MB1+MB2
MB1+MB2 contains selections from two series of images inspired by the landscape of the Morecambe Bay area in the north west of England. The work alternates black and white film images and colour images of rephotographed chromogenic prints, cyanotypes, and screen prints that have been treated to a mix of processes. Technically and aesthetically both series move back and forth across the digital divide, with digital images manipulated in the darkroom and analogue processes and prints reinterpreted digitally.
Morecambe Bay is an inlet of the Irish Sea. It is eighteen miles in length with an average width of ten miles. The Bay has one of the highest tidal ranges in the world, and the second highest in the United Kingdom after the Bristol Channel. The group of four large estuaries that comprise Morecambe Bay form the largest area of intertidal sands and mudflats in the United Kingdom, covering a total area of 310 square kilometres (120 square miles). In addition, there are associated saltmarshes, shingle beaches, forests, hills and a unique community of plants. Morecambe Bay is one of the most important wildlife sites in Europe. A quarter of a million birds winter, breed or pass through on their migration. There are seven islands in the Bay, five of which can be walked to at low tide. It is perhaps no surprise that the Cornwall-based environmental charity, the Eden Project, is developing Eden Project North at Morecambe to draw on the many natural wonders of the Bay.
Any visitor to Morecambe Bay is quickly aware that it is a special, dynamic landscape. The constantly changing weather and light, strong winds, vast sands and shifting channels formed by the rapidly receding tide, ensure that each visit to the Bay is a unique visual experience. The work reflects the astonishing diversity of the Morecambe Bay landscape and the mood of visual uncertainty, caused by the rapid changes in weather, that is most accurately symbolic of a truly unique place. The wide horizontal perspective of many of the images has been chosen to reflect the geographical shape of the Bay.
MB3+MB4
Two further alternating selections of colour and black and white landscape images from Morecambe Bay with the same mixed media methods and fine art printing techniques used in MB1+MB2.
Ghosts Are Real
'Memory's got nothing to do with the old and grey and faraway gone. Memory's the muscle sting of now.' David Chariandy
Encompassing diverse camera methods, experimental processing, a range of media and various fine-art print making techniques, Ghosts Are Real is a glorious full-bleed expression of beauty, colour and abstraction.
Ghosts Are Real is about memory, time and place and the myriad, often confusing ways in which they relate to each other. It is about the bruised relationship between the world and the self, about the way love can provide a protective shield, present everywhere, agile and invulnerable. Above all, it is a reminder that there is no bolt to slide across the past, thoughts, good and bad, welcome and unwelcome, will always return from the long grass of memory.
The work was created during a difficult period in Philip J Brittan’s life. His mother had just died after struggling with illness for several months and, as so often happens, dealing with the estate fractured his family in rancorous conflict. Philip escaped each evening for long, slow walks through the city and surrounding countryside. The night walks became a sort of haven, a place to recuperate from the troubles of the day. Memory is always associative; we recall not just the place itself but what it conjures in the mind. Walking, a different route each time, and often suddenly prompted by a particular place, Philip regularly experienced the emotional ambush that can arrive in the small hours with the past erupting into the present; welcome ghosts and lyrical memories alive with his time spent in the city, from child to adult—faces, voices, objects, music, walks, animals, stories.
Ghosts Are Real is the series of images created based on those long night walks; images that are as much about feelings experienced—the sense of a vanished world—as the representation of particular places. The daytime traumas, and his mother’s recent death, encouraged a bittersweet appreciation of the fragile wonders of the world, the sheer joy of the here and now, of life's exquisite, magical pleasures. And there is considerable visual beauty in the work—a reflection of the liberating freedom of the night walks and the revitalising time of recovery spent creating the images.
Last Garden
The images in Last Garden were created in the beautiful garden of Philip J Brittans’ mother during the last few weeks of her life.
"Come and look at the garden" were often amongst the first words Philip’s mother spoke when he visited. She was a dedicated gardener who gained immense pleasure from the many hours she spent working in the garden that she maintained for most of her life. The results were magnificent, combining a wide variety of plants in ways that enticed complimentary comments from visitors and from strangers passing by.
Sadly, as her health and mobility deteriorated, Philip’s mother spent less and less active time in the garden; a cause of great frustration and sadness. Philip moved house to be close to her and gradually took over the care of the garden.
During this time Philip started to make images in the garden using the plants, soil, water, sun and rain, initially with no clear plan about how to best produce and process the finished work. Eventually Philip decided that he needed to have a more intimate and physical connection with the prints and to include a process that allowed the garden to directly influence the finished work. He painted on the prints with various media and buried them in the garden (some with fabrics from his mother's house) for extended periods of time, allowing the place to mark the work in a very direct way.
