Land/Sea Gallery
Click the thumbnails to see a larger version of the image and the image caption.
Shoe 22, Playa Santa Maria, Havana, Cuba, 2015The plastic sole of this platform shoe looks like an apartment block. Look closely and you’ll see tiny sea creatures living inside it. Plastic is made from refined crude oil, which formed from the remains of plankton and seaweeds that lived millions of years ago. This is a powerful reminder that nature reclaims man-made materials. Whether we intend to or not, our behaviour affects the ecosystems around us, from which we are never entirely separate.
Flip Flop 29, Playa Santa Maria, Havana, Cuba, 2015The artist finds lost flip flops on almost every beach he visits. Mass-produced and easy to find in any colour you choose, they are worn in every country in the world. But they don’t last long. They are one of the ultimate symbols of our throw-away society. Here, shellfish feed on what humans have left behind. This is how the harmful chemicals in plastic enter the food chain.
Flip Flop 13, Saadani Beach, Tanzania, 2013Nature has created its own ‘micro-landscape’ on this discarded flip flop. These delicate markings resemble river tributaries. When you look at these photographs, do you think about your own footprint?
Gwrych Dryslyd (Hedgerow Confusion), Ffynnonofi, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2019This image was made by layering two photographs: a blackthorn in blossom in spring, and a hawthorn in autumn. This is the artist’s way of telling the story of climate change and nature confusion. Unseasonal weather causes native species to flower at unusual times. The untouched red berries are a sign of fewer wild birds. Farmland bird populations fell by 57% in the UK between 1970 and 2018. In Wales, half of the top 10 wild birds in decline are farmland species.
Blue Vegetable Carton, Freshwater West, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2016The ocean wears rocks down into pebbles and shells into sand. The same thing happens to plastic objects in the sea. They break down into smaller and smaller pieces. Such microplastics are found everywhere now – in sand, on mountaintops, in rivers, in rain, in soil, in our food, and our bodies. Here is what’s left of a vegetable carton after spending time in the sea. Nets and grids like this are a danger to seabirds.
Flailed Hawthorn, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2020The artist uses this tree to symbolise the tension between managing the landscape for food production and managing it for conservation. Mechanized land management has had a negative impact on hedgerows in the last eighty years. As a consequence, farmland birds and insect numbers have declined, due to loss of habitat.
Traditional hedge laying skills have been lost but thanks to the work of the National Park Authority and schemes such as Tir Gofal and Glastir, there is support for farmers who want to restore hedgerows and other wildlife habitats on their land.
Links: Pembrokeshire Coast National Park - Traditional Boundaries Grant Scheme 2020/21
Pembrokeshire Coast National Park - Conserving the Park scheme.
Traditional hedge laying skills have been lost but thanks to the work of the National Park Authority and schemes such as Tir Gofal and Glastir, there is support for farmers who want to restore hedgerows and other wildlife habitats on their land.
Links: Pembrokeshire Coast National Park - Traditional Boundaries Grant Scheme 2020/21
Pembrokeshire Coast National Park - Conserving the Park scheme.
Burnt Gorse, Preseli, Preseli Hills, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, Wales 2005Looking like a scene from a war movie, this photograph urges us to seek a more balanced relationship with nature. Gorse burning is a traditional way of maintaining heathland pasture for grazing. But ecologists argue that it destroys wild bird habitats and releases carbon into the atmosphere, which hinders our fight against climate change. But in some cases, heathland patch burning can improve biodiversity. The National Park Authority works with grazers to minimise the harmful effects.
Bench, Elan Valley Nature Reserve, Powys, Wales 2015Is this a beautiful view of unspoilt countryside? Or is this a landscape that centuries of sheep grazing have laid bare? The artist uses this bench, which is located on a tourist route in Mid-Wales, as the starting point for discussing opposing viewpoints of how upland landscapes should look, and be used.
Common Land, Dinas Mountain, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, Wales 2019Echoing 19th century paintings of “the pastoral” - or idealised rural life - this photograph was taken at a popular picnic spot in Pembrokeshire. Does it show nature in harmony, or is the artist suggesting something different?
Bleek, Domestic Cleaning Product, Freshwater West, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2017Voluntary beach cleaners do a valiant job, removing tonnes of plastic pollution from our shores. But elsewhere, that instinct to keep things looking clean and tidy can go too far! Sometimes it is the scruffy and overlooked parts of our landscape that make the best wildlife habitat. So lock up your lawn mower and create a wildflower meadow in your back garden. Let those brambles ramble and make the most of every space available to nature!
Container Abstracts, Green, Blue, Pink and Orange, Newgale, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2015What is a seascape? Is it something that an artist paints, or something that the ocean creates? The artist describes these as ‘ready-made’ seascapes. He photographs the sides of plastic containers washed in on the tides. The markings are made by nature, not the human hand, and challenge traditional ideas of representation. Their industrial colour palette is very different to the colours we are used to seeing in more romantic depictions of the sea-shore. They record both man’s impact on nature and nature’s impact on the ‘man-made’.
