Tim Simmons Intervention: Snow
January 10th- February 1st
The photography of Tim Simmons prompts
us to dream, to contemplate time and
eternity. His works expound the spirit of the
place, from the mundane to the magnificent.
Landscapes from the back yard to the
snowfield are the sets of his eerie, haunting,
enigmatic photographs. Created as seamless,
modest yet elaborately orchestrated tableau.
Meticulous in their poise, composition and
lighting – Simmons is a master technician,
an illusionist.
By using a photographic technique refined
over the last 25 years, he reconfirms that the
camera can do much more than capture a
moment in time. Simmons established his
career through a practice that combined high
end commercial photography in parallel with
self directed artistic work. In recent years
he has focused on an artistic career which
has enabled him to develop an autonomous
technique and style. Like one of his
inspirations, Winston O Link, Simmons
developed a strong personal identity through
producing enigmatic photographs that are
thoughtfully planned and fluently delivered.
Akin to the techniques of location
management and filmmaking, the dynamic
qualities of his photographs come from their
careful preparation, composition and timing.
The precise positioning of the camera, equally
careful placement of the lighting sources for
maximum effect and refined post production,
all contribute to high production values whilst
retaining a sense of spontaneity and a notion
of chance encounter. One location alone will
require an intense commitment from the artist
and his team to enable an image to be crafted.
Many elements need to coincide to achieve
the final work. In the harsh conditions of
Nordic winter, the recent subject of his new
series, this is no easy task.
This exhibition, simply titled Snow, continues
his fascination with the magnificence and
latent mythology of the natural world. Taking
Simon Schama’s premise from Landscapes
and Memory, that ‘Landscapes are culture
before they are nature: constructs of the
imagination projected onto wood and water
and rock’, Simmons has accented
extraordinary yet covert aberrations in the
landscape. Throughout his career he has
created photographs of diverse landscapes
such as the frozen rivers in Norway, desolate
quarries in Yorkshire, the verdant woodlands
of Derbyshire and the fluid opulence of
Cornish rock pools. Consistently his
memorable images venerate the natural world.
The photographs of Tim Simmons are
animations of frozen time worked to elevate
landscape – imagined as an indefinite subject
between dream and reality – above history
and legend. His pictures suggest the bizarre
yet beautiful surrealities behind deceptively
familiar locations. Empty and lonely territories
become simultaneously poetic and seductive.
Even the golf cage, an element of leisure
industry architecture, becomes elevated to
new mythical status via the image. In the
staging of an unconventional view of a
recognisable landscape, the artist exploits
an emotional reading of the world around us
and demonstrates how our very psyche is
acutely embedded in the spectacular and
transcendent appeal of the natural
environment. Dissonantly lit in their isolation,
at once familiar, they draw us into exploring a
transformation of the urban landscape after
dark – cold grey concrete, a carport and
anonymous steps – usually banal and
disregarded, take on altogether new and
classical meanings in this estranged context.
Nocturne is a natural subject for artists
who exploit the metaphysical dynamic that
manifests during the dark hours of day. In
their work emblematic representation is
manipulated to amplify the emotional impact.
This technique is employed in Simmons’
revelation of the world, whose images are
instilled with a heavy silence and an anxious
glow. In his recent series, spanning a variety
of subjects from Forests to Quarries, Rock
Pools to Suburbia, images are conjured during
the diminishing hours of day. He often works
deep into the night when the uncanny and
otherworldly appear to manifest. In each
image the enchanting narrative unfolds
suggesting yet unrealised moments of
transformative potential, rendered with
concentration and subtleness these fleeting
encounters endure. Within eerie states of
stillness they possess a silent and
extraordinary magical beauty.
Validating or evidencing the inexplicable
is an ongoing concern that runs through the
series. The photographs are shot at night or
at the time just bridging twilight, a mythical
zone when the veil separating this world and
the next is at its thinnest. They bask in the loss
of light which accents the glow that persists,
emanating from an unknown source. The
most significant sense from the works is an
overriding feeling that evokes the notion of
interlude and aftermath. An atmosphere
within them causes an exhilarating unease,
a nervous excitement, a shift in perception,
the unknown is about to appear or has just
left. Photography is essentially a fictive
medium, able to create realities, the
experience of which poses complex questions
about how we attribute meaning, how we
define the ‘real’, how we think and how we
indoctrinate norms and collective signs.
Without heavy handed intent these images
become a Rorschach for a system of reading
signs and symbols.
Described by materiality, then illustrated
by their relational depths each of Simmons’
photographs uncovers and documents a
covert environment. Not filled with romantic
longing but an aesthetic and technical
objectivity. In a climate of image saturation
and predetermined experience, photographs
nevertheless trade on the underlying facticity
of the subject depicted. On encountering his
works we can also relate to a time before
scientific explanation and allow ourselves to
be open for a moment to a feeling of mystery,
abandonment and awe. Simmons plays on
our trust in photography’s totemic devices
to pertain to or evidence ‘the truth’, allowing
belief in the image and momentary suspension
of disbelief. Despite cynicism all of us crave
something beautiful and transcendent in our
lives. It is through this conveyance of ideas,
concerning nature of wonder and faith in the
language of images, that the symbolic
architecture of meaning is able to build and
take root. Simmons’ photographs offer a
glimpse of a hidden mystery, triggering us
into an imaginative reverie.
