England / Reflection
A two-person exhibition from LCC MA Photography students Mandy Williams and Natalie Robinson
Offshoot Gallery, 162 High Road, London N2 9AS
From Disrupted Landscapes
Updated 30 January 2021
Our exhibition was installed at Offshoot Gallery, but because of government restrictions and national lockdown we couldn't open as planned.
On Thursday 14 January - the date of the original pv - a small preview of installation work was published on Offshoot Gallery’s website.
On Thursday 21 January Offshoot Gallery published a more in-depth look at England / Reflection with thoughts from Natalie and myself.
On Thursday 28 January Offshoot published our conversation with writer/curator Charlotte Russell about our exhibition and art practice.
You can view some of my work England here.
England / Reflection was a two-person photography and mixed media exhibition by University of Arts London LCC MA Photography students Mandy Williams and Natalie Robinson. Both artists are interested in how politics and power have shaped the landscape and use the river and sea as channels for reflecting on contemporary culture.
England
Williams’ series of black and white photographs of English landscapes show a progression from rupture to deformation. In some images these Disrupted Landscapes are merged with alien geographies accessed from NASA that resemble elements of our own landscape while unable to support human life. As England becomes increasingly hostile to those it perceives as outsiders, Williams uses these geographies to represent a landscape that has become alienated and unstable, and which causes harm. The environments bleed into one another, sometimes barely perceptibly, at other times jarringly. Land is reversed and inverted; black borders divide and enclose these rigid, disarticulated landscapes.
The photographs are paired with a short video, Inward Island, that tells the story of an island through its landscape. It uses increasing degrees of colourisation to produce a gradual and hypnotic visual transformation that contrasts with the increasingly unnerving soundtrack. Through the video’s use of metaphor, the beauty of the landscape is first revealed, and then reversed.
Reflection: what lies beneath – new maps
From Reflection: what lies beneath - new maps
Robinson’s work explores a body of work inspired by a moment of light. The light cast by the sun reflecting onto the ground from the glass tower in Angel Court [EC2] brings to life the lost river of the City of London - the Walbrook - which once ran below. The river -until a thousand years ago, the lifeblood of the City- was enclosed, covered and lost as a result of the human enterprise which created the dense financial powerhouse that we know today.
In addition to sharing that moment of light, the images shown -drawn from the documentation of the process of making the body of work- remember working with textiles to recall the fluidity of the river and then map the stages in the development of a model to create a place shaped for reflection on the exploitations from which the City has grown.
Biographies
Mandy Williams works with photography, video and sound to disrupt and expand traditional representations of landscape. She is concerned with the psychology of place and approaches contemporary issues in a reflective way, experimenting with media and metaphor to create new narratives.
Natalie Robinson uses photography to observe that ‘things are not always as they seem’ both in a landscape and urban context. With a background in architecture she takes a sculptural and place-making approach to the way her images are shown with the intention of engaging the viewer with her experience.
Contact information
Mandy Williams info@mandywilliams.com / https://mandywilliams.com
Natalie Robinson pictalie@icloud.com / www.pictalie.com
Offshoot Gallery info@offshootgallery.com
If you have any questions about the work or would like to see more images, please get in touch.