Dominic Pote, Land of Light @ The Yard Gallery at Wollaton Hall
Set in the charming surroundings of Wollaton Park, the Yard Gallery provides an ideal location for an exhibition that acknowledges both the beauty of nature and its cohesion with a man-made landscape. Dominic Pote’s photographs are like a collection of memories captured onto canvas.
The former Nottingham Trent photography student achieves this effect by moving whilst capturing the image and exposing the film, creating a hazy, dream-like quality that is anything but a typical static photographic image. It is as your eye would take in the scene; a swift movement of colours and shapes, blended together as if created with water colours rather than film.
Pote mainly chooses landscapes characterised by boundaries, whether land and water or urban and rural, which were then allowed to bleed into one another, blurring the distinction. The locations vary from mountain ranges in Turkey to canals in Venice, but all manage to capture the sense of movement and flux. His photographs of a wood in Wiltshire were particularly effective, and are dizzily reminiscent of running through trees watching them streak past you.
Kate Gilks