Melding photograph and sculpture, Darren Harvey-Regan (b.1974, England) works in the liminal space where flat representation ends, and three-dimensional object begins. And with the photographic medium straddling object and representation simultaneously, such a place seems an astute location for Harvey-Regan to examine where the two meet. Perplexing, and at times humorous, his photographs act as the subject of his scrutiny but importantly also as the tool that he uses to carry out his procedure, constantly attempting to free himself from the constraints of photographic representation.
The Erratics (Exposure 3) – 2015
Darren Harvey-Regan is a graduate of the Royal College of Art. His work has appeared in exhibitions and publications internationally and is part of the permanent photography collection at the V & A Museum, London.
The Erratics (Exposure 4) – 2015
The Erratics
Harvey-Regan’s put together a collection of his images, displaying them all in a photobook named ‘The Erratics’.
In geology an erratic is a rock that differs in type from those around it, having been carried over large distances by long-vanished glaciers. Harvey-Regan’s eponymous series questions the medium of photography and its ability to extract from contexts and alter perception.
Originating in the artist’s desire to liberate himself from the weight of representational imagery – a yearning for abstraction – alongside a converse desire to engage with appearances as only photography can, The Erratics began as a series of large format photographs in the Egyptian desert, capturing chalk monoliths in the most objective manner possible. These images were followed by months of meticulously carving and photographing chalk rocks in the studio, forcing a geometry and line to shape the objects towards the photographic surfaces they eventually become.
The Erratics combines these sets of images within a new text work by Harvey-Regan that explores how the processes and concerns within the work might be further expressed and shaped through the act of writing.
One of Hockney’s most famous joiners, ‘Pearblossom Highway’, which consisting of around 800 pictures. Every photo for this image was taken at completely different viewpoints, not just one central one. He took photos from all different positions such as up, down, sideways etc. Hockney ended up taking close ups of areas, as to make the viewer feel close and involved with the photograph. Hockney’s friends ended up thinking that this image was a painting rather than photography.
Pearblossom Highway
David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
Hockney has owned residences and studios in Bridlington, and London, as well as two residences in California, where he has lived intermittently since 1964: one in the Hollywood Hills, one in Malibu, and an office and archives on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood, California.
On 15 November 2018, Hockney’s 1972 work ‘Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)‘ sold at Christie’s auction house in New York City for $90 million (£70 million), becoming the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at auction. This broke the previous record, set by the 2013 sale of Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog (Orange) for $58.4 million. Hockney held this record until 15 May 2019 when Koons reclaimed the honour selling his ‘Rabbit‘ for more than $91 million at Christie’s in New York.
We Two Boys Together Clinging (1961)
David Hockney was originally famous for his paintings rather than his photography. He always returned to painting portraits throughout his career. From 1968, and for the next few years, he painted portraits and double portraits of friends, lovers, and relatives just under life-size in a realistic style that adroitly captured the likenesses of his subjects.
David Hockney’s Joiners
In the early 1980s, Hockney began to produce photo collages—which in his early explorations within his personal photo albums he referred to as “joiners” – first using Polaroid prints and subsequently 35mm, commercially processed colour prints. Using Polaroid snaps or photolab-prints of a single subject, Hockney arranged a patchwork to make a composite image. Because the photographs are taken from different perspectives and at slightly different times, the result is work that has an affinity with Cubism, one of Hockney’s major aims—discussing the way human vision works. Some pieces are landscapes, such as ‘Pearblossom Highway #2‘, others portraits, such as Kasmin 1982, and ‘My Mother, Bolton Abbey, 1982‘.
Creation of the “joiners” occurred accidentally. He noticed in the late sixties that photographers were using cameras with wide-angle lenses. He did not like these photographs because they looked somewhat distorted. While working on a painting of a living room and terrace in Los Angeles, he took Polaroid shots of the living room and glued them together, not intending for them to be a composition on their own. On looking at the final composition, he realised it created a narrative, as if the viewer moved through the room. He began to work more with photography after this discovery and stopped painting for a while to exclusively pursue this new technique.
Hockney has experimented with painting, drawing, printmaking, watercolours, photography, and many other media including a fax machine, paper pulp, computer applications and iPad drawing programs. The subject matter of interest ranges from still lifes to landscapes, portraits of friends, his dogs, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
One of David Hockney’s joiners
Over time, however, he discovered what he could not capture with a lens, saying: “Photography seems to be rather good at portraiture, or can be. But, it can’t tell you about space, which is the essence of landscape. For me anyway. Even Ansel Adams can’t quite prepare you for what Yosemite looks like when you go through that tunnel and you come out the other side.” Frustrated with the limitations of photography and its ‘one-eyed’ approach, he returned to painting.