Green Gorse, Ffynnonofi, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, Wales 2004At first sight this might be a view looking down on a tropical rainforest. The lungs of the planet, rainforests are the most biodiverse places on Earth. We start to imagine towering trees teeming with thousands of birds, bats, small mammals, lichens, mosses and ferns. On closer inspection, the trees we are looking at are all one species – gorse – and just a few feet high. The artist uses this monochrome slab of green to illustrate the ecological problems that arise from monoculture farming. Where temperate rainforests once stood, are we content for this to be all that remains of ‘the wild’?
Pecked Foam, Porth Ceiriad, Llyn Peninsula, Wales, 2016When choosing what to photograph, the artist looks for objects that evoke other times and places. This looks a marble tablet inscribed with ancient text. But these markings were actually scratched by hungry seabirds in their search for food. Dead seabirds are often found with stomachs choked full of plastic. Puffins, kittiwakes and even herring gulls are on the RSPB’s red list of birds that urgently need help.
Fencing, Tremadog Bay, Llŷn Peninsula, Wales 2016The artist is interested in the history of the grid as a symbol of modernity and utopian ideals. Plastic grids like this one, found washed up on a beach in North Wales, cause the deaths of thousands of seabirds each year. Offered back to us by nature, this grid becomes a dystopian symbol of the damage done to the natural world.
Ash Dieback, Moonlight, Ffynnonofi, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, Wales, 2019“You don’t have to go to the Arctic to see environmental collapse. It’s here on our doorsteps, in our lanes and hedgerows. And it’s happening now.” – Mike Perry
This melancholic moonlit photograph captures the dying branches of the ash trees surrounding the artist’s studio in North Pembrokeshire. Ash dieback is perhaps the epidemic that has gone unnoticed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Up to 95% of Britain’s ash trees could be lost to this disease. Pembrokeshire has been particularly hard hit.
This fungal disease, thought to have been introduced by commercial trade in saplings, is a reminder of the need to protect our habitats and ecosystems.
Passionate ecologists, committed volunteers and caring landowners are working hard to replant native woodlands and hedgerows.
This melancholic moonlit photograph captures the dying branches of the ash trees surrounding the artist’s studio in North Pembrokeshire. Ash dieback is perhaps the epidemic that has gone unnoticed during the Covid-19 pandemic. Up to 95% of Britain’s ash trees could be lost to this disease. Pembrokeshire has been particularly hard hit.
This fungal disease, thought to have been introduced by commercial trade in saplings, is a reminder of the need to protect our habitats and ecosystems.
Passionate ecologists, committed volunteers and caring landowners are working hard to replant native woodlands and hedgerows.
Burnt Fertilizer Bags (Red White and Blue), Pembrokeshire, Wales 2019The artist found this lump of burnt plastic in a field near his home. Its shape and colours reminded him of the iconic American Eagle, but the story it tells him is not simply about plastics entering our food systems. For him, it also symbolises the influence of politics and big business on how we farm.
Shoes 4, 2, 9, & 1, Cwm Gwyllog, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2015These old shoes were in the sea a long time. Those daps must have been worn in the 1970s! How did they end up in the ocean? Who did they belong to? These shoes tell an archaeological story about landscape and culture. When future archaeologists look back at us, what stories will they tell? Do we like what we’re leaving behind for future generations?
Cross, Wet Deserts Rannoch Moor, Scotland, 2009“When I arrived at Rannoch Moor the land looked ravaged. Not the untouched romantic wilderness I’d read about in Robert Macfarlane’s Wild Places or had imagined based on the travel guides and colour supplements. The tourist route through Rannoch Moor appeared to go through what looked to me like a First World War battlefield. A flooded plain of cut down trees and rotting roots. The land was pitted and destroyed not from military apparatus but by landowners and forestry businesses...” – Mike Perry
Conifer plantations like this one in Scotland contribute to climate change because draining land for forestry releases the carbon stored in bogs. In Pembrokeshire, the National Park Authority bought a spruce plantation near the Gwaun Valley, and has started to restore it to moor and heathland. Now heather, bilberry and gorse are recolonising the landscape. Rare marsh fritillary butterflies live nearby.
Conifer plantations like this one in Scotland contribute to climate change because draining land for forestry releases the carbon stored in bogs. In Pembrokeshire, the National Park Authority bought a spruce plantation near the Gwaun Valley, and has started to restore it to moor and heathland. Now heather, bilberry and gorse are recolonising the landscape. Rare marsh fritillary butterflies live nearby.
Loch Cluanie, Western Highlands, Scotland, 2009The artist took this photo at the end of a long day. When he developed the film he couldn’t quite understand what had happened. Was it a double exposure, or had water got in the lens? The strangeness of the image seemed to fit the strangeness of the flooded landscape near a Scottish hydro-electric reservoir, where there were few signs of life.
20. Keep Box Fragment, Freshwater West, Pembrokeshire, Wales 2015Perry has photographed the suspended side of a fishing ‘keep box’ as a reminder of the pollution caused by the fishing industry. Like Fencing, these threatening ‘cage like’ black and white objects are examples of the manufactured surfaces and patterns now making up our marine ecosystems. They are geometric abstractions that tell a powerful contemporary story of the seashore.