The images do not reflect Philip’s state of mind at the time of their creation. In a period marked by reluctant absorption into the world of doctors, hospitals, and care workers, of fatigue, anxiety and sadness, it would perhaps have been more accurate emotionally to have smeared a mass of mud across the prints. But it wouldn't have been true to his mother's spirit or to the garden she created. She took pride in its success and delighted in its life-affirming beauty. With Last Garden Philip has endeavoured to be true to her positive vision. He wanted to make images that are alight with love, images that through their glowing beauty radiate a clear sense that this very personal work really matters.
In memory of Ivy Brittan
Autumn River
A selection of images from Autumn River, a series made with some of the millions of decaying leaves that fall into the River Frome, in the south west of England, and are carried, like brightly coloured jewels, along its length each year.
In Autumn River Philip J Brittan makes work that, inspired by the way Roger Deakin thinks about water in his classic book Waterlog, is not just about the river but also in and with the river, searching for something beyond what the eye can easily see. The images were made by moving into the water, either on foot or by boat, with many images looking beneath the surface of the river. In this immersive setting perspective, scale and colour are reconfigured, leaves are reflected and distorted, a mass of intoxicating colours intensified and blurred with movement, trees on the riverbank viewed through a multi-coloured haze.
The River Frome is a small and unremarkable river that runs through the urbanised outskirts of Bristol. It is not a typical place where one would expect to find the wild or the beautiful. But it’s there and it’s there in abundance. The work in Autumn River then can be viewed as further evidence supporting the view that we do not need to indulge in the contradictory and environmentally damaging practice of travelling vast distances to find the wild or the sublime—opportunities exist all around us, we just need to be attentive and look. As the images make clear, to be in such a place in the northern hemisphere on a breezy day in late autumn can be mesmerizing, vital, and life enhancing. The colourful chaos that is autumn producing a canopy of glorious colours smeared by water and wind—a sensational natural firework display of the red, yellow and orange pigments of the autumn leaves, with the colours almost appearing to fall from the air itself.
Bring Me Sunshine: Morecambe, Austerity and the Death of Retail
The images in Bring Me Sunshine show one aspect of Morecambe, a seaside town in the north west of England, after a disastrous ten years of unnecessary and ideologically driven austerity inflicted by Conservative, and Conservative and Liberal Democrat coalition, governments in the United Kingdom between 2010 and 2020.
The austerity experiment implemented over the last decade has had appalling human consequences, especially—inevitably and deliberately—for the poor. Encouraged by the IMF and other international financial institutions, Conservative UK governments used an economically confused and ideological driven obsession with the deficit to make drastic and damaging spending cuts to state expenditure. Wages stagnated, and while employment stayed high, new jobs paid badly. Personal debt exploded, inequality worsened, home ownership declined and precarious private renting expanded. Central funding to local government was cut by up to 60%, with predictable negative effects on a wide range of public services—including social care, transport, planning and housing—and legal obligations for standards and safety. Sports facilities, museums and libraries were closed or sold off. Homelessness came back, changes to the benefit system were a dysfunctional, incompetent disaster—with benefit scroungers successfully blamed. Food banks grew, zero-hour jobs flourished, the punitive bedroom tax was introduced, benefit sanctions increased with disabled people disproportionately affected. The NHS was reorganised and starved of funds—with immigrants blamed for the increased pressures on services. Courts closed, prisons became overcrowded, legal aid traduced. Child poverty increased, as did infant mortality.
Seaside towns in the UK reflect and amplify many of the UK's wider economic problems. In particular, a dysfunctional housing market with a shortage of social housing has forced more people into private renting, while cuts to housing benefit since 2010 have ensured that the most economically viable areas of the country are unaffordable for people on low incomes. With the decline in tourism seaside towns have a surfeit of old guesthouses that landlords have acquired and repurposed into low quality but affordable bedsits. In consequence, many seaside towns have become the place to go for cheap housing. Unfortunately, the economies of seaside towns, Morecambe included, offer mostly insecure, low-paid work, with little training and opportunity for local people to transform their lives.
Recent years have witnessed an unprecedented collapse in the retail sector in the UK with record numbers of high street stores and corner shops closing. The most significant factors shrinking the opportunities for any small scale retail business have been the continued rise and dominance of the supermarket and the relentless expansion of Amazon and other online companies. The results in Morecambe have left a decaying retail fabric.