Landscapes At Noon

A project Commissioned by the National Trust Flatford and ECDP

2021- 2022

Landscapes at Noon, an exhibition of experimental photography, celebrates the 200th anniversary of John Constable’s iconic painting ‘The Hay Wain’ and the surrounding landscape at Flatford. Using experimental analogue and historic photographic processes, Liz Harrington and I collaborated on a series of works that investigated themes of light and shadow, as well as reflected on memory, time, and the spirit of place.

The works include an installation of images, printed on silk panels using a 19th century photographic process called cyanotype, showing multiple viewpoints of ‘The Hay Wain’ view today. The floating silk panels, presented in the Granary building once owned by the Constable family, are reminiscent of the emulsion layer of early photographs. Visitors were able to walk amongst the installation, as if stepping into a photograph and becoming physical participants in the artwork. As light seeped through them or shadows emerged, new perspectives and details appeared and disappeared, reflecting the transient nature of the landscape and memories that come and go.

Each silk panel was hand-coated in the Granary building, with cyanotype emulsion to make it light sensitive, and large-scale negatives of ‘The Hay Wain’ view created and placed on the silk and exposed to sunlight to create the image. The prints were made at noon, where possible – reflecting the weather condition of the day – and fixed using water from the river Stour. The printed images include those taken by the artists along with a selection from visitors who submitted their photographs via the #haywain200 hashtag on social media channels during the summer.

There were a number of smaller experimental works and studies shown, including pinhole photographs on paper and wood, lumen and salt prints, as well as some collaborative cyanotype nature pieces made with visitors over the summer. Plant matter that visitors collected for the collaborative works was repurposed to make a plant-based photographic developer and subsequently used for the artist’s own works.

The exhibition title ‘Landscapes at Noon’ is a nod to both Constable’s ‘The Hay Wain’, originally called ‘Landscape: Noon’, and the cyanotype process that requires strong sunlight and the midday sun.