A new exhibition at Huxley-Parlour be the first public presentation of Jamie Hawkesworth's thirteen-year project documenting the landscape, architecture and inhabitants of his home country. A celebration of people and place, The British Isles is imbued with Hawkesworth’s generous and dignifying eye.
The exhibition, and Hawkesworth’s wider project, provides an alternative history of Britain from 2007 to 2020. This eventful period – punctuated by elections, referendums, conflict, and a pandemic – is reframed through the language of the everyday. We see school children, desolate beaches and suburban sheds, each treated with the same sense of curiosity and generosity, prompting a reflection upon what contemporary Britain is and should be.
The works in the exhibition are uniformly titled – all simply called ‘The British Isles’ – so as not to reveal when or where each image was made. For Hawkesworth, the details of place and time are incidental to the image; removing them works to reconstruct his own experience of making this body of work, as the series grew in non-linear and circumstantial ways. Surprising compositions and golden hues generate an otherworldliness, owing in part to the artist’s process; preferring the slower, more tactile approach of analogue photography, Hawkesworth shoots exclusively on film and meticulously develops his own prints. Attuned to the normality of everyday life, Hawkesworth reframes the familiar as a dreamworld, recasting his subjects as its inhabitants in a radically democratising way.
