Wig Sayell

Photographic artist Wig Sayell uses installation, experimental and early Victorian processes. Her work involves interacting with the landscape, often with pre-determined viewpoints.

A Modern Picturesque is a collection of large format cyanotype photographs that explore the possibility of a picturesque that might be taken as politicised, contemporary and challenging, or indeed, anything other than the middle-brow comfort viewing it is apparently ‘fated’ to be. Inspired by a statement made by 19th century photographer, Richard Keene, Sayell set out to discover if the picturesque landscape might still be experience ‘within five or six miles of home’. Keene listed suitable subject matter in categories such as ‘crags, brooks, rustics at work…’ and this, explains Sayell, “was a kind of challenge and became a starting point for A Modern Picturesque…

“As I began to engage with the project, I grew considerable satisfaction from discovering suitable locations in an approximate 6 mile radius from home, not least because it seemed to replicate the kind of localism that had beomce increasingly central to political and environmental discourse at the time.”

The methodology within the work adheres to the conventions of the picturesque in terms of subject matter and composition. The only formal intervention made is using the Victorian cyanotype process on immensely enlarged 35mm negatives. The result is to make the scale of the finished piece daunting, the blue of the cyanotype in some sense ‘unreal’ or unfinished, the distortions resulting from both process and enlargement distressing. Moreover, the contemporary features within the compositions – the tower blocks and trainers – make if difficult for the subject matter to be located in an irrelevant past.

Ultimately, explains Sayell, “my concern is whether South East Essex has altered beyond recognition or not all all over the last 150 years, and the meaning one wishes to attribute to any conclusions drawn in this regard”.

_{Images: Rustics at Work, Barleylands, County Show Essex, 2007 (detail, top) and Rustics at Work, Springfield Allotment, Westcliff, 2007 (detail, right) © Wig Sayell}