The Lake portfolio is the echo of my struggle to process recent life changing events.
The loss of close family members, in quick succession, followed by the pandemic and my experience of COVID19 and living with its ongoing symptoms. Making these images started me down the road of making sense of my feelings. The work appeared to evolve into two separate portfolios with very different aesthetics and different stories - the 1st set of images, The Deonstruted Lake (portfolio below) and the 2nd set, the heavily manipulated coloured background images. However, it wasn't until the two were brought back together that I began to resolve my feelings.
In all of the images, the background is the same photograph, individually colour manipulated to represent my emotion as I responded to the events happening around me. The more radical the colour shift, the more out of control I felt; the more subdued the colour, the more detached I'd become. For this body of work a number of separate journeys have come together; all of them anchored in the photographs I have taken during my daily walks around he Lake. A place of natural beauty and calm, a wide open space where I can think and breathe and put the chaos of my thoughts aside for a period.
Together these journeys have become The Lake - a reflection of grief, loss snd isolation.
Introducing The Ice Lake - this is portfolio captures my memory of winter and the frozen landscape .
This was a fun - do you remember when? - mini exhibition back at the lake.
The images were selected because of the internal colour contrast - the clear blue of the sky with the ice blue of the snow, in contrast to the yellow of the sunlight in the trees. It seemed appropriate and timely to present this portfolio mid-summer, during this years heat wave as everybody was wondering around wearing shorts and t-shirts.
My thanks to those who visited the mini exhibition on August bank holiday weekend.
Introducing Vectoring, the latest chapter in my journey, using photography, to deconstruct the landscape.
Photography is a 'dirty art', it captures all the noise and debris of life without caring what it divulges and who it embarrasses.
For this project, I investigated various processes and filters that would enable me to cleanse and control the contents of the image, whilst maintaining its strength. Colour skewing is commonly used in photography to mask extraneous detail, but in this case I wanted to find a way of removing that detail rather than covering it up.
To this end Vectoring was an ideal tool. Vector mapping uses a mesh - a network of data points - to map various objects and terrains, allowing this information to be further used for creating 3D maps and renderings. For my Vectors project, I concentrated on the first part of this process, applying the mesh to my photographs and manipulating it to create a very controlled and abstracted view of the landscape.
Another take on the new normal we are living, reflecting our inability to fully see or understand the detail of our situation.
The popularity of the Multicoloured Wood, the first triplet, from The Deconstructed Lake was the springboard for the development of this new portfolio.
My idea was simple enough, create similar colour skewed triplets. As I developed these new images, they did not appeal. On closer examination, it was the red images that were wrong.
Returning to my exhibition feedback there were lots of positive comments about the original photograph and the B&W conversion, but not a single mentioned of the red image - this intrigued me.
And so began my investigation into colour skewing...
For The Deconstructed Lake, I used photographic deconstruction to communicate a new narrative for the now quiet landscape. The final images mirror the isolation we are currently experiencing in our daily lives. These isolation-landscapes are constructed images intended to represent the new normal - an environment that is simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar.
Pop-up Gallery at Bermuda Lake (26th - 28th June 2020)
I would like to thank all those that attended my pop-up exhibition at Bermuda Lake. It was my first gallery and I learned so much. I feel humbled and also encouraged by the very positive feedback from the people who talked to me. Thank You.
Post my exhibition I intend to complete this portfolio (at least for the time being) by creating a 'zine' - including my photographs, feedback from my conversations and quotes from my postcards.
My work is available in limited edition, unframed, archival prints.
Please contact me for more details.
Karen Gregory Photography
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