Lockdown Landscape
Oliver Sidaway | United Kingdom
Photographer: Oliver Sidaway
Exhibit Title: Lockdown Landscape
Location: United Kingdom
Coming back from abroad after three months of lockdown. Travelling by train from London to Bristol. I am wearing a mask but there is no one else in the carriage. The train is brand new, electric, very fast, it travels, rattling over the points, hurtling through the landscape which passes in a series of blurs.
The English Landscape, cleared and commissioned long ago, sculpted by centuries of architects, turned into a gallery of vistas. Studies in green and blue and grey. Empty. The occasional lorry on a parallel road. No one working or walking in this time of isolation. Looking at it feels as if someone has created this landscape and then left it. Maybe they’ll come back? Maybe they won’t?
The window of my carriage frames the view. My camera frames the window. And me behind my mask. Degrees of separation. Is it me or is the world getting further away?
I am interested in the relationship between people and landscape, how we shape it and how it shapes us in turn. Our relationship with our environment, urban, suburban, rural and wild is as much an emotional one as it is a physical interaction. The landscape is both metaphor and habitat and where the one ends and the other begins is the stuff of all sorts of stories and struggles.
www.oliversidawayart@gmail .com
www.oliversidaway.com
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