Writer and editor Di Smyth speaks with artists Alexander Mourant, Eugenie Shinkle, and Julie F Hill about their varied engagements with photography as a spatial, embodied, and durational practice. Working across a range of materialities and scales, their installations in Copeland Gallery at this year's edition of Peckham 24 provide a starting point for a conversation traversing deep space and cosmological time, the life cycles of agriculture and images, resisting fixed points of orientation, and the potential for objects to transform infinitely.
Alexander Mourant's Bruises presents a glimpse into a farm workshop, and is part of an ongoing, meditative project on Mourant’s family farm as it approaches closure. Mourant reenacts methods of panel cutting, storage and repair at the workshop, combining photographic silkscreens on aluminium and steel. By gathering often anonymous objects, Mourant emphasises the photographic as accumulation, creating analogies of industrial readymades and organic body parts. In Potato Theories, Mourant has made metal casts of Jersey Royal Potatoes from his family farm, in various stages of growth. Mourant considers temporality and duration through the various stages of potato development, and proposes an analogy to the life cycle of images.
Eugenie Shinkle's ROM works across multiple photographic images to build large-scale image fields that reorganise perception across scale, resisting singular viewpoints. Built in 1978, the Rom skatepark in Hornchurch, Essex was the first of its kind in the UK. No longer in use, the concrete structure is slowly decaying, a consequence of decades of weathering, and of the wear and tear inflicted by the passage of thousands of wheels. Though they’re only a few decades old, the forms have a strangely primordial quality, the concrete stained and colonized by lichen, as if the recent past were already slipping into something more geological. Designed to enable fluid movement through space, the skatepark’s continuous curves challenge the rectilinear logic of conventional architectural photography. Shinkle used three different analogue cameras in 5x4, 120 and 35mm formats to photograph the site. More than just recording the site, the camera structured the conditions under which Shinkle encountered it. This piece takes the form of a large-scale installation in which movement and stillness are not opposed, but coexist. Two adjacent images tumble in multiple iterations and configurations, interrupting any fixed point of orientation. ROM does not seek to represent the skatepark as an object, but to reconstruct an experience of it: disorienting, immersive, and at times euphoric.
The suite of works comprising Julie F Hill's installation explore the entwined darknesses of deep space and time. Cave takes data from the James Webb Space Telescope from barred spiral galaxy NGC 5068, and reworks it into a sculptural installation that emulates a cavernous formation, providing an experience of intimate immensity. The pool beneath is considered akin to an observatory, an instrument for understanding deep space and time. Underneath the canopy, Rock Clouds form. Pieces of dolomite are left in a solution to grow aragonite crystals, a form of calcium carbonate, mimicking forms found in caves known as “cave flowers”. Reflected in watery surfaces, they continue to change throughout the duration of the exhibition to eventually sit in dried out channels of mineral residue. The black trays within the installation reference darkroom apparatus; much like photography, forms and images emerge from chemical and molecular exchanges. Chasms is an ongoing series made by digitally processing RAW data from space telescopes using scientific software. Various algorithmic functions are applied to visualise the data, a process Hill likens to a digital darkroom. Printed data is then left in various solutions to crystallise, fusing celestial light with geological time.
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Alexander Mourant is an artist, educator and writer based in London. He is a Lecturer in Photography at Kingston University. His first publication, The Night and the First Sculpture, was published by Folium (2024), and was shortlisted for the Author Book Award at Rencontres d’Arles (2025).
Eugénie Shinkle is a photographer, writer, and theorist whose research explores the material, embodied, and political dimensions of photographic practice. Trained originally as a civil engineer, she brings a distinctive interdisciplinary approach to photography, drawing on art history, philosophy, landscape studies, fashion theory, and digital culture.
Julie F Hill is an artist whose research-led practice responds to the vastness of nature as represented by modern science. Taking an expanded approach to photography, she creates sculptural prints and installations that explore conceptions of deep-space and cosmological time
Di Smyth is Editor of the British Journal of Photography and of the Photoworks Annual. She also lectures on History and Theory of Photography at the London College of Communications, University of the Arts London, and has given talks and workshops at many other universities and institutions, including London School of Economics and King's College London.