BIRDSONG. Mike Jackson

About

This will be the artist’s first exhibition with the gallery and in the United States.

Jackson began exploring silver gelatin paper as a medium, and soon realized it could be much more than the final step of producing an image from film onto paper. In Birdsong, Jackson experiences, then responds to a thing. Jackson then makes marks on paper that trigger that same response. The marks represent the response, not the thing.

While working in the darkroom, Jackson began to feel envious of painter’s studios; wide open windows with light streaming in. With the darkroom you cannot make pieces directly from life - as you sit in a dull red glow. Jackson then realized he could hear birdsong - even though light could not come into the darkroom, sound could. 

The work is created ‘live’ rather than from a memory – Jackson places the marks on paper as he listens to the song. the darkroom’s lack of light, much like an isolation tank, allowed Jackson to notice a form of sensory input that he had beforehand taken completely for granted. Each luminogram is a one off unique piece.

The pieces made from birdsong changed as the seasons changed, with winter being quite solitary and quiet, to Spring and Summer being a cacophony of noise and input that spreads around the paper in massive swoops.

Mike Jackson was born in 1966. He studied painting at West Dean College, West Sussex. He moved to Wales in 2006 to experiment with photography. Started an extensive study of a single remote beach - Poppit Sands, using a medium format Hasselblad film camera. The study lasted for eight years. This work earned three Hasselblad Masters Finalist places and The Chris Beetles Award in 2014

The luminogram work has been exhibited at PhotoLondon three times, at Paris Photo in 2017 and has been published as a book by 21st Editions. The work is in the collection of The National Gallery Of Art in Washington DC, and has been featured in numerous online and printed reviews and interviews.