Despina Kyriacov / England

Artist Statement ::
I am a photographer who works mainly with a large format view camera for my Landscape/Fine Art work.  I use 5 x 4 colour transparency film and usually have my images made into cibachrome prints.  I studied Fine Art at Art School of which I specialised in photography in my final year.  During my time at art school I was inspired by nature and its forces and my interaction with it.  I used photography as a means of expression and have been preoccupied with it ever since.

My work " Seaweed" is a part of a visual exploration of the seascape as seen from the North East Yorkshire coast and the Northumberland coast from Robin Hoods Bay to the Bamburgh coastline.  It is my attempt to juxtapose differences from these various seascapes, in various lighting conditions and tidal times.  This vision, which is frozen in time, becomes abstracted from its own reality just by the framing of the composition i.e. selected subject matter.  There exists the contradiction of wanting to be true to nature when photography doesn’t allow one to be.  I am fascinated by this tension.  I am not interested in ‘idealising’ nature in order to beautify it.  I am attempting to record it as truthfully and as faithfully as possible, recognising the existing properties and seeing the truth about what is there.  By photographing nature is this way I am segmenting pieces of it in order to scrutinise moments of it at a particular point in time.

---