NYAB Event - Simon Roberts "We English"

Simon Roberts "We English"

Klompching Gallery

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Following on from the critically acclaimed Motherland series, that formed the inaugural exhibition at Klompching Gallery in October 2007, Roberts’s We English is a visually stunning tableaux of large format photographs that explore identity, attachment to home and the relationship between people and the land.

“In 2005, I spent a year travelling across Russia to produce Motherland, a book exploring the Russians' attachment to their homeland. This attachment to place was somewhat mysterious–simultaneously profound and banal–and it led me to think about my own sense of belonging and memory, identity and place. We English became another journey, not quite as epic as that across Russia, but involving a 1993 Talbot Express Swift Capri motorhome, my pregnant wife, our two-year-old daughter and a 5x4 large-format camera.”—Simon Roberts.

Informed by his predecessors Tony Ray-Jones, John Davies and Martin Parr, as well as the tradition of 16th-century Dutch and Flemish landscape painting, Simon Roberts’ new body of work is an unashamedly lyrical vision of the ways in which people congregate and interact with the landscape, through the common purpose of leisure. Through his images of the English at play, we witness sunbathers lounging in Gloucestershire, hillwalkers miniaturized by the grand hills of the Wasdale Valley, the somewhat curious Mad Maldon Mud Race in Essex and the sparse quietness of surfers off the Salcombe Sands in Devon. We English is an insightful and determined series of photographs, two years in the making, that forms Roberts’ second significant body of work exploring notions of nationhood.