“The paintings in Topographies II stitches in combination a fictional position from a couple of capturing journeys – places related by way of mild, warmth and geology however separated bodily by way of continents,” says Gough
As though located at the backside of a chasm or cave, we’re taking a look upwards against an out-of-sight aperture in the rock-face above. Daylight streams inwards, illuminating the pock-marked floor of the cavern partitions, slanting diagonally and downwards. The ground proper of the symbol [above], on the other hand, is fed on in darkness, in order that we will’t inform how some distance the terrain on which we’re status extends: it might be centimetres or dozens of toes. The absence of transparent viewpoint, as in a lot of the photographs in Jess Gough’s Topographies II, turns out to push us up in opposition to the floor of what we’re seeing, as though the camera have been mapping the contours of the surroundings quite than photographing it. Handiest in a couple of pictures, which appear to tactically bracket the series, does the sight of sea or sky give us our bearings again.
Topographies II is a part of an ongoing undertaking introduced as a sequence of artist’s books. “[The sequence] makes use of the camera to discover landscapes and learn about their explicit textures, moods and kinaesthetic qualities,” says Gough. “The paintings in Topographies II stitches in combination a fictional position from a couple of capturing journeys – places related by way of mild, warmth and geology however separated bodily by way of continents.”
We don’t seem to be supposed to understand exactly the place we’re – although a type of barren, elegant northerly desolate tract is implied – which provides to the disorientation completed by way of flattened views. An emphasis on engrossing and uncanny textures pulls center of attention farther from the third-dimensional international, whilst additionally unsettling our sense of what components we’re encountering: cast, liquid, and fuel are steadily laborious to tell apart amid the mass of development.
