Chris Hammerton

I have long been fascinated by the natural world; the complex processes that shape it & the interactions of the flora & fauna that populate it, which led me to study geography at university.

Shortly after graduation I bought my first ‘camera phone’ in the days when that was a term and all phones didn’t have a serviceable camera by default. I would often walk in the countryside and along the coast of Glamorgan where I lived at the time, always having a camera in my pocket and naturally started taking photographs along the way. Slowly but surely the walks became a secondary consideration to the photography.

Over the years my focus has shifted from making straightforwardly representational images of the landscape to more abstract & experimental approaches which attempt to convey the emotions the locations stir in me.

Most recently I've become particularly interested in utilising in-camera multiple exposures to create layered collages of the woodland and wetland landscapes near my home in South Monmouthshire. Photography as a medium traditionally records a single point in space at a particular point in time. Using multiple exposures I aim to subvert this idea to produce images that are a record of my journey through the landscape over an extended period. The resulting photographs reflect the idea that my passage through the landscape is a succession of encounters with various scenes which build up and bleed into one another to become a partly imagined, idealised landscape in my memory.