Harvest
The khaki loam of the Ypres Salient and the heavy London clay yield two antithetical harvests, which sit alongside each other in a series of tintypes. One, the harvest of war, bears witness to the violation of the land and destruction of the body; a story told in the munitions and personal effects left behind by the soldiers who fought and died there during World War One. The other, an imagined crop from a mother’s London garden, where the act of gardening is employed as metaphor for nurture and motherhood; a crop sown and tended, a child born and lovingly raised.
Embracing the imperfections inherent in the emulsion of wet plate collodion, the wounds and scars of process impart emotional resonance to objects photographed side by side, as specimens of the harvests of love and war.
Battlefield artefacts from a collection held by the London Scottish Regiment.
Wet Collodion on Aluminium