Across two interconnected exhibitions in London and Somerset, artist Guy Dickinson explores the shifting relationship between landscape, memory and perception.

Bringing together photographic based works from several recent series, Astray and Adrift trace a world in which familiar landscapes become fragmented, layered and increasingly elusive. Trees, roots and traces of terrain emerge from shifting fields of light and shadow, suspended somewhere between observation and recollection. What appears familiar becomes strange; what seems tangible begins to dissolve.

Drawing loosely on the wandering and estrangement of Seamus Heaney's Sweeney Astray, Dickinson approaches landscape not as a fixed place to be recorded, but as something experienced through movement, dislocation and the passage of time. Through mixed media and photographic abstraction, his images resist the certainty of a single moment or viewpoint. Time accumulates rather than passes, and the landscape becomes an experience continually altered by memory.

Presented as two connected exhibitions, Astray and Adrift invite a slower way of looking, embracing uncertainty and the fragile nature of our encounters with place. Neither wholly representational nor abstract, these images occupy the threshold between presence and absence, between what is seen and what is remembered.

They are less records of landscape than traces of having passed through it.

The surface of looking, the surface of reading. The text’s flatness on the surface of the page and across the width of the canvas. The handwritten word, its rhythm and tilt as it moves towards becoming a signature. Shifting the word from what it sounds like to that which it looks like. The look that can creep into a page of poetry. Lines of text abandoned to the flow and rhythm of the look of words as one flows into the next.

Ian McKeever, Talking Painting: Writings on Art and Artists, 2026

exposed

in a hollow, between two hills,

a collaboration with Christopher Thornhill

in the fluid

            nudities of dream

The Tiding Light / Aquarius (extract), Christopher Thornhill, 2019 - 2026

Those who imagined it to be limitless forget that the possible number of books is limited. I dare insinuate the following solution to this ancient problem: The Library is limitless and periodic. If an eternal voyager were to traverse it in any direction, he would find, after many centuries, that the same volumes are repeated in the same disorder (which, if repeated, would constitute an order: Order itself). My solitude rejoices in this elegant hope.

The Library of Babel, Jorge Luis Borges, 1941

 > book

...A spore is an instrument of survival across discontinuity. It is produced precisely when conditions become inhospitable — when the parent organism cannot continue — and it is designed to persist through whatever comes next and to germinate when conditions change. It is, in the deepest sense, a message to a future that cannot be predicted: everything you need is here, compressed beyond legibility, waiting.

The title Spores is therefore more than a metaphor for process. It is a statement about what images are for. These photographs propose that the fragment (the tiny, the overlooked) carries within it the full instruction for a world. That enlargement is not distortion but revelation. That the world we cannot see at normal scale is not a reduced version of the world we can; it is the same world, available from a different position.

Blake knew this. "To see a World in a Grain of Sand" is not a claim about poetic licence; it is an epistemological proposition — that the grain contains the world's structure, that perception is a matter of threshold and attention rather than scale and size... 

Spores (extract), M. P. Pearson, 2026

​...riverrun, past Eve and Adam's, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.

James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939

I am passing out. O bitter ending! I’ll slip away before they’re up. They’ll never see. Nor know. Nor miss me. And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my cold mad father, my cold mad feary father, till the near sight of the mere size of him, the moyles and moyles of it, moananoaning, makes me seasilt saltsick and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! Save me from those therrble prongs!

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James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939

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