Darren Almond is an artist whose invention, imagination and technical
expertise brought him a nomination for the Turner
prize in 2005.
He is about to exhibit photography with a difference - the pictures in his new
exhibition, Moons
of the Iapetus Ocean, that opens on January 18 at White Cube in
Shoreditch, London, were all taken at night.
Darren's astonishing moonlit photography captures eerie night scenes around
Britain. Some look like they could have been taken on a misty day, others
reveal more about the landscape than we notice in the daylight, while some
are simply otherworldly.
We have a gallery of 20 of the wonderful pictures to the left, from a scene
that featured in paintings by John Constable to the beacon of a lighthouse,
the results are never less than beguiling.
Almond’s work often takes him to remote parts of the globe, following
conceptual threads that encompass geography, politics, history and his own
personal biography. This exhibition will include two distinct bodies of
work: Fullmoon photographs that incorporate new images and key earlier
images from around the British Isles and new large-scale photographs taken
in Tibet.
Almond has been making his Fullmoon photographs since 1998, when a chance
encounter led him to develop the idea of night-time photography using the
iridescence of moonlight with an extremely lengthy exposure time. The result
is an ongoing series of landscape photographs that are bathed in an eerie
brightness, seemingly, and rather alarmingly, turning night into day.
In Almond’s images, waterfalls and gushing lakes are transformed into pools of
static steam (Fullmoon@High Force) and a pounding sea is calmed into a
thick, solid fog (Fullmoon@Neban Point). In others, such as Fullmoon@Wester
Ross, Almond presents us with the mossy, ferny landscapes of bygone English
folklore. Always unpopulated, his landscapes suggest the possibility of
another existence, a reality without the seething masses of humanity, which
can only appear in the dead of night.
In this exhibition, Almond intentionally points to his interest in historical
geography – to the sea that existed between England and Scotland between
400-600 million years ago. Examining this landscape, as well as other
fringes such as the remote coasts of Ireland and southern England, he
reminds us of the temporality of current geography as well as our own
individual isolation and insignificance within the larger topographical
scheme of things.
In the upstairs gallery at White Cube, Almond will present three large-scale
photographs from his new series entitled ‘Infinite Betweens’. These works
were taken in Tibet, where traditional prayer flags are hung in trails
across the mountainous ridges as a way to make offerings of thanks and
prayers. Piles upon piles of these flags accumulate and become scattered
over one of the highest and most exposed landscapes on earth. Captured in
Almond’s photographs they form gorgeous, multicoloured abstract
compositions. As with the Fullmoon photographs, Almond shot the ‘Infinite
Betweens’ using moonlight capturing movement in the image.
Darren Almond has exhibited internationally. Recent solo exhibitions include
Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw (2007), SITE Santa Fe (2007), Museum Folkwang,
Essen (2006); K21, Düsseldorf (2005), Lentos Museum of Modern Art (2005),
Herzliya Museum of Art (2003), Tate Britain, London (2001), Kunsthalle
Zürich (2001), De Appel Centre, Amsterdam (2001) and the Renaissance
Society, Chicago (1999).
Darren Almond's White Cube
exhibition, Moons
of the Iapetus Ocean, runs from January 18.
A fully illustrated book, entitled Moons of the Iapetus Ocean, with
an essay by Brian Dillon, will be published to accompany the exhibition.
Another Darren Almond exhibition, Fire under Snow, takes place at
the Parasol Unit in Islington
from January 18 - March 30.
