Liz Johnson

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Artist Statement

I work with large format film cameras. This makes for slow, considered picture-making and enables me to make high-quality enlarged prints and also to employ a range of traditional contact printing processes such as platinum palladium and POP printing This in turn means that I can select the process which will best complement the 'feel' of any given image. My work, which engages primarily with the environment and our relationship to it, is concerned with atmosphere, with emotion, and with reflection, rather than with straight documentation. It deals equally with abstract qualities - of light, structure, tone and form. I think of the camera as a transformative tool, and aim to produce work which is sufficiently ambiguous to bear sustained and repeated looking. I find that I am often drawn to work in places which are in various stages of decay and disintegration, as if they are returning to the earth. The photographs from Eric's Sheds are an example of this fascination. These images are part of a major project which was based around the sheds of my elderly next door neighbour. Full to the brim with his hoardings over the years, these sheds were then emptied after his death, leaving only the cobwebs in the windows. The conservatory image is one of a series of photographs made in a derelict Victorian conservatory. This image, like much of my work, deals with what is hidden (through the stained window panes) as much as what is revealed. The ruins of Angkor have much in common with the trees in my home county of Cumbria, half a million of which were destroyed by storm in early 2005. In both cases, what has collapsed has been transformed something else, more abstract, more evocative, and, from a photographic point of view, more beautiful.

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