Flowers has joined with photography training and development agency Rhubarb-Rhubarb and the Arts Council West Midlands to realise the second year of the ‘Hungry’ Bursary Awards Scheme. The Bursary is open to both established and emergent photographers and is committed to the aim of nurturing creativity, innovation and excellence in the field of photography. Following an online submission process, a selection of work was chosen by a panel of judges comprised of prominent individuals from the art world, management services, imaging, creative and business industries: Harry Hardie of Host Gallery; David Birkitt of DMB Media; Chris Littlewood of Flowers; Mark Foxwell of Genesis Imaging; and Lara Ratnaraja of Business Link. The exhibition brings together work from the seven winning series.
Juila Curtin / Resettlement
Resettlement focuses on the vernacular architecture, in particular the transient, makeshift structures inhabited by forced migrants, which emerged during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Sampling photographs from the Farm Security Administration catalogue – a vast collection of images that document history, as well as forming constitutive parts of the history of photography – I deconstructed and subsequently reconstructed these buildings to form a three-dimensional model of the settlements as they are depicted in the archived images. Through this process I attempt to open up a contemporary space for the interpretation of the photographs.
Kelly Hill / In the cities
My project is a game of chance. I arrive at an unfamiliar home at dusk and discuss the worlds the children would like to create. They select their own props and I withdraw to observe them from the outside. I invite them to participate in a game but they create the images in the poses and gestures they make. I am interested in chance encounters, the merging of fact and fiction and discovery of the magical in the mundane.
Tom Lovelace / Unit 2
Unit 2 is a series of images depicting industrial forms that have been created solely for the camera. These objects are based upon imagined, anonymous and functionally ‘false’ structures that explore the point at which the mundane teeters upon the fantastical. The project is conceptualised around the creation of a new machine typology: ‘function equals form’ is reversed so that ‘form equals function’.
Marcia Michael / The Study of Kin
My work is concerned with how the invention of photography has facilitated and promoted human classification through the recording, representation, collection and display of difference. It explores the ways in which both institutional and private photographic archives – including the family album – generate and perpetuate systems of social control.
Kate Owens / 28 Day Flower Diary
28 Day Flower Diary explores traditionally ‘feminine’ occupations such as floristry, which were once considered suitable activities for taming idle hands and minds. Interspersing bouquets of my own digital making with diary extracts, I attempt to recast both the activity of flower arrangement and the notions of order and control with which it is associated. The images reveal and revel in something unspoken and subversively uncontainable.
David Plummer / Pain Has an Element of Blank
Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.
It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.
(Emily Dickinson)
In 2003 David Pembroke was diagnosed with Progressive Supranuclear Palsy, a neurodegenerative brain disease that has no known cause, treatment or cure. David Plummer traces the progression of the disease in a series of portraits of Pembroke, leaving it to his sitter to decide the background colour of each successive photograph as a means of tracing changes to his emotional state.
Zhao Renhui / The Institute of Critical Zoologists
This series of images titled The Blind illustrates a system of disguise used by contemporary nature photographers and zoologists being tested in various environments. The Blind, a form of a camouflage cloak, works on the principle that an object vanishes from sight if light rays that strike it are not reflected as usual, but forced to flow around it as though it were not there.
For further information, please contact Chris Littlewood at Flowers on 020 7920 7777 or email chris@flowersgalleries.com
