Fermynwoods Associate Artist James Smith has been exploring Fineshade Wood to understand the Forestry Commission’s pragmatic and logical reasoning of spot marking trees for removal due to disease, native classification and plantation cycles.
Background Studies, Hues of Labour is a guest exhibition of work in progress focussing on the independent intensity of colour, with its artificial and intrusive qualities found within working rural land. These hues amplify and isolate the identities and relationships of forms and structures encountered in the observers’ foreground. Viewed together they represent the collective background and a strategy of guidance, orientation and warning.
James Smith’s photographic practice studies the ways in which post-war politics have been inscribed into the English landscape. The work is considered and represented through the identities of form and structure (Tactics), underpinned by a debate regarding the architecture of territory (Strategy) and the inherent projection of politics – Power, Class and Labour.
Catch up with James’ introduction this work in progress below: