SOMERSET ART WEEKS

Happily I will be opening my ‘Gallery’ – come old cider shed this year for Somerset Art Weeks, 18th September till 3rd October. We are all crossing our fingers that we will be able to go ahead.  I have been having some great help over the lockdowns and have really learnt how to properly process my infra red work. I have continued to photograph in the Blackdown Hills as it is always so quiet and there is a lot that catches my eye.  I guess that my pictures reflect the hard times that farmers on  this unforgiving landscape have endured.

Pauline Rook is an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society  living and working in Somerset. She specialises in portraiture but is equally well known for her rural documentary work.

Working on a dairy farm, brought out her passion for black and white photography as she sought to document the rapidly changing world around her. She studied at an advanced level  and learned the skills needed to take photographs in dark and difficult circumstances and to produce top level monochrome prints.

Her photographic journey  started in the black and white darkroom and this experience is still a major influence on her work.

Pauline has embraced the change to digital photography and enjoys the many creative  advantages it has .  She is currently been working with a camera that has had its Infra Red filter removed. This means that there is no pretence that the resulting photographs represent anything other than an artifice, but that it offers a different outlet for artistic expression.  The use of normal photographic technique is still there but the pictures reveal a surreal world where there are no colours but light or dark tones depending on how much IR radiation the subject emits.

Her work has been published in books and magazines. Pauline’s photographs can be seen at the Gallery of the Somerset Guild of Craftsmen in Broad St, Wells