Phtotography Oxford Festival: Rory Carnegie, Rachael Edgar and David Rhys Jones

About

Exploring three differing methods of photography, Sarah Wiseman Gallery will present artists working in digital media, ceramics and Victorian bichromate photography processes.

Rory Carnegie:
Rory will be showing a selection of large-scale photographs from his 'Port Meadow Dogs' series at Sarah Wiseman Gallery. At the end of last year, Rory Carnegie won gold for Best Portrait Series category at the Association of Photographers Awards. (AOP) The photographs will be available to buy as part of a limited edition print series, either framed or unframed from Sarah Wiseman Gallery.
Working with local owners and walkers, he has completed a series documenting dogs that walk on the Meadow each day. He has photographed the landscape throughout the seasons, composing the images in layers, creating an ethereal, haunting portrait likeness - as a result they are almost painterly in quality, reminiscent of the style of Landseer or Stubbs.
Rory Carnegie is an award-winning photographer based in Oxford. His work has been published in The Observer, LA Times, The Telegraph Magazine, The Sunday Times, GQ, The Independent Magazine, Creative Review and the British Journal of Photography.
Rachael Edgar is best known for her printmaking, creating surreal images based on song-lyrics, poetry and folklore. Fresh from her post-graduate degree, she has created a new series of contemporary work using a very early photographic process, first used by the nineteenth century pioneers in photography.
Gum Bichromate photography works by the artist coating a surface (such as paper) or in Rachael's case, glass, in a light-sensitive emulsion. The print is made by applying a transparency (a photo-negative, for example) to the coated surface and exposing it to a UV light-source. The resulting print is manipulated by hand to achieve varied results, combining technical know-how with sensitive artistry.
The Victorian aesthetic of early photographs made this way has informed Rachael's new series. The prints themselves, which contrast images of playful innocence with darker, more unsettling tones, are an exploration of the psychoanalytical state of 'ambivalence' a state of having simultaneous, conflicting feelings that should exist in equilibrium.
The prints aim to discomfit by disrupting that equilibrium into its component, conflicting parts, asking the viewer to move from one state to another and back again.
David Rhys Jones takes photographs while out on pre-planned walks, typically around an urban area. He is drawn to the eccentricities found in UK towns; old shop signage, gargoyles or even graffiti; the layers and layers of history laid down by generations of inhabitants, moving through the streets and buildings. He has recently completed a project exploring the history of Gray's Inn in London [pictured above] using spoons to explore the history of its medieval dining hall. He is planning a similar series of work on spoons in response to the famous 'Sheldonian Heads' in central Oxford.
The resulting work, photographs tranferred onto ceramic or metal are shown as wall-mounted pieces, alone or arranged in groups, which David describes as 'constellation viewing'.
David Rhys Jones originally trained at the Slade, specialising in printmaking, before completing his masters in Ceramics at Central St Martins. His interest in transposing images onto different surfaces; silk, metal, plastic for instance ' led to his method of using porcelain combined with photography and print.