Nicholas Hughes: (British b. 1963)

How do we set about repairing our dysfunctional relationship with Nature and fully waken to all that we are offered by return?   In the making of my work, I regularly crave isolation to reduce distraction and regain concentration levels, walking which plays a major role in my practice allows me the time to shed the everyday preoccupations that our increasingly frenetic world throws at us. The silence this can afford can be complimentary to Photography in many respects.   Rather than seeking out the worlds’ beauty through travel – I take considerable time to study my immediate surroundings, the aim being to seek out the beautiful in the immediate as an aspect of our responsibility to the present. The recent lockdowns perhaps offered this potential to many who wished to become better acquainted with their own locale.   We do not often take or have the time to just be, although we refer to ourselves as human beings, we are more often than not - engaged in the act of doing.

In my work a certain subject matter becomes my muse until I have teased out how it makes me feel – it is about pursuing each image to its conclusion regardless of how long it takes. In spending a lengthy time in the same location - it is as though rather than looking at the scene you gradually become a part of it and rather than capturing what you might see on first sight this act of looking over time can evolve. It’s about being lost in the thereness of Nature - being in a space and the space being within you. When out walking, light is rarely static – I wanted to show that and aimed to offer an immersive experience - a sensory connection through moments akin to breaking the skin to another world.

“It’s all there. I never tire of looking at it, but I still don’t know the answers.” L.S. Lowry

“Immensity is within ourselves. It is attached to a sort of expansion of being that life curbs and caution arrests, but starts again when we are alone.” Gaston Bachelard

The wilderness provides a template onto which can be fixed one’s ideas and aspirations. To this end I have sought to capture the essence of the human spirit and its relationship with nature via abstract imagery. In distilling an emotional response to colour, my aim is to find a form of contemporary expressionist idealism. The overburdened mind is offered the escape valve of distant vistas through existing utopian visions.

My intention is to focus the observer’s attention and avoid deflecting it with negative images, which distract the observer from the essence of the image. In doing so I hope to draw the observer towards the spiritual essence of the image. The fragility of our existence is keenly illustrated in this manner and drawn towards existing beauty. I hope that the delicate nature of my portrayal serves as a metaphor of the fragility of our relationship with the natural world. It further aims to offer a re-acquaintance with what Dawn Perlmutter has suggested, a quality which has recently fallen off the agenda, the previous nourishment of much of the world’s art – the spiritual.