Born in Thirsk, North Yorkshire, Guy Dickinson trained as an Architect in London, winning a number of awards including the RIBA President's Medal. He has been an associate at John Pawson since 2003. The seeds of his tracing silence project, established in 2011, were sown during a 14 day immersion in the Yorkshire Moors in 1992. Experimenting with methods of construction, weaving, stitching, thatching and casting, he created a series of simple shelters that sought to unearth the intrinsic nature of the places he inhabited.
'He found perhaps a relationship between still and moving water, or between forest and field, and designed each resting place to occupy that boundary. He sensed you could make architecture from modest constructions which nevertheless had the scale of the landscape.' Niall McLaughlin
Now utilising the mediums of photography and poetry, Guy's work continues to explore place, but also the similitude between the passage of thoughts and the passage of the body. He scours, combs and sifts, eyes shifting from foreground to background, from details to horizons, looking to tease out some essence of how we perceive the world around us. Horizon, depth of field and perspective have been slowly relinquished in favour of texture, tone and surface. Developed through a cycling process of layering and distillation, these quietly cartographic fields invite us to look again at the landscape and the complexity of our place within it.
"Guy Dickinson’s instinct to head off to the remote edges of things goes deep. The visible traces of these solitary odysseys are sequences of photographs whose intensity comes not, one senses, from a desire for self-knowledge, but from a yearning for total immersion in the encounter with a physical environment. Landscape or seascape, in their ability to encompass the grand and the granular, these images take the viewer similarly deep into their field of vision. It is of the essence of Guy’s work not to tell us how to look, but rather to clear the way we see, so that it is the place itself – the fissured limestone, boulder strewn shores and roiling swell – not the photograph, that we feel on our retinas. In so doing he achieves that rare feat of conjuring Heaney’s ‘salt of our earth’."
Alison Morris
‘What do we say any more
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept.’
Seamus Heaney, from ‘The Singer’s House’
to conjure the salt of our earth?
So much comes and is gone
that should be crystal and kept.’
Seamus Heaney, from ‘The Singer’s House’
Articles / Interviews
Black + White Photography / interview / Issue 275
Biblioscapes / interview / a dialogue
The United Nations of Photography / What photography means to me / a monologue
Echtrai Journal / Edition One / a poem, a cover, some interleaves
ITO Journal / Right to Roam / work from the series, Riparian Rights
Pleasure Garden / Issue Seven / Riverrun / a poem commissioned by John Tebbs
Inside the Outside / Towards a premise / a collaboration with David Foster
Centre for Alterity Studies / Alterity Five / On Consciousness / 14 poets, writers & artists
Inside the Outside / Out of the Woods of Thought
Centre for Alterity Studies / Alterity Two / Stations
Corbel Stone Press / Reliquiæ
The Dartmoor Collective / A review of Rifts & Erasures
Inside the Outside / Caput Mortuum with preface by Christopher John Thornhill
Thames Estuary Library / Saltsick
Inside the Outside / Stations with Alison Morris
Inside the Outside / Scar
On Landscape / Featured Photographer interview with Michela Griffith / issue 160
Webb Chiles / self-portrait in the present sea
Inside the Outside / Strainsear with Alison Morris
Some books feature on Biblioscapes
Exhibitions
Solo / postROOM / 2023 (8th February - 4th March)
Group / Bard / A shadow passes / 2022 / ongoing
Group / Argentea Gallery / Gather / 2019
Group / Patching’s Gallery / Connected 2019
Group / Argentea Gallery / Out of the Woods of Thought / 2018
Black + White Photography / interview / Issue 275
Biblioscapes / interview / a dialogue
The United Nations of Photography / What photography means to me / a monologue
Echtrai Journal / Edition One / a poem, a cover, some interleaves
ITO Journal / Right to Roam / work from the series, Riparian Rights
Pleasure Garden / Issue Seven / Riverrun / a poem commissioned by John Tebbs
Inside the Outside / Towards a premise / a collaboration with David Foster
Centre for Alterity Studies / Alterity Five / On Consciousness / 14 poets, writers & artists
Inside the Outside / Out of the Woods of Thought
Centre for Alterity Studies / Alterity Two / Stations
Corbel Stone Press / Reliquiæ
The Dartmoor Collective / A review of Rifts & Erasures
Inside the Outside / Caput Mortuum with preface by Christopher John Thornhill
Thames Estuary Library / Saltsick
Inside the Outside / Stations with Alison Morris
Inside the Outside / Scar
On Landscape / Featured Photographer interview with Michela Griffith / issue 160
Webb Chiles / self-portrait in the present sea
Inside the Outside / Strainsear with Alison Morris
Some books feature on Biblioscapes
Exhibitions
Solo / postROOM / 2023 (8th February - 4th March)
Group / Bard / A shadow passes / 2022 / ongoing
Group / Argentea Gallery / Gather / 2019
Group / Patching’s Gallery / Connected 2019
Group / Argentea Gallery / Out of the Woods of Thought / 2018
