ENTRY DESCRIPTION
Part of my ongoing series The Forest, this photo depicts Kelsey Dylan, an American model and herbalist specialising in medicinal mushrooms. She travels the world for work but will not fly, instead circumnavigating the globe via boat, train and buses, staying with me every time her boat lands in the UK. She always goes out of her way to be helpful; from helping me haul boxes of photo paper from my old darkroom into my new studio to insisting on cooking meals at home.
The Forest is a conscious departure from masculinity & modernity, in medium & in subject matter. My subjects are my contemporaries, from a global community of young artists using their bodies in art, uniquely connected in the digital age through social media. Recent puritanical legislation around the globe has inhibited how we connect & share our work, but we continue to create.
Being from the same community we have immediate familiarity that others aren’t privy to. We are nude, but it is an unselfconscious & primordial nudity, reclaimed from the male gaze & with a softness & intimacy rarely captured in a male lens. We are in nature & a part of it; we aren’t conquerors of the natural world, we are skyclad witches & exultant earth goddesses in communion with nature, vulnerable yet unafraid. We remain people, as unique & individual as the forest itself, not anonymous figures bereft of identity. We are willing collaborators & active participants, captured with the ritual alchemy of analogue photography.
The images of The Forest are an expression of freedom, defiance, community & of liberation of spirit, continuing a tradition stretching back generations.
AUTHOR
I am a British LGBTQ+ visual artist working primarily with analogue photography, specialising in nude portraiture. I studied Fine Art at Central St Martins and continue to live and work in London.
In 2020 I received a Gold Award in the San Francisco Bay International Photo Award, an Honourable Mention in Photos Des Femmes’ seeingWOMEN Awards and in the 15th Julia Margaret Cameron Award. In 2019 I was awarded an Artist Residency prize and a Special Mention of the Jury Award in photography from the Mediterranean Contemporary Art Prize. Also in 2019 I was a semi-finalist in the Head On Portrait Prize, obtained 3rd place in Nudes from the Monochrome Photography Awards, received an Honourable Mention at the Tokyo International Foto Awards, and was an official selection for the Imago Lisboa Meeting Point portfolio reviews. In 2018 I was a nominee for the PhotogrVphy Grant. In 2017 I was the subject of the award-winning short documentary A Film On Film by David McNulty. In 2014 I received the Silverprint/Photofusion Black and White Photography Award.
The first nude body I photographed was my own. My self-portraiture is a way for me to explore my own vulnerabilities, and I did this by removing my clothing, my armour. Later, others responded to this vulnerability and began allowing me past their own armour.
By shooting on film my photos become tactile objects, a counterpoint to the incorporeal and ephemeral digital photography that surrounds us every day.
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