University of Brighton, First Floor Gallery - 154-155 Edward St, Kemptown, Brighton BN2 0JG
Photoworks and University of Brighton Photography Research Group present:
Dark Matters and Other Geographies
A group exhibition of photography and moving image from members of the photography research group at the University of Brighton exploring related ecological, environmental and psychological themes.
The exhibition presents work with wide ranging subjects and approaches, from fictional creatures and real animal traces, visible and invisible human bodies, to pictures from closely encountered present locations and appropriated archival images from past expeditions to remote places.
Featured artists
Holly Birtles, Eloise Calandre, Daniel Campbell Blight, Zoe Childerley, Rachel Gillies, Fergus Heron, Rachel Maloney, Martin Seeds, Phill Taylor
Holly Birtles - Fighting Fish
Holly Birtles reflects on her ongoing work inspired by the Thames River and Thames Estuary, where performers choreograph their roles as ‘Thames Monsters.’ In Chennai, she responds to the Adyar and Cooum rivers, drawing parallels of sentimentality, dedication, care, and destruction. The paradox lies in reverence for these sacred sources, contrasted with the toxicity and damage caused by anthropocentric activities.
The project Fighting Fish embodies monstrosity, intertwining beauty with the grotesque, haze, waste, life, and death. The concept of ‘fight’ is initially explored through constructed performances, directed body language and costume. The project symbolizes an ecological struggle, whilst it also reflects sentimental and emotional associations with place.
Birtles explores optical paradigms and artificial intelligence to bring these life forms into existence. She collaborates with the AI program Mid Journey through image inputs and digital editing, transforming digital simulations into experimental silver gelatin prints. The repetitive nature of Mid Journey is mirrored through darkroom manipulations, presenting multiple versions of the same image or ‘monster.’
Eloise Calandre - In Our Hands
In Our Hands combines photography and 3D scans to create a series of still life images. Discarded food packaging acts as evidence, an uneasy imprint in the environment. Crisp packets, sweet wrappers and soft drinks empties hark back to a youthful stomping ground, hidden or forgotten, leftover fragments of human encounter in unexpected places, detritus become found objects, vessels within an interconnected system of place, time and memory. These mixed reality images incorporate photogrammetry, with deliberate corruption to the process of capturing embodied space, glitch becomes interruption, a conduit between worlds.
Daniel Campbell Blight - White Anxiety (Portrait of Nigel Farage), 2026
White Anxiety (Portrait of Nigel Farage), 2026 is an appropriation of the official House of Commons portrait of Nigel Farage MP, in which his white body is removed from the image, leaving only the photo studio/backdrop visible. It comments on the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, in which individuals anxiously claim that white western populations are being deliberately eradicated by non-white populations.
Zoe Childerley - Beneath the Waves
Beneath the Waves investigating the coast as a site of compounding instabilities: geological, political, ecological and human. it centres on a defined stretch of South East England’s shoreline, from the White Cliffs of Dover westward through Dungeness, Hastings, Brighton and toward the Hampshire shore. This corridor, historically shaped by defence, trade and migration, now charged by intensified border politics and accelerating coastal erosion, becomes a space for thinking through the anxieties that gather at edges.
Rachel K Gillies - A rather atmospheric layer of hoar frost (2026) from the series The Peripheral (2026 -)
This work is an exploration of images from the British Antarctic Survey archive, and part of the ongoing series The Peripheral (2026-). The photographs are created through the purposeful abstraction of archival photographic images that were taken as documentation of meteorological phenomena and data collection. Working in collaboration with the archive, source images are chosen which are inherently ‘flawed’ and then re-worked in processes that remove them from their original mode as document, to invite further examination.
The work acknowledges the archive as unstable and asks how re-materialising the photographic image might allow an expanded understanding of that which was originally fixed: subject, time, perspective.
All source images are © The British Antarctic Survey archive.
Finished works are © Rachel K Gillies 2026
Fergus Heron - Allt (2018-)
This project involves working with watercourses in a woodland location in the Highlands of Scotland, colour photography with a view camera and darkroom printing. Works in the exhibition picture encounters with locations through an approach that counterpoints absence and distance with wildness and intimacy. In connection with the Photoworks festival theme, this work proposes interdependent relations between human and more-than-human natures, considers why photography influences ideas of place beyond describing landscape views, and explores how photography as a relational process, brought into being by nature and culture in close relation, can offer ways of imaginitively resituating ourselves in ecologies we are deeply interconnected with.
Rachel Maloney - Iterations (2024 -)
Iterations (2024 -) is a collection of works in progress that reflect on objects passed down through the women in Maloney’s family. The work explores memory, materiality, and intergenerational storytelling.
This work connects with the Photoworks festival theme of ‘Un/Stable: Lands, Anxieties, Dreams’ as it acts as a methodology for daydreaming, re-imagining and retelling of the personal histories and memories contained in a domestic archive. This act of re-imagining the archive is anxious. The retelling is unstable. The present is dreaming of the past and telling stories of the future.
Martin Seeds - A Promised Land
A Promised Land presents three large-scale photographs of urine stains on urban surfaces, printed on gold pearlescent paper and installed across three walls of a semi enclosed space. The surrounding walls are lined with the same material, unprinted, making image and ground continuous. A Promised Land speaks to the festival’s theme of Un/Stable lands, fractured realities, the desire for belonging, safety and promised abundance meeting the unglamorous, disavowed evidence of bodies simply trying to exist. The gold makes a promise that the pictures refuse to deliver.
Phill Taylor - Light Studies
Light Studies is an ongoing research project that explores our human relationship to both the natural untouched landscape and the urban man-made environment and how observations of the natural light can suggest hope in an ever changing land.