Less, 2022
Commissioned by untitled (recs)
This project is a record of a landscape, made to visually support rock band deathcrash's sophomore LP, 'Less'. Made over a fortnight, I designed a mobile installation that was used to survey the Isle of Lewis, taking pictures of it shapeshifting and adapting to new topographies in the terrain. I collected soil samples to make chromatographic records of the substrate, and produced two additional photographic essays that were formatted into lyric books and inserts for the publication. I also used the installation to direct two music videos to accompany the record.
North-minded, 2023
Published by Zone6
Buy it here:
https://photobookcafeshop.com/products/north-minded-by-kaye-song
The photographs in this project were taken along the Norwegian and Barents Sea, at the Arctic edge of the world.
Driving across over 1000 km of coastline, I ticked off national parks and scenic viewpoints under the never-setting sun. Between these, I encountered artillery batteries cast into rock, rickety wooden racks for drying fish, fences for holding back drifting snow in the tundra, dams, graveyards, quarries, piers, factories, roadworks... I had anticipated finding pristine vistas, but finding lumps and bumps under its surface came as somewhat a relief - that the myth of the Arctic as a sublime, untouched frontier perpetuated by adventure-seeking foreigners had inconsistencies. My camera pointed to moments that shattered my own illusion of the place, framing elements that hinted instead at the land’s capacity to support human living, which - in face of the harsh conditions here - was allowed to be piecemeal and slow.
The term ‘north-minded’ was coined by writer Robert Macfarlane to describe the phenomenon that draws one to extreme heights and latitudes, where there is so little dust content in the atmosphere that ‘light is able to move unscattered through the air’; northerliness a ‘mode of perception as well as a geographical position’. I had always fancied myself as north-minded, the oblique light and cold temperatures strike a unique calm in me and I like that remoteness can afford quiet. Taking these photographs and making this book with Johnny, I am beginning to understand the nuance of this term beyond its obvious allure and see north-mindedness as a way of getting to know a distant land. To be north-minded is to practise a method. It is to acknowledge our place in a landscape that is made not only of experience but also imagination - to go to these remote places and find life in the apparently barren, to be an active surveyor whilst moving sensitively and stoically in tandem with the land.
The Outdoor Canvas, 2023
In collaboration with STORE Projects
Commissioned by Oxford University Development and Company, Place
The is a public art project inspired by agricultural infrastructure. The Outdoor Canvas is a modular, mobile structure for displaying art, which can also be used as a cinema screen, a performance stage, or to store ‘accessories’ for turning hay bales into seating structures.
Four Landscapes for Stoke, 2022
Commissioned by B-Arts, part-funded by Stoke-on-Trent City Council and Historic England.
An original artwork commission for Stoke Town, to breathe new life into high streets around England.The artwork storyboards how the landscape around Stoke has formed what it is today.
I ran a workshop to engage students from Staffordshire University. We made a large landscape model out of local clay whilst thinking about the make-up of our land and our relationship to our wider surroundings. We 3D-scanned this together and the mesh from this features in the fourth panel.
Shane de Blacam, 2023
Commissioned by the Royal Academy of Arts and exhibited at the Guangzhou Design Triennale 2024
These images use three of Shane de Blacam’s buildings in Ireland as a stage for photography. In place of heroic vistas and glossy interiors, I looked for more intimate moments in the buildings, where one might see how materials have aged or how the architect’s careful hand has orchestrated a special coming together of light and shadow, mass and void. Using a square-format camera and 120mm film, the images are vignettes that describe a highly sophisticated architecture - one that masterfully mediates elements across scale and that is embedded firmly in context.
The Horse Shed, 2023
Commissioned by Youngwilders
An outdoor shelter built from the recycled components of two defunct horse sheds on-site. This structure is designed as a gathering space, whilst also telling a story of a landscape shifting from its use as ex-grazing land, to community-led ecological restoration.
Design for an Edgeland, 2020
Drawings and models made that speculate on a design for an edgeland landscape, using fluidity and marginality as the basis for the architecture. Buildings are made from rammed earth on-site, arranged around new thoroughfares through the landscape with walls that form containers to quarried-come-wetlands.
