“Dominic Pote paints with light. His materials may be those of the photographer but his eye is that of an expressionist painter and his sensibility one of a poet. Cartier-Bresson talked of the photograph’s ‘decisive moment’, that potent instant frozen forever within a single frame. But Pote, without the aid of a digital camera or other technological devises, creates images that suggest the actual experience of time. Hazy and dreamlike his photographs imitate the process of memory itself. His subjects are seascapes, architecture and landscape for he is attracted to the point where places meet; the city and the skyline, the shoreline and the sea.
His camera is hand-held in line with his body. Often he does not look through it with his eye but starts on his knees or crawls in order to catch a building or a view from a particular angle. Working somewhere between the film maker and the still photographer his exposures last as long as he keeps moving. Many of his photographs are two or three meters in length. Framed by the physical act of walking his images are both literal and metaphorical journeys, movements through space so that there remains something of the organic feel of their making.
Movement, flux and transformation are the basis of his aesthetic and his philosophical concerns.
Light bleaches out and erases detail so that sky, water, sea and buildings bleed into each other and boundary definitions become ambiguous, whether he is photographing the constantly changing shoreline of the volcanic Greek island of Milos or the landmark buildings of the city of London such as St. Paul’s Cathedral or Canary Wharf. His frontiers are both actual places and utopian visions. As with the great German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich, with his infinite stretches of sea and mountains or his fog-bound plains painted at sunrise or by moonlight, Pote suggests the underlining spiritual significance of the landscape and the redemptive possibilities of the sublime.”
Sue Hubbard
Sue Hubbard is an award-winning poet, novelist and freelance art critic who writes regularly for The Independent and The New Statesman.
Selected Exhibitions:
06/14____________________________________Solo Exhibition at Art Moorhouse, London
05/12 ___________________________________Exhibition at Addenbrookes Hospital, Cambridge
01/10 ___________________________________Exhibition at the Sugar Store Gallery, Brewery Arts Centre, Cumbria
10/09 ___________________________________Taking Art for a Walk, Mascals Gallery, Kent. Group exhibition along side Robert Long,Hamish Fulton and others
10/09 ___________________________________Land of Light, solo exhibition at the Yard Gallery, Nottingham
05/09 ___________________________________‘Artspace’ The Barn Galleries, Oxfordshire
12/08 ___________________________________Menier Gallery, London. Joint show with artist Henrie Haldane
11/08 ___________________________________Istanbul Art Fair, Turkey
05/08 ___________________________________Orientalism – Commission and Exhibition at the British Council, London
11/07 ___________________________________Envie d’Art Gallery, Paris
09/07 ___________________________________Envie d’Art Gallery, Brussels
04/07 ___________________________________As I Walked Out, Group Exhibition, Will’s Art Gallery, London
03/07 ___________________________________AAF, Battersea Park, London
11/05 ___________________________________Derby City Open
11/05 ___________________________________Leicester City Open
09/04 ___________________________________International Group Exhibition, University of Istanbul, Turkey
06/04 ___________________________________Hellenic Centre, London
04/04 ___________________________________Nature, Will’s Art, London
03/04 ___________________________________Home, The Menier Gallery, London
01/04 ___________________________________The Art Lounge, Birmingham
09/03 ___________________________________Reid Architecture, London
06/03 ___________________________________ Fotoklub Zagreb, Croatia
05/03 ___________________________________Nature, Wills Art, London
04/03 ___________________________________TenGallery, St Ives, Cornwall
03/03 ___________________________________Woolff Gallery, London
02/03 ___________________________________Manchester Art Show, Urbis
01/03 ___________________________________ Dean Clough Galleries, Halifax
01/03 ___________________________________Arcola Gallery, London
11/02 ___________________________________Leigh Buckland Showroom, Clapham, London
11/02 ___________________________________Battersea Contemporary Art Fair, London
11/02 ___________________________________The Phoenix Association Gallery, Brighton
09/02 ___________________________________Blackfriars Art Centre, Boston, Linclonshire
09/02 ___________________________________Worcester City Art Gallery
08/02 ___________________________________Sternberk Art Galery, Sternberk, Czech Republic
07/02 ___________________________________The Wallner Gallery, Lakeside Arts Centre, Nottingham
06/02 ___________________________________Foreign Closeness, Palmovka Synagogue, Prague, Czech Republic
05/02 ___________________________________ Nottingham Contempory Art Auction, Djanogly Art Gallery
01/02 ___________________________________ The Triangle Center, Manchester
10/01 ___________________________________ Creative Consultants Gallery, Manchester
07/01 ___________________________________Industrial Landscapes, The Nottingham Castle Gallery and Museum
04/01 ___________________________________The Broadway Cinema, Nottingham
01/01 ___________________________________The Plough Arts Centre, Torrington, Devon
07/00 ___________________________________New Designers, London
06/00 ___________________________________Flux Degree Show, Nottingham Trent University
Riva Degli Schiavoni, Venezia
Selected commissions and projects:
2016 ___________________________________Runnymede Hotel Spa, surrey
2014 ___________________________________St Giles Palliative Care Hospice, nr Lichfield, Staffordshire
2012 ___________________________________Tenbury Hospital, artwork for male and female wards
2012 ___________________________________Birmingham Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Burns Centre
2011 ___________________________________Scarborough, New Emergency Ward
2010 ___________________________________Salisbury, New Children’s Ward
2010 ___________________________________Gloucester Royal Hospital, New Women’s Centre
2009 ___________________________________Goscote Monumental Art Project, Walsall, Birmingham
2009 ___________________________________Runnymede Hotel, Surrey
2009 ___________________________________NHS – Bingley Hub, Yorkshire
2008 ___________________________________The British Council, London - Orientalism
2008 ___________________________________Kingston Upon Thames Hospital – 2 commissions
2007 ___________________________________Scarborough Hospital
2006 ___________________________________Salisbury Hospital
2005 ___________________________________Bonington Gallery (Future Factory), Nottingham
2005 ___________________________________Barclays Bank
2004 ___________________________________P&O Cruise Lines
2004 ___________________________________Experian Uk - Residency