Sharpe's Wood is a substantial body of photographic work centred on an area of woodland situated on the edge of a northern city. Developed through sustained engagement with the site, the project uses long-exposure night photography to investigate the relationship between landscape, perception, and photographic representation. The woodland became a testing ground for photographic seeing, where the camera's capacity to record extended durations of time revealed aspects of the environment that remained largely inaccessible to human vision.

​

Working after dark, the photographs capture traces of nocturnal light, transforming familiar woodland into an ambiguous and often uncanny space. The extended exposure collapses distinctions between documentation and invention, recording physical reality while simultaneously producing images that challenge conventional experiences of landscape. Trees, pathways, and vegetation emerge from darkness with an intensified presence, creating a tension between revelation and concealment.

The work engages critically with the long tradition of landscape photography and its role in shaping cultural understandings of place. Rather than presenting landscape as a stable, picturesque subject, Sharpe's Wood explores it as a site of uncertainty, memory, and transformation. The photographs question the assumption that landscapes can be fully known or objectively represented, suggesting instead that they are continually reimagined through cultural narratives, histories, and technologies of vision.

​

Situated on the urban fringe, the woodland occupies a contested territory between nature and culture, wilderness and development. The project reflects upon changing relationships with local environments at a time when traditional notions of place, belonging, and regional identity were increasingly shaped by wider social and environmental change. In this context, the photographs resonate with contemporary debates concerning the decline of local distinctiveness and the erosion of what cultural geographers describe as a meaningful sense of place.

​

Drawing upon theories of landscape as a cultural construction, Sharpe's Wood examines how photography mediates our understanding of the natural world. The nocturnal images reveal landscape not as a fixed reality but as a complex and shifting encounter between light, time, technology, and perception. By transforming an overlooked woodland into a psychologically charged and visually compelling environment, the work contributes to broader discussions surrounding the representation of northern English landscapes and the capacity of photography to reconfigure the familiar into something strange, evocative, and newly seen.

​

Exhibited:

Viewpoints (selected work/group show). Leeds Trinity University 2024

Northern Light Contemporary Landscape. Sheffield Hallam University  2016

Field Work. Impressions Gallery, Bradford 2017

The Gallery (group show selected works).

LANDeSCAPE NORTH Fannels, Leeds 2012-13 curated by Tony Baker.

Twenty Exhibition (2010):  a major exhibition celebrating 20 years of the Hereford Photography Festival, curated by Professor Paul Seawright.

Sharpe's Wood. PM Gallery, Ealing, London 2010-11.

Leeds Open. Leeds Art Gallery. 2009.

Bexley Wing. Leeds Teaching Hospital.

Sharpe's Wood (inaugural show) 2007 Impressions Gallery, Bradford.

​

Pre 2007 (tilted as: Unseen):

Unseen. Photography Gallery, Dean Clough, Halifax. 

Anglo-Irish Bank, Leeds.

One Landscape Many Views. Cartwright Hall, Bradford 2001

Photofolio Salt's Mill, Saltaire.

​

​

​

​