2012 – 2015
Taking its name from a Ministry of Defence report issued in 2011, that assessed the risk of residual contamination at sites in the United Kingdom used in the manufacture, storage, and disposal of chemical and biological weapons (CBW) from World War I to the present day.
Looking beyond the risk assessment to the ways that landscapes are psychologically charged by their history. Examining the sites of the official investigation and many more including sites used for both CBW activities during the Cold War. Following traces that lead, predictably, to military bases and government facilities and, more surprisingly, to grocery stores and holiday parks. The images take us into the country lanes of Dorset and Devon, the Peak District, the woodlands of Yorkshire and out across the open rolling countryside of the Salisbury Plain, Wales, the remote Scottish Highlands and the Irish Sea. When over 4,000 sq km of the...landmass was appropriated for military use in the 20th century.
Marking the influence of military activities upon British landscapes and provoking deeper consideration of their lasting social and environmental impacts. Locating unexpected vistas that challenge conventional understandings of place.
They also remind us that war is domestic, one that employs thousands of people in production processes that are surely akin to activities in other industries.
The places pictured here become interstitial; they seem to exist between past and present, public and private, civilian and military. Here, too, the pastoral myths of the bucolic British landscape — of simple nature, a golden past — are disrupted by material realities embedded in the landscape itself.
DARA MCGRATH
McGrath is a photographic artist based in Cork City, Ireland. His photo works look at transitional spaces, in-between places where architecture, landscape and the built environment intersect, where a dialogue – of absence rather than presence – is created.
Recent exhibitions include Espace Lhomond Paris Photo, New Irish Works, PhotoHof Salzburg, Gallery of Photography Dublin, Photo Biennale Thessalonika, Centre Des Beaux Arts Brussels, Voies-Off Arles, Venice Biennale of Architecture, Archisle, Carlisle Photo, Landeskrone Photo, Kaunas Photo Days, Singapore Photo Festival, Photo Week DC, Yokohama City Museum, Glucksman Gallery and the Copenhagen Photo Festival.
McGrath is the winner of the AIB Arts Prize, the European Now Award, a Solas Award and has recently been nominated for the Prize Pictet 2016. He is also the winner of the inaugural RAC Photography Award 2017 (selected by Martin Parr).
Entrada actualizada el el 08 jun de 2017
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