In autumn 2014, Tamsin Relly participated in The Arctic Circle, an expeditionary residency on board a tall ship in Svalbard, Norway. She wanted to experience these rapidly changing Polar regions first hand, as research for her interest in exploration, climate change and exploitation of land and natural resources. Deep Time Vanishing is a body of work in progress, developing in response to this trip. Using diverse media including analogue photography, drawing and video, the work reflects both the idea of the untouched landscape of our imaginations as well as the reality of humanity’s interventions.
Her photographic images were shot with a medium format analogue camera and hand printed directly from the negative. Multiple exposures created in the field on camera, allow for unpredictable outcomes in the negatives. These layered images, contribute to the sense of motion experienced on board a moving ship and hint at the vulnerability and impermanence of the landscape. The images across the series reflect both the idea of the untouched landscape of our imaginations as well as the reality of humanity’s interventions.
Lunar Sea was shot through the porthole of the ship, and evokes the link between oceans and cosmos, Moon and tides. In Treading Lightly ghostly figures inhabit the image – like traces of the many groups who have passed through the landscape at different times – as explorers, scientists, extractors, tourists or poets. Thinning echoes some of Relly’s paintings where the landscape has dissolved almost entirely. Glacier Tide gives a sense of the glacier shifting shape, dissolving or retreating over time.