Film and Video Umbrella

PROJECTS

The Sunken Bell

2007

Guy Moreton

Guy Moreton's photo-series, commissioned for the Waterlog exhibition, brings together a number of sparse but richly evocative scenes that epitomise the landscape of the East of England. Made in close collaboration with artist Alec Finlay (with whom he has worked on several occasions in recent years), the first of Moreton's large-scale photo works form part of a project called The Sunken Bell which draws its inspiration from the shifting outlines and fluctuating fortunes of the coastline around Dunwich, once one of England's largest ports, and now almost totally lost to the sea.

Alongside Finlay's paintings, intricate watercolours of the various 'bell methods' that might have rung the changes at some of Dunwich's many drowned churches, Moreton's photographs of the ruins of nearby Walberswick church show the extent to which the certainties of faith and stone are themselves no safeguard against the ravages and vicissitudes of time.

Leaving these images of this crumbling church tower, the eye next alights on the equally foreshortened edifice of Dunston Pillar, a former 'land lighthouse' built to guide travellers through the dangerous Lincolnshire marshes, and now strangely stranded among miles and miles of agricultural land. Three photographs of the Pillar, in close-up and in distant outline from the East and the West, complete the manifestation of the project currently on display at Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich.

Recently exhibited at Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, and set to be reprised at The Collection, Lincoln in September 2007, a further three photographs of the Blyth estuary near Dunwich, and of the Yare and Waveney marshes, add further vivid reminders of a desolate but beguiling landscape in which earth and water seem to emerge from, and sink into, one another.

Associated Projects with Guy Moreton:

Waterlog, 2007
Dunston Pillar, 2007
The Sunken Bell, 2007

Associated Publications with Guy Moreton:

Waterlog: Journeys Around an Exhibition