AMANDA HARMAN
LIGHT ACROSS THE SHALLOWS

24th September to 15th October 2022

Amanda Harman is an award-winning photographic artist, based in the South-West of England. In recent years her work has focused on notions of beauty, belonging, and connection to the natural world, from the fluid landscapes of the Somerset Levels, to her home territory in the Golden Valley near Stroud. Time spent walking and retracing routes across the landscape is key to Amanda’s practice and way of making images. By observing a place for months, and often years, she seeks to reveal the unseen and the insignificant, and by quiet observation, elevate the beauty of ordinary and overlooked places.

Her work and her approach have been recognised by a number of awards: she was the winner of the Sony World Photography Award for Still Life in 2014 and shortlisted again in 2018 in the Landscape category. She won the Critical Mass Solo Exhibition award in 2016 with an exhibition at the renowned Blue Sky Centre for Photographic Arts in Portland, Oregon.

Amanda works on long form projects that considerer our human relationship with the landscape and the emotional as well as physical connections we make with our environment. Two of her recent projects, including ‘Sun Lights this Water’ from which the images selected for this exhibition are drawn, have been published as books by Another Place Press.

SUN LIGHTS THIS WATER

“For the past three years or so, in all weathers and seasons, I have walked from my door, down through the valley and along the route of the derelict canal that runs beside the river. This is a wild and untamed hollow, where the water seeps and spills from the canal’s collapsed sides, and abandoned locks create stoppages and blockages along the valley floor. The canal’s collapse is a wildness of reeds and weeds, yellow flag iris, saplings, catkins, beech mast, lichen, and old man’s beard. In winter floodwaters creep and spread, and the deep cold in the valley bottom traps the frost, low winter sun sending mist drifting upwards through the woods that cling to the steep hillsides.

Made whilst travelling on foot, these images pay testament to the subtle ways we are shaped by the landscapes through which we move; exploring and forming connections to the earth, and to each other. They are about knowing a place intimately, coming to understand the shape of the land, the light, the seasons, the ground beneath, the trees above, the water streaming down the steep valley sides to reach the river. They are about the desire to fully arrive in a place.”

-          Amanda Harman, September 2022