Darren Almond Fullmoon
Shan Shui Fullmoon, China, 2008.
Fullmoon@The North Sea, China 2009.
Fullmoon@Li, China, 2008.
Dragon’s Eye, China, 2008.
Fullmoon@The Sea of Clouds, China, 2008.
West Sea Canyon, China, 2008.
Fullmoon@North Sea Canyon, China, 2008.
Huangshan Pine Fullmoon, China, 2008.
Artist's Statement
Darren Almond works by examining the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations, and he produces works which have universal as well as personal resonances that regularly take him to distant places.
In 1999, Almond began a series of colour photographs, known as the Fullmoon Series. The first of these, titled Fifteen Minute Moon was an experiment: to see what would result from photographing a moonlit landscape using an extended time exposure. He shot his first Fullmoon photograph on a trip near the Montagne Sainte Victoire in France, which was inspiration for much of Cézanne’s last paintings. It remained in Almond’s studio for a while as he continued to think about it. As he says ‘there is always a portion of the world in shadow.’ Almond continued the series by travelling to solitary sites that had inspired artists and writers such as Turner, Constable, Caspar David Friedrich and John Ruskin. By using only the moon as a source of light and an extensive exposure time, he creates meditative landscapes that bear a mysterious and lyrical atmosphere.
Almond’s new Fullmoons capture – in an indisputable yet uncanny beauty – the Huang Shan region in the Anhui province of China. Almond was especially drawn to the Yellow Mountain range, also known as Xihai or Huang Shan, with its magnificent peaks and canyons as well as extraordinary natural sites of Chinese spiritualism.
Often translated into traditional Chinese landscape painting – which is generally called Shan Shui, or ‘mountain and water’ – Huang Shan was first depicted in 1646 by Jiang Tao, who later became the Zen monk Hongren.
Almond continues to travel to remote locations removed from the bright-lights and clamour of towns and cities to capture landscapes that may be lost to human activity in the future. These landscapes – with their notion of melancholy – are not only shaped by the moonlight but also by the historical associations that surround them.
About the photographer
1971 in Wigan, United Kingdom
British
London, United Kingdom
Darren Almond’s diverse work, incorporating film, installation, sculpture and photography deals with evocative meditations on time and duration, as well as the themes of personal and historical memory.
Almond is interested in the notions of geographical limits and the means of getting there – in particular, culturally specific points of arrival and departure. Since 1998, Almond has been making a series of landscape photographs called the Fullmoons.
Taken during a full moon with an exposure time of 15 minutes or more, these images of remote geographical locations appear ghostly, bathed in an unexpectedly brilliant light where night seems to have turned into day. Many of Almond’s works are filmed in remote and often inaccessible locations. The artist followed a sulphur miner in Indonesia during one of the labourer’s daily journeys from the mouth of a crater to the weighing station to produce Bearing, shot with a high-definition camera. In Schacta, Almond filmed the activities of a Kazakhstani tin mine and set them against a haunting soundtrack – made as a field recording – of a local female musician/shaman during her performance. Other works explore themes closer to home: Traction is an ambitious three-screen projection that draws a portrait of the artist’s father, laying bare external and internal scars, whilst revealing the artist’s preoccupation with time.
A similar intimacy is evoked in If I Had You, a multi-screened film installation about the artist’s grandmother – a tender portrait of youthful reminiscence and the dignity of old age. In Terminus, Almond negotiated relocating the original bus shelters of the town of Oświęcim (also known by the German name, Auschwitz) to make a moving installation about historical loss. Another realisation of time was achieved with the work Tide, in which 600 digital clocks were lined up along the entirety of a wall simultaneously registering the relentless nature of time, especially relevant to the process of clocking in and out associated with the mechanisation of labour.
Darren Almond has participated in numerous important group exhibitions including ‘Sensation’ (1997-1999), Berlin Biennale (2001), Venice Biennale (2003), The Busan Biennale (2004) The Turner Prize, Tate Britain (2005), Moscow Biennale (2007), and the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain (2009). Solo exhibitions include The Renaissance Society, Chicago (1999), De Appel (2001), Kunsthalle Zürich (2001), Tate Britain (2001) and K21, Düsseldorf (2005), Museum Folkwang (2006), SITE Santa Fe (2007), and Parasol Unit (2008).
A Chinese man who I became friends with whilst working on the project reiterated what many Chinese people feel: “Why do we have to destroy to develop?” He explained how in Britain many of us could revisit the place of our childhood, knowing that it will be much the same; it will remind us of our families and upbringing. In China that is virtually impossible, the scale of development has left most places unrecognisable, “Nothing is the same. We can’t revisit where we came from because it no longer exists.”
China’s landscape both economically and physically is changing daily. These are photographs that can never be taken again.
Earth Shortlist
Nadav Kander, Yangtze, The Long River, 2006-2007
Darren Almond, Fullmoon, 1998-2010
Christopher Anderson, Capitolio, 2004-2009
Sammy Baloji, Memory, 2006
Edward Burtynsky, Quarries, 1991-2006
Andreas Gursky, Body of Work, 2002
Ed Kashi, Curse of the Black Gold: 50 Years of Oil in the Niger Delta, 2004-2006
Naoya Hatakeyama, Blast, 1995-2010
Abbas Kowsari, Shade of Earth, 2007-2008
Yao Lu, New Mountain and Water, 2007
Edgar Martins, The Diminishing Present, 2005-2008
Chris Steele-Perkins, Mount Fuji, 2000-2001