Of the several processes involved in photography, the interaction of chemicals with the negative is perhaps the most physical and intimate to the image. Understanding this complexity is at the core of a new exhibition at Beetles + Huxley, London, titled, “LAND | SEA by Paul Kenny.” The exhibition includes recent works from photographer Paul Kenny’s series “Seaworks” and “O Hanami,” both of which reimagine objects found along the shoreline and forest floors of Great Britain.Kenny breaks down the photographic process into two simple stages — first, making a negative for image capture and then making a print from it. “In my work, I eliminated photography from the first stage, and what I make is in effect still life,” says Kenny. The current exhibition is about Kenny’s love for the wilderness of coasts. While at art school, Kenny was influenced by modern masters Paul Strand and Minor White. His early work was also about beaches on the Northumbrian coastline and their still-life depictions. Even then, Kenny was interested in what seawater did to the developing process, as he used water taken from the location of the photograph and noticed how different kinds of erosions changed the texture of the image.“Seaworks” was born when Kenny found a 7UP bottle with a message inside (from a school project). It had washed up on the shore of a beach in Ireland, having taken seven years to cross the Atlantic from Fado Island. He noticed thousands of scratches on the bottle as he was taking the note out of the bottle, and each scratch had been an impression of nature’s tryst with the bottle, year after year. Fascinated to no end, he started cutting up the bottles to create his works — all without the use of a camera. This technique of camera-less photography, where he makes small slides/plates laden with objects found on his journeys and scans them to produce large-scale photographs, is testimony to the power of the photograph without its traditionally perceived origin of form or practice. During his visits to a village in Northwest Scotland over 23 years, Kenny found the smallest things to be most profound and whenever he saw a beautiful stone or shell, he would refrain from picking it up in isolation, but rather take a handful of the beach to photograph. The Japanese festival ‘O Hanami’ celebrates the ephemerality of cherry blossom blooms before the wind sweeps them away. This poetic practice was what inspired Kenny to work with native flowers such as Blackthorn, Cow Parsley and Hogweed after he came back from a trip to Japan. During a harsh winter in Northumberland in 2010, Kenny decided to work only with elements around his feet, as the snow had restricted his outdoor movements. “I sought out beauty and fragility in the scraps of gathered material, mindful of my concerns about the landscape and the scars and marks left by man as the land is ordered and shaped, clipped and manicured,” said Kenny as each piece revealed its own character.Kenny’s photographs are almost fossil-like, the impressions of nature on glass plates revealing a world we live in but are strangely unfamiliar with. As seawater stains the negatives, there is a bloom of salt crystals and this makes Kenny’s works inseparable from the very coasts he walks on.“LAND | SEA by Paul Kenny” runs through July 16, 2016, at Beetles + Huxley, London
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