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NEXT
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Reviews & Interviews |
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Broadening Horizons: Kate Mellor's Island
-Island: The Sea Front, reviewed by Wendy
Wilson for Source Magazine |
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Kate Mellor quotes Paul Theroux as an introduction
to her collection of coastal landscapes. 'Most people on the
promenade walked with their faces averted from the land...Most
people looked seaward with anxious hopeful faces....' She takes
us around the coast of Britain with scientific precision, using
measured points in what she describes as 'an essentially British
posture'. the landscapes are not simple seascapes, they all
include a point of reference, a piece of land or some people
which we recognise as British. Mellor captures the sense of
enclosure provided by an island, but also the protection. She
places stark, windswept beaches alongside familiar seaside scenes.
The horizons are ever present and there is a great sense of
openess and sense of hope which pervades these panoramic scenes.
Hurst Beach is a detached view of not just a landscape but a
portrait too. People come to the coast to be as close as they
can to the endless horizon.They are searching for something
and the sign in the foreground adds an irony, if not a little
imprisonment, to the people living on this island. There is
no sense of idyllic charm to the collection.
The continuous and endless horizons do begin to convey a feeling
of entrapment within the coastline, the subjects and the camera
continually looking outwards, curious about what is beyond.
Slain's Castle on the North East coast of Scotland brings the
old and the new alongside each other. Both the ancient castle
and the newer house behind it do not seem great or grand. The
light is overcast. The castle, a stark outline against the sky,
is a reminder of former days, when the coastline was fiercely
protected. Scotland and Wales are forced to accept their physical
joining with England, yet they too remain looking outwards towards
that which infiltrates from the outside.
We also see, in Brighton, boys playing at war, as if defending
their own territory, their own coastline. This reminder of past
days is coupled with Victorian esplanades and piers in gaudy
colours and the more mundane and modern street signs and windproof
shelters. Westward Ho again is overwhelmed by the infinite nature
of the horizon. People are mere specks running towards it. However,
it would seem that they are not escaping. The child's sandcastle
in the foreground is an enclosure, a fortified battlement which
protects from outside. It is triumphant and safe from intrusion,
surrounded by water.
This separateness, this great physical distance, insists that
what we look at in Mellor's wide angle views is quintessentially
the island culture and, but secondarily, British culture. [Port
Crom on] The Mull of Kintyre (as with most of Mellor's images),
presents us with very little that identifies it specifically
as a place, it is just a coastline. The caravan in the foreground
shows peoples' natural wish to be away from their everyday surroundings,
and on an island, this is possible only by going to the closest
place to the edge of the land. People are drawn to the seaside
in countless numbers every year and Mellor explores the reasons
behind this attraction. Yes, there is the sea, but that is presented
as an entity, and not as an answer. We see several 'No Swimming'
signs and much inclement weather. It has not been forgotten
that the coastline contains ports and industry, which becomes
the arteries of a place like Britain or Ireland.
The method of Mellor's 'mapping' of the coastline means industry
and leisure are seen as of equal importance to the nature of
an island, as are the rugged, stark places which seem deserted.
Mellor has found the typical and the unusual and married them
neatly. She often uses foreground images to enforce the ever
present limits of the edge, the sea. It is a timely record of
an island, of the differences an island such as Britain feels
at a time when it's European partners are marching together,
and of how a specific culture might arise from it's geography.
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"Kate Mellor quotes Paul Theroux
as an introduction to her collection of coastal landscapes.
'Most people on the promenade walked with their faces averted
from the land...Most people looked seaward with anxious hopeful
faces...."
-Kate Mellor. Island: The Sea Front. |
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