From issue: #17 The Graduate Issue 2022
Gwandra
In 1952, John Berger stated that, to discover West Cornwall’s true nature, ‘you must dig into it, turn it this way and that, simultaneously examine it in detail and weight it as a whole’. Ruben Storey’s Gwandra – which means ‘to ramble’ in Cornish, but also encompasses talking and thinking – is, in part, a series of encounters uncovering the surfaces of the Penwith region. Inspired by land art and the St Ives School of Art and combining photographic sculptures and collages, Gwandra centres on four material motifs: granite, reflecting ancient structures; plaster, used in cast moulds; gesso, a white paint mixture recalling the artist Ben Nicholson’s reliefs; and paper, for its common use as a photographic object. By elongating the process of collage from found object to photographic reproduction, Gwandra aims to examine the sculptural form and represent the plurality of space.
Ruben Storey was born in St Ives in 2000. He graduated with first-class honours from the BA Photography at Falmouth University in 2022. Storey is an interdisciplinary artist whose work blurs the boundaries between photography and sculpture, with a particular interest in the materiality of the image and landscape. Focusing on the region of Penwith, Storey detaches himself from single visual constructions to approach landscape as a plural structure residing in the spirit of place.