Blink and you'll miss it, 2023
Commissioned by Assemble
For publication in upcoming anthology of essays on rural Britain by Little Toller Books
This is a photo essay documenting the elusive transformation of rural Britain as experienced through a series of journeys along the planned High-Speed Rail line - HS2 - that is proposed to better link London and the North of England.
The Greenhouse, 2024
Commissioned by The Paradise Co-operative
A sheltered teaching space, designed to take up the exact floor area and volume of a beloved but rotting yurt. The project used uncut polycarbonate panels as a nod to greenhouse vernacular and strapped breezeblocks on top of reclaimed railway sleeper foundations as ballast and seats.
Reclamation, 2022
Set design and photography for Madder Rose
A peninsula of marshland is held together by a sea wall and tentatively reclaimed from the Blackwater Estuary in Essex. This is an intertidal landscape where water seeps through mud undetected. Its ground plane breathes and appears to operate with its own logic but is at the same time intrinsically coupled to its setting, affording both a sense of freedom and one-ness on this vast, open sea-edge.
The Fyfield School of Land, 2020
Drawings made that speculate on a redevelopment of farmland in England as a sustainable, equitable, and pedagogical landscape.
Buildings are proposed that can support this, utilizing a method of construction that harvests and processes material directly quarried or grown on-site. They promote a low-energy and sustainable architecture that exists in harmony with its environment, connected to and part of a changing landscape that it helps to shape. Digging is advocated as a right only if undertaken mindfully with consideration of surrounding impacts.
Return, 2021
Commissioned by untitled (recs)
A set of earthen images were made for deathcrash's debut LP, Return.
They were taken from the peat bog landscape of the Hatfield Moors, almost a year after it was devastated by fire in May 2020 (which burned for more than 10 days). Blackened birches and crusted bark-like ground made green moss pop like neon in a landscape that’s been exploited, extracted, cut and re-cut for fuel since the 13th century. Today, it’s a nature reserve and SSSI with an incredible calm amidst a sense of hope of what might follow all the past and recent destruction - a tone the underpins the music in Return.
Wilderness in Progress, 2021
Published in Overgrowth.
A photo essay exploring the construction of wilderness in Wester Ross in the north-west Scottish Highlands.
The Colour of Industry, 2019-20
Published by Zone6.
A photo essay exploring the less salient qualities of industrial architecture in the an area in North London on the cusp of drastic measures for redeveloping the surrounding areas into high density living.
Poetics and Politics of Flyovers, 2017-18
Over fifty flyovers were documented as part of a project that investigates the spaces created by transport infrastructure. The hundreds of flyovers built over a short time in Indian cities is unusual - they dominate the urban landscape and their giganticism was exploited to physically emulate that of the global world-class city.
This simulation may be convincing to those on the highway or in aerial shots that market the city, but a camera at ground-level uncover pluralistic environments underneath and reveal more of the true nature of the city as experienced as local everyday neighbourhoods
Design competitions, 2020
Images made for design competitions - proposals that centre storytelling as a key inspiration for the architecture.
Image 1 (in collaboration with Amy Grounsell):
'The Ground Beneath Us' - a proposal for an outdoor canopy that tells a story of the geology of the area, using nets with pockets to contain locally quarried stone.
Image 2:
'Building and building and building' - a proposal for a temporary library of self-build resources, using the crane as inspiration for its form
Image 3 (in collaboration with Hannah Sheerin):
'The Little Shed of Horrors' - a proposal for a shed that plays on the cabin in the woods trope whilst drawing from folk architecture as a homage to the eerie English landscape. The design of each element of the shed has taken inspiration from a classic horror film, but abstracted so as not to spook too many passers-by.
Saltmarsh research, ongoing
My ongoing photography and research about saltmarsh landscapes, and preliminary sketches exploring the idea of making displays for printed images and other collected material. Exploring the complexities of intertidal landscapes and how humankind have altered, exploited, and now live with them.
Last photographs from a research trip to the North Sea coast of Denmark [+1, 2], which share many similarities with the English east coast (the Wash, the Thames Estuary [3, 4, 5]). These are landscapes where water reed and eelgrass is in abundance, and the architecture here reflects it.