KultureFlash ::: Art Worker of the Week ::: Dan Holdsworth

ARTWORKER OF THE WEEK #5

Dan Holdsworth @ Entwistle

Black Mountains, 2001
Triptych, c-print (each 179 x 237 cm)

Dan Holdsworth graduated from the London College of Printing in 1998 and in just a few years has established a distinct position within British photography, showing in exhibitions such as Beck's Futures (2001). Holdsworth makes photographs of landscapes and interiors that are devoid of people, and his works have an alien, hallucinatory quality. Mark Sladen met the artist and asked him about his current exhibition -- which consists of a single large triptych, entitled Black Mountains.

MS: Where were the photographs taken?

DH: The photographs were taken on the South coast of Iceland, on the edge of a glacier. There's this one glacial area that I'd seen that looked very blackened. I love exploring places and I walked up higher and higher towards this glacier, until I came to this place that was very blackened because of soot that was melting out of the ice. There's a volcano under the icecap so it's the fallout from this volcano. This glacier is very black and at the edge of it are these drifts of black dust, quite heavy and thick, like snowdrifts. When I photographed the glacier I wanted to bring out this monochrome quality and these textures. They were such abstract structures. And I wanted to dislocate them from where they were, so I didn't want them to have a foreground and I wanted to take out most of the sky. I wanted them to exist in themselves.

MS: What relationship do these images have to an idea of place?

DH: The way I work I'm often quite interested in dislocating the image from the place -- I'm not so interested in where it's located. What I'm interested in is a psychological landscape. I often try to limit the amount of information in the image in order to create this illusory space. And I found that in Iceland -- in the desert -- where you do feel very dislocated. There's nothing to focus on, there are no signifiers, there is just rubble.

MS: What happens when you make an image of a landscape with no signs of human intervention?

DH: I think it becomes more about my own mind. You can go to any urban space and get a similar type of experience -- I think the experience is universal. But I was trying to take that experience further. The landscape of Iceland is a place that exists outside of a human idea of time and it's interesting to go to a place like that and think about modern human interaction. I was thinking a lot about our fragility.

MS: You've talked a lot about leaving information out.

DH: I think that if you limit the amount of information you can define something more -- sometimes there's so much information it's difficult to process it. By taking out the sky you can focus the gaze. But also you're alluding to something else because there's something there that you can't see. I think we just occupy this surface and there's so much beyond that.

Mark Sladen is a curator at Barbican Art Gallery

Black Mountains, until 21 December 2002
Entwistle, 6 Cork St., London W1, 020.7734.6440

Image © the artist, courtesy Entwistle, London