John Blakemore first showed his work at the Gallery in 1976. The current exhibition is in two parts, the early section consists of photographs made in Wales which were first shown in the Photographers Gallery, Cardiff last year and have subsequently been toured by the Welsh Arts Council. The second section is recent work and illustrates a new lighter feeling, both by more distance and through the capturing of movement. John Blakemore has written about both parts of the exhibition as follows:
Spirit of Place
I first visited Wales in 1968 when I spent the winter in Barmouth. It was a time of personal crisis following the break up of my first marriage and the decision to winter in Wales was an arbitrary one, generated by the need to escape the pressures of London. The Welsh landscape was different to any that I had previously known, very different to the fat, soft landscapes of the Midlands, where I was born, and from the experience of that winter all my subsequent landscape work, whether done in Wales or not, has grown. The countryside has always been important to me, during my boyhood I was a keen ornithologist and on leaving school I worked on farms for two years. However when I first began to use photography as a medium it was to document the urban environment, the problems of industry and city life.
The period following my divorce was one of creative stagnation and when the need to make images finally re-asserted itself it was to the landscape, to the experience of my first winter in Wales that I turned, returning to Wales to photograph in 1970.
The Wales of my photographs, my Wales, is narrowly defined, a stretch of beach a wooded hillside, a short length of river valley, areas which in some way speak to me, and which I visit again and again; to learn to see, to allow the possibility of communion, of understanding. photography is built around this ritual of intimacy yet. paradoxically, I do not see my photographs as concerned with place in a physical, a geographical sense. What I try to evoke is the dynamic of landscape, its spiritual and physical energy, its fundamental mystery. The photograph provides an intense delineation of reality, but the camera also transforms what it sees. I seek to produce images which function both as fact and as metaphor, reflecting both the external world and my own inner response to, and connection with it.
These photographs were all made in Wales during the past eight years. I am grateful to the Welsh Arts Council for the opportunity to show them and hope they communicate something of the delight and awe I have experienced through the Welsh landscape.
Lila
To work with a medium is to define for oneself its limitations. The fundament al limitation of photography which is also for me, its greatest strength, is the need for subject. The camera must be pointed away from self towards the world
Involvement with subject, intensity of experience, become for me, the basis of meaningful photography. The work process is both a refinement of response through the intensification of awareness, and a process of exploring and defining ones relationship to the world. To be in the land- scape, to experience it with intensity is to feel awe; awe at the power, the fecundity, the sheep abundant vitality of nature. In the context of world religions the contemplation of this flow of life has been expressed in the poetic idea of the universe as the play or dance of God, in Hindu tradition 'Lila'.
-Written by John Blakemore. Introduction by Sue Davies.
John Blakemore was given assistance for 'Spirit of Place' by the Arts Council of Great Britain and the Welsh Arts Council and for Lila' by the Arts Council of Great Britain and East Midlands Arts.
The Welsh Arts Council produced a good catalogue for John Blakemore when he had his show in Cardiff and we have managed to get hold of a small stock.
For further information on this and past exhibitions, visit our Archive and Study Room.