Image: Helen Sear – Natural Surveillance (Trompe l’oeil 1)

Beyond the view: Helen Sear in conversation with Eugenie Shinkle

September 21st, 2023
6-8pm, free entry (booking is essential, go to the direct link)

Centre for British Photography
49 Jermyn Street
London SW1Y 6LX

Introducing the first in our series of Fast Forward: In Conversations created in collaboration with the Centre for British Photography in London. The series will be run from Autumn 2023 through to the summer of 2024.

We invite you to come and join Helen Sear and Eugenie Shinkle in conversation concerning Helen’s work in the current exhibition at the Centre:

“Helen Sear presents a series of large-scale works that combine multiple images to emphasise the indivisibility of the human and the natural worlds. In giving equal status to the human and natural, Sear observes the landscape as another body.

Sear questions whether it is possible to have a view of nature without incorporating the human presence. She emphasises that what she records is not something that is separate or distant from her. Instead she is a part of nature and the experience is immersive. One way she does this is by disrupting a fixed-point perspective in many of her large composite works. The viewer follows her as she moves around, looks up and down, travels from the front to the back. In denying a fixed-point perspective and stitching her images together, she creates multi-layered landscapes. Ultimately, what Sear achieves in her composites is an active, rather than a static viewing”. 

Helen Sear’s practice focuses on the co-existence of human, animal, and natural environments and is rooted in an interest in Magic Realism, Surrealism and Conceptual Art. She studied Fine Art at Reading University and University College London, Slade School of Art, her photographic works becoming widely known in the 1991 British Council exhibition, De-Composition: Constructed Photography in Britain, which toured extensively in Latin America and Eastern Europe. Her work explores the materiality of vision, often combining hand drawn or erased elements with photography to disrupt a convention of fixed-point perspective associated with the medium. She also works with moving image and mixed media installations. Sear was the first woman to represent Wales with a solo exhibition at the 56th Venice Biennale 2015 presenting a suite of new works…the rest is smoke. Her inaugural exhibition with Martin Asbaek Gallery, Fascination, opened in Copenhagen in March 2018 and two major pieces were acquired by The Hyman Collection in 2019 Dewi Lewis published her book Era Of Solitude in November 2021.

Eugenie Shinkle is a photographer and writer based in London, UK. She is Reader in Photography at the University of Westminster, and co-editor of the online photobook platform C4 Journal

The Centre for British Photography (registered charity number 1190955) is a major new public space that supports photographers working in Britain through exhibitions, events, grants and mentoring. Located in central London, the centre has six exhibitions spaces, a programme of public events, an archive, and a photography sales gallery. It aims to provide a dedicated home for British Photography in all its diversity. The aim is to host exhibitions curated independently by outside curators and institutional partners as well as internally curated exhibitions, as well as to provide access to the renowned Hyman Collection. We wish to provide a platform for a range of voices in order to present an expansive overview of the diversity of British photography past and present.

For more information and to book a place, please go to the direct link.