This series of photographs uses the experience of walking to form a new connection to humanity and to nature. The series is called Liznojan, Liznojan means to learn whilst following a track. This series allows for a new experience with nature to take place through the activity of walking. Both poetic and ambiguous in nature, the work channels larger issues though avoiding the grand narrative. Liznojan is the work that allows for a new experience with nature to come forth. Spending nights in the wild, finding a way through mists in bogs and trenches, something very different occurs. To rediscover the landscape for what it is, one must go back, search forgotten histories. People belong to the landscape. Their histories are embedded within the land. This is a union between a mythical fiction and the English everyday, in order to create a sense of ambiguity and unease.
I feel as though the medium of Photography itself is ambiguous, it can be stretched, pulled, played with, it is interesting in the way it is particularly malleable. This diversity makes photography an interesting tool to use in looking both at fiction and at reality. The reality we consider is after all often a multi-layered fiction. It is this space, the in-between that really holds my attention. This realm between fantasy and reality, it is always blurring, and verbally very hard to describe
I’ve always held a fascination with the way images can hold a narrative; they speak of the side-lined, the outsiders, the outskirts themselves. It’s this that really always interested me. We look because often we aren’t sure what is happening just on the edges of the image. I think this quality drew me to photography - the margins. I first began really playing with photography at a young age, just obsessing over disposable cameras and experimenting with the results. A little further along the line I was studying fine art. Photography speaks visually in a language that, for me, can not be expressed in any other way, so it made sense for me to pursue this. I was never really a realist. I’d always take these walks and drift off, which I guess is what I still do now, just with a camera. It was these daydreams and finding another world in the one which presents itself that always fascinated me. I would always tell stories and get completely lost within my own imagination.
The main concept was to provide an alternative to the grand narrative that we are provided with both as part of history and the everyday. I used to be really rigid and set strict boundaries when it came to my personal work. However, I feel photography is now at a stage where the act of taking a photo is not sacred. As an artist I try to find a way in which the ‘now’ can be reached visually, and how this act of experience can be expressed to the viewer in a tool that remarkably alters and holds time still. This is really about experiencing place and nature.
It is both poetic and ambiguous in nature. Liznojan is a union between a mythical fiction and the English everyday, in order to create a sense of ambiguity and unease. As more time is spent with the project, deviations from an existing reality become more apparent.
More info: joannecoates.co.uk