The Crossword Puzzle
This was one of Hockney’s famous joiners named ‘The Crossword Puzzle’. It was a photograph of two of Hockney’s close friends and every photo taken of them was taken at a different time. He wanted to showcase the variety of emotions highlighted over a certain period of time. He quoted ‘The space is the illusion, but the time is not an illusion’. Also stating that ‘It’s real and accounted for in the number of pictures’, ‘You know it took time to take them, wait for them, put them down’. He explains how time is obviously highlighted throughout the process and the image itself as it displays the different amounts of emotions.
He explains more about the ‘Crossword Puzzle’ photograph in this video.
David Hockney (born 9 July 1937) is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
At the Royal College of Art, Hockney featured in the exhibition Young Contemporaries – alongside Peter Blake – that announced the arrival of British Pop art. He was associated with the movement, but his early works display expressionist elements, similar to some works by Francis Bacon. When the RCA said it would not let him graduate if he did not complete an assignment of a life drawing of a live model in 1962, Hockney painted Life aPainting for a Diploma in protest.
Hockney
His Work
Hockney has experimented with painting, drawing, printmaking, watercolours, photography, and many other media including a fax machine, paper pulp, computer applications and iPad drawing programs. The subject matter of interest ranges from still lifes to landscapes, portraits of friends, his dogs, and stage designs for the Royal Court Theatre, Glyndebourne, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.
David Hockney has been featured in over 400 solo exhibitions and over 500 group exhibitions. He had his first one-man show at Kasmin Limited when he was 26 in 1963, and by 1970 the Whitechapel Gallery in London had organised the first of several major retrospectives, which subsequently travelled to three European institutions. LACMA also hosted a retrospective exhibition in 1988 which travelled to The Met, New York, and Tate, London.
Joiners
What are joiners? a single image made up of multiple overlapping images. It is a photo collage, but not a traditional collage in which different photos are simply arranged together to form a patchwork piece. A joiner photo tells a single story. It is a composite of a single scene or subject made from multiple photos.
Examples
What makes a good joiner? He called these collages and photo montages joiners. This distinctive approach to image making was a reflection of Hockney’s dislike for photographs executed with a wide-angle lens. By creating his joiners, Hockney sought to reflect the process of seeing, creating a narrative based around visual experience.
Hockney’s Work
How did Hockney create his first joiner? He called these collages and photo montages joiners. This distinctive approach to image making was a reflection of Hockney’s dislike for photographs executed with a wide-angle lens. By creating his joiners, Hockney sought to reflect the process of seeing, creating a narrative based around visual experience.
Image Analysis: The neutral tones in this image give it a very subtle atmosphere, I think that the brown tones in the foreground and the lighter blue sky in the background, separated with a lot of land, make for an interesting composition for this joiner. I like the fact that you can see the original paintings, especially in the sky of this joiner, as i think that it adds a lot of depth and texture to this image, meaning it cannot be viewed as boring. Furthermore, I think that the perspective of the image is important to note, as it creates a different feel to the piece as objects such as the yellow and red sign become more eye-catching. This image is one of my favourites out of Hockney’s work as it carries more significant being the first joiner ever created, and additionally it made a huge impact on the photography community.
Emily Allchurch
Emily Allchurch, born 1974 in Jersey, Channel Islands, lives and works in Hastings, East Sussex. She trained as a sculptor, receiving a First Class (Hons.) degree in Fine Art from the Kent Institute of Art & Design – Canterbury in 1996, and an MA from the Royal College of Art in 1999, where she began working with photography as a material. Since then, she has exhibited regularly in solo and group shows in the UK and internationally.
Allchurch uses photography and digital collage to reconstruct Old Master paintings and prints to create contemporary narratives. Her starting point is an intensive encounter with a city or place, to absorb an impression and gather a huge image library. From this resource, hundreds of photographs are selected and meticulously spliced together to create a seamless new ‘fictional’ space. Each artwork re-presents this journey, compressed into a single scene. The resulting photographic collages have a resonance with place, history and culture, and deal with the passage of time and the changes to a landscape, fusing contemporary life with a sense of history.
