Current Exhibition in Café La Strada

July 2010

Jeremy Haslam

Artist’s statement

In my landscape photographs, taken over the last forty years or so, I have always attempted to explore abstract patterns and textures in landscape forms and buildings, using the rectangular frame of a photograph as a creative formal composition. Many of these early photographs were taken with a square medium-format camera, using colour transparencies, and were inspired by the open spaces of the Marlborough Downs and Salisbury Plain, which I used to visit regularly and in all weathers and seasons. I have now scanned many of these into digital format, and use a digital camera for its ease of use and flexibility.
As a development of this, I started making photocollages in the late 1980s, again concentrating on landscape and townscape subjects, in which I was influenced by the photocollage work of David Hockney. These began using prints which were arranged on a board and then stuck together – somewhat laboriously. I now use digital frames and make photocollages on a computer using Photoshop, which introduces a whole range of new and more flexible possibilities in making the final image.
I have recently started combining found objects with photographic images, to create low-relief ‘photo-constructions’ as a sculptural form. These combine the ‘virtual’ depth of a photographic image with the real depth of a relief sculpture, creating a visual tension between the two kinds of visual reference, and using the same means of creating illusions of space that architectural relief sculptures employ.