CLARE CLARKSON DEVELOPMENT

Since my lecturing work has all gone online, Tim has created two little films for me, so well-received that we're about to do another. He's enthusiastic, can-do and had excellent creative ideas. He's also a perfectionist. I'm very happy to have found him.

Each photograph in this series is both a meditation on our relationship with the natural world, and a celebration of its dramatic beauty.
Popular psychology recommends engaging with something bigger than ourselves in order to heal a fragile mind, and Tim has described his personal story in relation to the work as a transformative journey from despair to high spirits. Stepping away from the dubious business of ‘self-expression’ he has instead deployed persistence and quiet discipline to record the daily phenomena of the sea. The result is a rich and complex narrative of the undisciplined behaviour of air and water; one in which dark clouds release a veil of rain far from the shore anticipating a storm, a whisp of cloud hovers in an almost clear sky, above a tranquil sea, or a full moon casts a nicotine hue across the dark water. Whilst we recognise the scene, the dramatic sensuality that emerges from each image’s composition and the powerful body of work seen together is less familiar.

In her famous love letter to the Cairngoms, ‘The Living Mountain’ Nan Shepherd describes moments in her relationship to the landscape when ‘something moves between me and it. Place and mind may interpenetrate until the nature of both are altered’. something has been altered here, and we are richer for it

This is a fabulous, big, ground floor, accessible photographic studio, so it's easy to shoot people (not literally), furniture and scenery. Tim Nathan and I worked with Tessa from Omega Studios to present her mid-century items – close-ups of jewellery, models wearing jewellery and scarves, and set-ups using tables, chairs and vases. All Tim's photographs were excellent. It was a pleasure to work with him and use the images for print and digital publicity purposes.