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Nigel Monckton

Author Archives: nigelmonckton

Fe2O3 – the book

07 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by nigelmonckton in Fe2O3 - the book

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Experience has taught me again and again that you can never know what lies beneath a surface or behind a facade. Our sense of place, our understanding of photographs of the landscape, is inevitably fraught with misreading.

Joel Sternfeld

Some might see this as a reason not to try – I like to think of it as a challenge. In Fe2O3 I try to understand what has happened to the steel and iron working sites of west Cumbria, by juxtaposing panoramic landscapes with photographs of artefacts and stray object found on the sites, and with short quotes and snatches of my own thoughts.

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If you’re interested in seeing more, why not visit my Blurb bookstore: Fe2O3

Wonderful things

07 Monday Oct 2019

Posted by nigelmonckton in Wonderful Things

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Things that are thrown away or lost  can tell us as much about the past as many of those items we carefully preserve for posterity. Collected by archaeologists, beachcombers and photographers, these bits of rubbish can be and are used to tell stories with varying degrees of objectivity.

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Wonderful Things is my first cabinet of curiosities. In it I have tried to capture a sense of the objects I routinely find on my local beaches, the odd juxtapositions, even the humour of an hour or two spent rummaging through a collection of flotsam and jetsam. The stories they tell are ephemeral – swept in an out on the tides of both the sea and the imagination – the cabinet preserves just some of them.

Find a copy in my Blurb bookstore: Wonderful things

 

Four seasons

20 Tuesday Mar 2018

Posted by nigelmonckton in Spring Summer Autumn Winter

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Seasonal painting was a strong theme in traditional Chinese and Japanese painting – the Japanese in particular developed the idea of representing all four seasons in a continuous landscape – an idea which related strongly to the Buddhist idea of impermanence and change, and can also be read as a metaphor for the circle of life.

This is my interpretation of that, taken over a year, in my garden in Cumbria.

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Artefacts

01 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by nigelmonckton in Artefacts

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Washed out of the slag banks, these artefacts are some of the decreasingly small number of items that retain a direct link to Workington’s industrial past. The processes of time and chemistry are etched into their surface.

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Colours – 1

26 Monday Oct 2015

Posted by nigelmonckton in Colours

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Iron slags and waste ore, salt water and sea air are a recipe for corrosion and all sorts of coloured compounds. More often than not these are muted, like the colours of the beach pebbles, but push the vibrance, contrast and saturation and you get the following results:

Permanence in motion – Ibiza (i)

18 Sunday Oct 2015

Posted by nigelmonckton in Permanence in motion

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Continuing my occasional series of wave studies. I am struck by the difference  the overcast sky makes to the tone of the images:

Permanence in Motion – Seychelles

02 Saturday May 2015

Posted by nigelmonckton in Permanence in motion, TIME 2013 -

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Permanence in Motion – Kefalonia

21 Wednesday May 2014

Posted by nigelmonckton in Permanence in motion

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Spring Summer Autumn Winter

21 Monday Oct 2013

Posted by nigelmonckton in Spring Summer Autumn Winter

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A series of images of an ordinary field somewhere in Cumbria – one per month – organised by season to examine varying pace of change through the year.

Continue reading →

Permanence in motion – Allonby

12 Thursday Sep 2013

Posted by nigelmonckton in Permanence in motion

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The sea is a constant – one that varies every second of every day.

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Work

  • COASTLINE 2013 –
    • Triple Point
    • Wonderful Things
  • FE2O3 2014 –
    • Artefacts
    • Colours
    • Fe2O3 – the book
  • TIME 2013 –
    • Permanence in motion
    • Spring Summer Autumn Winter

Recent Posts

  • Fe2O3 – the book
  • Wonderful things
  • Four seasons

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