Uncertain Terrain
by Andrea Liggins
Uncertain
Terrain brings together for the first time, several bodies of photographic
work by Andrea Liggins, spanning a period of over six years. Throughout this
time a different way of imaging the landscape has been sought, which is an
alternative to the tradition of photographing established beauty spots and
views.
The landscape photographs in this exhibition do not seek the purity of the
wilderness or the authority of the view, but concentrate on the familiar,
the home ground and the private. They are intimate, personal landscapes, places
to look out from and not at.
Instead of the structure of the picturesque, promoted in the eighteenth century
by the Reverend William Gilpin as the ideal, the madness of the baroque aesthetic
is the quest, with its explosive energy, disrupted composition and obscurity.
Many of the photographs have been shown in group exhibitions nationally, some
as far afield as New York, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.
The research that was undertaken alongside the photography, which informed
the work, has examined the environmental consequences of traditional landscape
photography. The view from the hill, for example, reduces the environment
to form and pattern, and often misses the essential detail, the disappearance
of our hedgerow wildlife and even the hedgerows themselves.
The cameras used, such as a mobile phone camera and a cheap plastic camera
made in the 1950s, help to provide a democratic representation of the land,
giving the peat bog and the hedgerow the same status as the majestic view
from the summit of Snowdon.
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