The Porthleven Prize Residency 2024 and Outpost 2025 Artistic Statement

The Porthleven Prize Residency is based in the eponymous harbour town and sponsored by the Osborne Trust. Over two rounds in January and March, the 2024 residency allowed a select group of artists to dedicate themselves to the prize's theme, "Provenance". Much of my photography over the course of the residency was made entirely on site. This involved shooting on a 4x5 field camera, developing film in homemade caffenol or seaweed developer, and contact printing cyanotypes. Additional prints were made in Bath, Somerset, either salt printed using Porthleven sea water, or on traditional darkroom enlargers. The Porthleven Prize Artists presented their work at the Net Loft Gallery in Porthleven, Cornwall in August 2024, and the Michael Pennie Gallery in Bath, Somerset in October 2024. In July and August of 2025, Outpost, a solo show primarily composed of black and white darkroom prints, was presented at Arlington 5 in Ottawa, Canada.

From the Outpost artisitic statment..."I was there. Outpost collects photographic prints of the harbour town of Porthleven, Cornwall, in January and March of 2024. As a settlement, Porthleven dates back roughly a thousand years. The ebb and flow of its fortunes mimic the tides that batter its retaining walls and balks. By times a fishing town, a port of refuge, a renowned ship-building port and now an emerging artist hub and tourist destination with a legendary town band, a famous cat, and a hip coffee shop. Like many Cornish towns Porthleven today teeters on the edge between a past it can never have back and a future it is unsure it wants. Yet, physically and photographically, it seems timeless. Roughhewn from rocks and overgrown with shaggy coastal grasses. Eroded yet seemingly enduring. It is shaped, sometimes blasted, by forces that are eternal, immortal and inevitable."

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