subatomicboy's photostream  

Hello, I'm atomboy and I make photographs, drawings and write. I was trained in photography and visual communication technology. The work I produce explores the experience of landscape as tension and the resulting images are usually a "working through" but not necessarily a resolution of that tension. In this respect many of the images are ambivalent and "open" and this is intentional. For various reasons, I have only recently started showing my work in public.

The images I make are mainly photographs but I draw, make masks and sometimes make small installations in the landscape as well. I have also written music as one half of Renfro and we released a critically acclaimed album called Mathematics in 2009. Google it. Who knows, we may even make another one....

I am interested in animism, paganism, ritual, magick, autonomous politics, emergence theory, spatiality and the ways we enchant and speak to landscapes and of course the ways in which landscapes enchant and speak to us. The work operates from a marginal, liminal space and draws upon the permaculture notion of "edge" because the place where two systems or ecological habitats meet is generally more productive and richer. In my work I use edges and value the marginal, especially the ways in which human activities in the landscape impact on non-human persons. Photography has always occupied this liminal space in art history and it's one of the reasons I am drawn towards it in my practice, rather than painting or sculpture. Technically, this has led me to pushing lo tech camera set ups to see what happens. I am not necessarily interested in a technically perfect photograph and often digitally manipulate the images to "rough them up" I want them to appear to be of the landscape itself rather than a separated representation - we are in the landscape with dirty hands and feet rather than clinically documenting or fetishizing it. This means that my exploration of "beauty" may not necessarily reflect the dominant aesthetic conventions that inform landscape and rural photography.

I am from London but live in rural North Devon in the UK and the environs of South West England have had a massive impact on my consciousness and photographic practice. Before that I lived in very urban East London for 16 years and this transition from the city to the countryside is still playing out in my work, as it is in British culture generally (c.f Raymond Williams).

I am also exploring various male archetypes in my work, especially the Father and the Horned God, and I draw upon psychoanalytic theory and continental philosophy to make work about about subjectivity, masculinity, sexuality and gender too. I am particularly interested in memory, biography and reconciliation in relation to trauma. Recently, I have been thinking about making art in relation to Kropotkin's gift economy and how to use this idea in public space.

This is my Flickrstream. Many of the images have been contextualised on my Tumblr called Music for Torching. The Tumblr is a visual accompaniment to a written word blog which I no longer update, which I described as follows:

"An ongoing voyage into middle age by someone who'd quite like to sink the ship. It all goes here 'cos there's nowhere else to put it - well, nowhere that wouldn't end in gunfire, arrest and mutilation. There's a bit of magick, a bit of ritual, smatterings of Shamanism, a lot of pondering, and even more waddling around in pop culture."

Here on Flickr, the images float free to circulate on their own and have a bit of fun leading an independent life! I make this stuff because I only feel half alive when I don't do it. I also enjoy making art and the joy and curiosity that it inspires in me. I hope you like it too.