#17 The Graduate Issue
The students graduating in 2022 have studied over years marked by the Covid pandemic and a period of intense ethical examination in photography and beyond. We celebrate the work of ten image-makers from around the world who have grappled with the challenges to produce outstanding work.
Austin Cullen, Jana Islinger, Abdulhamid Kircher, Erin Lee, Ali Mohamed, RoN, Victoria Ruiz, Anna Sellen, Ruben Storey, Vera Yijun Zhou.
The selected projects employ a wide range of artistic approaches, from straight documentary to the deeply personal and the staged. But each reflects a thoughtful response to issues affecting contemporary society and politics, and a flair for communicating with images.
Special thanks to the selection panel including: Jermaine Francis, photographer; Kobi Prempeh, curator Fynn Studio; Sabrina Citra, Photoworks Writer in Residence 2022; and Julia Bunnemann, Photoworks Curator.
Thank you to our partner Spectrum Photographic for selecting one lucky graduate for print support; three other graduates will receive mentoring from Photoworks.
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.