Her works are held in public and private collections worldwide, with a complete set of her Tokyo Story series in the permanent collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, with a further set in the collection of Fidelty in Tokyo. In 2020, the Museum of London acquired a lightbox version of Babel London (after Breugel) to go on permanent display, when it opens at its new site in West Smithfields in 2025.
Her Work
What I like about her work: I think that her work is very unique, there is common theme throughout her work, which is creating building’s into painted joiners. Furthermore, I think that the fact that her work is easily identifiable means that her name is more widely known. In all of these pieces there is significant contrast between the buildings and the sky, with the buildings all containing bright colours and then the sky blending to cooler blues and greys, creating contrast between warmer and cooler toned colours, and adding a wide variety of colours to her work.
Image Analysis
Art Basel in Hong Kong
This is one of my favourite image out of Emily Allchurch’s work, this is because of many components in the image, the first is the wide variety of colours and textures throughout the piece. With the bricks in the building with all of the heavy detail contrasting with the stale blue sky in the background, the lack of texture makes the building more eye catching and it more apparent that its the focal point for the image. Furthermore, I think that the composition of the joiner is significant as its a very busy piece, as the building is filled with depth, the foreground is filled with other aspects such as natural component such as people. This created more contrast and adds depth of field to the image.
UNESCO Global Geoparks are single, unified geographical areas where sites and landscapes of international geological significance are managed with a holistic concept of protection, education and sustainable development. A UNESCO Global Geopark uses its geological heritage, in connection with all other aspects of the area’s natural and cultural heritage, to enhance awareness and understanding of key issues facing society, such as using our earth’s resources sustainably, mitigating the effects of climate change and reducing natural hazard-related risks.
By raising awareness of the importance of the area’s geological heritage in history and society today, UNESCO Global Geoparks give local people a sense of pride in their region and strengthen their identification with the area. The creation of innovative local enterprises, new jobs and high quality training courses is stimulated as new sources of revenue are generated through geotourism, while the geological resources of the area are protected.
UNESCO Global Geoparks empower local communities and give them the opportunity to develop cohesive partnerships with the common goal of promoting the area’s significant geological processes, features, periods of time, historical themes linked to geology, or outstanding geological beauty. UNESCO Global Geoparks are established through a bottom-up process involving all relevant local and regional stakeholders and authorities in the area
UNESCO Global Geopark Map
The Global Geoparks have until recently been concentrated in Europe and in China, but the last few years have seen the geoparks initiative spread worldwide so that there are existing UNESCO Global Geoparks, or active applications to become UNESCO Global Geoparks, on all continents. The UNESCO Global Geopark information sheets provide detailed information on the UNESCO Global Geoparks in the different countries around the world.
The Geoparks are about ‘more than rocks’ and the UNESCO Global Geoparks celebrate the links between people and the Earth.
In 2022, there were 177 UNESCO Global Geoparks in 46 countries around the world. United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) seeks to build peace through international cooperation in Education, the Sciences and Culture.
——Jersey Geoparks ——
Jersey in particular is an incredibly strong contender for having exceptional Geoparks, with it’s important cultural heritage and amazing geology.
Jersey Geopark Exhibition
——Jersey Geopark Map ——
On the Jersey Heritage website, there is a map which pinpoints all of Jersey’s Geosites around the whole island. Showing off every Geological sight of interest that highlights Jersey’s truly beautiful rocks. These rocks are what makes Jersey an incredibly fascinating island.
Map of Jersey’s Bedrock
Geological Sites of Interest
There was then a Jersey Geological Trail guide, produced by Dr. Ralph Nichols and Dr. Hill. It is a beginner’s guide to some lovely beach and cliff sections which reveal Jersey’s geological history. The beauty of Jersey lies in its cliffs, bays and inland valleys. This beauty is the result of the island’s geology, the colour and the different hardness and structure of the rocks, and their response to the changes of climate over the years.
Nichols geology lectures and practicals fascinated him and he felt that he was exceptionally lucky to be taught and inspired by the best Demonstrators, such as Ron Walters, ‘Sarge’ Jenkins and Tony Harris, who later all gained acclaimed doctorates and obtained top professional posts.
Dr. Hill helped Nichols mainly with the illustrations of the guide, highlighting a remarkable variety of rock types and structures exposed in such a small island.
Nichols joined the Geology and Archaeology Sections of La Société Jersiaise, later helping to establish the Jèrriais Section, and also GCSE and A Level Geology and Archaeology courses for night classes at Highlands College of Further Education. This enabled him to learn so much about Jersey which has a greater variety of things natural and historical than he has ever found in such a small area.
