Postponed due to Covid-19, we are delighted to announce the news dates of Paul Hart’s exhibition at Fen Ditton Gallery.
Opening times:
Friday 18th - Sunday 20th September, 11am - 5pm
Saturday 26th & Sunday 27th September, 11am - 5pm
Other times available by appointment
All works are for sale and additional unframed prints are also available. Enquire here
This Spring saw the publication of ‘Reclaimed’ the final of a series of three extraordinary photographic books by artist photographer Paul Hart in collaboration with Dewi Lewis Publishing. In this series, ‘Farmed’, ‘Drained’ and now ‘Reclaimed’ Hart – 2018 winner of the inaugural Wolf Suschitsky photography prize - explores one of the most productive yet haunting agricultural landscapes in England: the Lincolnshire fens.
Amanda Game has worked closely with Paul Hart on behalf of Fen Ditton Gallery to select and present some key images from each book of the series (plus two images from his earlier forest image book, Truncated) and to present them in this exhibition.
Fen Ditton Gallery is delighted to present this new selection of high quality photographic prints with Hart: an artist with whom the gallery enjoys an increasingly important working relationship following the successful presentation of his work in ‘Trees Observed’ (2018) and ‘Land Lines’ (2019). All the images are available for purchase by contacting the gallery and are available in two sizes: 17 x 17 in image size (20 x 24 in paper size) edition of 8; 14 x 14 image size (16 x 20 in paper size) ed. 12. All works are signed, titled and editioned verso. Books can also be ordered through the gallery.
Each of the selected black and white images - carefully composed with medium and large format film cameras, hand-printed by Hart on fibre-based silver gelatin paper - reveals the artist’s characteristic ability to focus attention on an overlooked everyday beauty of this intensively farmed land. But his observations are also acute in other ways, exposing something of the unstable relationship between land and man in this ever-shifting, reclaimed waterland.
People do not feature in these images any more than they are evident if you take a walk along the edge of a Fen dyke: this is a mechanised, unpeopled world though still replete with traces of human activity. Few other artists have Hart’s ability to create images that give such resonant form to our paradoxical relationship with land. Each work evokes with poetic sensibility the muddy texture of the sensory living world, on whose health we all depend, but, by documenting all he sees – the brick houses overgrown with trees; the deserted concrete tracks; the lack of human community – he asks us to consider these agricultural edgelands in a new light and ask how productive they really are, and for whom.
British photographer Paul Hart (b. 1961) works primarily with the black and white analogue process and is one of a diminishing number of photographers whose practice involves all aspects of the photographic process from the negative through to the print. Hart studied at the London College of Printing (UK) and Nottingham Trent University (UK), graduating in 1988 with a BA (Hons) in Photography. He has concentrated on long-term self initiated projects for seventeen years. His work has been exhibited widely in the UK, most recently at ; Fen Ditton Gallery (Cambridge), The Austrian Cultural Forum (London), The Royal Academy of Arts (London), The Photographers Gallery (London), The Royal Photographic Society (Bristol), The University of Cambridge (UK) and internationally at art fairs including Paris Photo and the AIPAD Show (USA). In 2018 Hart won the inaugural Wolf Suschitzky Photography Prize/Residency (London/Vienna) and was shortlisted for the Mark Rothko Memorial Trust Award (Daugavpils) and in 2019 was shortlisted for the HARIBAN Award (Tokyo). His work resides in important collections including : V&A Museum (London), Ivor Braka Collection (London), MoMA Library Collection (NYC) and Martin Parr Foundation Library (Bristol, UK). Photo books are central to Hart’s practice having published four monographs to date in addition to the three Fen books, his first book TRUNCATED (also with Dewi Lewis 2009) received widespread acclaim.
Founded in 1994, Dewi Lewis Publishing has published many leading British and international photographers such as Laia Abril, Martin Parr, Simon Norfolk, John Blakemore, Paul Hart, Simon Roberts and Bruce Gilden, as well as books by lesser known emerging photographers. It publishes up to 20 new titles each year. Before establishing the imprint, Dewi Lewis was founding Director of Cornerhouse, a major Manchester based Centre for Contemporary Visual Arts and Film, where in 1987 he established Cornerhouse Publications, a winner of the Sunday Times Small Publisher of the Year Award. Many of the books published by Dewi Lewis have been shortlisted for international prizes and several have won awards. In 2014 the imprint received the PhotoEspana’s prize for Outstanding Publishing House of the Year and, in 2018, it won both the Paris Photo / Aperture Foundation Photobook of The Year Award and the Rencontres d’Arles Author Book Prize. Dewi has worked in close collaboration with a number of European publishers and was a founding member of The European Publishers Award for Photography, which ran from 1994 to 2016. Dewi Lewis was appointed an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society in 2004 and in November 2009 he was awarded the inaugural Royal Photographic Society Award for Outstanding Services to Photography. He was awarded the Kraszna-Krausz Foundation Award for Outstanding Contribution to Publishing at the World Photography Awards in April 2012.