work evolved, I discovered the scanner could find natural colour and enhance it. Dried seawater can contain greens and blues, and dried rust/seawater contain yellows, oranges and reds. Seawater from the Ionian sea dries a different colour to that of the North Sea or the Atlantic.
Paul Kenny, Lowick, Northumberland, June 2009