A master of the uncanny, Simmons is a
photographer who can transform an ordinary
parking lot into a sublime experience. Rock
pools, quarries and suburban gardens are
no contest for his vision and each prosaic
revelation becomes as unearthly as Close
Encounters, evocative of a parallel universe
and even more affecting to know that it exists
in ours. It is possibly this commitment to
mapping hybrid spaces which establishes a
consistency in the production of a potentially
disparate multiplicity of images. Simmons is a
flaneur within the beautiful, on an un-mapped
journey, a journey of the senses – he navigates
the globe in search of meaning. He is a
metaphorical conquistador of transcendence,
seeking out aberrations in the earth’s crust
that evidence the existence of an ethereal
otherness. He is building a global archeology
of the senses to share, the remit of his art is to
communicate meaning, his work is meaning
rich. But he also seeks in life, through his work,
a more sincere honest way, a grounded earthy
existence, a connectedness, a truth un-spoilt
by greed or materialistic competition.
When you are engaged with producing
open ended narratives as Simmons is you
find, on delving into the world of myth and
following the tangled threads, that at some
point everything is connected. This is the case
with Simmons’ new exhibition Snow. Drawing
on the threads that run throughout his past
series, concepts resurface concerning the
uncanny, eerie atmospheric portrayal of
landscapes. In Snow the focus is turned
towards a journey through the frozen winter
countryside in Valdres, Norway.
Snow covered landscapes are traditionally
romantic and entrancing places, isolated,
full of mystery and intrigue – simultaneously
capable of possessing a devastating beauty
and of being a destroyer of souls.
Unfortunately today remoteness is largely a
mythical notion, the snowscapes of Norway
are in fact an increasingly desecrated,
vulnerable set of linked human landscapes
and populated ecosystems. However, the
snowscape captured by Simmons’ lens is a
breath-taking compelling place, which lends
itself to the perception of a sublime yet
hauntingly harsh uninhabited wilderness
that confirms the fairy tales of youth.
Extremes in temperature and unique light
conditions exist in these harsh contrary
locations. During good weather pure bright
sunlight refracts in blinding brilliance from
the crystalline surface, at other times all
perception of gradient and perspective is
lost, obscured by blizzards or cloud. At night
during certain times of the year ethereal lights
manifest in the atmosphere. For thousands of
years people have marveled at their existence
and questioned the causes, many cultures
have a mythology to explain them. As Ian
Herbert finds in his research the ‘Lapps call
it revontulet – “fox fire”, the unearthly, green
light of the aurora borealis – the northern
lights. This is, according to one the country’s
folk tales, the heavenly effect of a fox running
on the snow, sweeping its tail so the sparks fly
off into the sky. There are many other mythical
explanations – an equally evocative one tells
that the aurora shows when there are so many
fish in the Arctic Sea that the light is reflected
up from their backs’. What then could be the
cause of the strange glow of light emanating
unidentifiably in the photographic landscapes
of Snow? Simmons creates a new mythology
in his work akin to the aurora borealis, he
produces a new inexplicable incandescent
phenomena.
The topography of Norway captured in
these photographic images evokes a
breath-taking natural spectacle so powerful
it seems to pulse with life. The sun trembles
just above the skyline casting dark shapes
across the snow, ready to sink back down into
shadows again. When darkness comes, the
ice radiates under a bright moon and another
enigmatic light source appears. Only the
jagged features of the landscape remain
visible in these snow-laden sites. Silhouettes
of trees are held in stasis within the ice,
hunched by the weight of their covering, like
sculptures struggling to become free from a
mass of stone lit by an unknown entity. The
landscape takes on the physical embodiment
of silence, a muted yet delicious exposition
on the hinterland between dreamlike and
conscious states that incorporates the
themes of absence and presence to
perfection. This series emphasises Simmons’
fascination with creating impossible yet
believable views. He plays with atmospherics
to create images that at first seem credible,
but then on closer analysis throw the viewer
into confusion. His photographs have a
curious quality and transparency that induces
a near tangible atmospheric effect. A radiation
of temperature and physical sensation
permeate and emanate from the imagery,
creating a micro-climate that is at once
geophysical and metaphysical.
Fascinated with the mythology of space
and potential traces of life in absence,
Simmons’ imagery does not attempt to offer a
single answer to a complexity of questions but
acts toward contributing to the mystery of life
and in reconfirming the elusivity of a tangible
didactic. Snow is a place where the
landscape’s intense, spectacular conditions
can become a state of mind and this is indeed
what happens in moments of clarity. Simmons
has refined his technique to represent a sense
of place that is greater and more compacted
than the geography of everyday life, it is a
transformative imaginary world beyond the
facade. Dostoyevsky was known to have said
that ‘Beauty will save the world’. To this end
these images come from a desire not only to
elucidate the incredible but also from an
ambition to examine and find the
transcendent, rather than represent the
beauty of mere surfaces.
Louise Clements is senior curator of QUAD.
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Devon Rockpool 1, 2007
Torridon Moss Pond, 2005
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