About the work:
The work explores the landscape as a changing, animated scene, bringing life to familiar landmarks such as Fifty Views of Wills Tower, Let Trees Tell the Time: Queen Square in the Round and Four Seasons of Clifton Suspension Bridge. Like Monet’s series paintings, they form individual studies of the kaleidoscopic effect of place over a period of time, revealing its capacity to evoke a myriad of emotive and even spiritual connections. Repeated looking is also part of our biology and reveals much about our physical connection to landscape. All of this interconnectedness offers ways to reinvigorate the window-world of photography, not least by bringing the aesthetic of cubism and impressionism into the frame.
The book Bristol Through the Lens: An Exhibition and an Essay, recently published as a second edition with Tangent Books, includes all 20 prints and is available to buy, priced £10. In the accompanying essay, Sheona writes about the story-telling and space-stretching capacity of photographs, and the ways in which other photographers have explored techniques that produce this effect, including tilt-shift photographer Andy Clifford and pinhole photographer Justin Quinnell. From the foreword, David Trigg writes, ‘Sheona Beaumont not only recognizes photography’s inherent tension between objective truth and subjective expression, but also its potential to transcend literal representation.’