Milo Newman
Milo Newman is an artist and researcher who explores environmental narratives via photography, writing and sound. Through these media he makes use of the concept of landscape as a framework to translate cultural histories and concepts of place into artworks.
There are two main strands to his practice: archive-based projects that critically interrogate historic socio-cultural landscape interactions to explore how we have come to inhabit the ‘Anthropocene’; and multi-disciplinary, phenomenological engagements with specific places that ask now we are here, how does it feel to be so. He produces exhibitions, installations, and artist’s books.
Milo studied Documentary Photography at the University of South Wales, before completing an MA in Photography and the Land at the University of Plymouth, and an MA in Environmental Humanities at Bath Spa University. He is currently undertaking an AHRC funded PhD at the University of Bristol exploring ways of articulating the emotional geographies of anthropogenically driven other-than-human extinctions. He has a studio at Spike Island, also in Bristol.
Works
The Mapping of Jan Mayen
The Mapping of Jan Mayen is an artist’s bookwork that reinterprets an archive of scientific papers, maps, photographs and rock samples found by the artist amongst the collections of the University of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences during an EarthArt Fellowship.
Interweaving episodes of memory, materiality, science, history and geography, the book tells—and ecologises—the story of a 1938 surveying expedition to the Arctic island of Jan Mayen made by Donald Ashby, a young geologist.
A series of performative readings were also held in the geological collections storeroom where the archive was discovered.
Skein
Skein is a typographic series of photographs of pink-footed geese in flight. It was recently included in an Arts Council funded travelling exhibition ‘Bird After Bird’ produced by GroundWork Gallery in King’s Lynn.
The photographs that make up this series act, in part, as a metaphor for a consideration of landscape as an animated process that is in a constant state of either becoming or disintegration. In each photograph in the typology a different pattern of flying geese is depicted, but the overall containing structure of the skein (the term for the formation in which they fly) remains. When considered together as a series they express a sense of the preservation of structure within a process of flux, where a unitary form is maintained while its material embodiment constantly changes, emphasising the dynamic forces at work both culturally and physically within the term landscape.
Lacunae
Lacunae is a multi-work artist’s book about the mutability of a specific section of the UK coastline. Its structure follows a descent through a series of temporal layers that depict the ongoing process of the site’s erosion over geological time.
Its narrative is formed around a walk that was repeated many times over a period of years. The final set of photographs are drawn from work made over this time. They are combined with writing and archaeological and geological investigations to explore the memory of the past iterations of this place.
The title relates to these geological investigations, hinting at the missing sections in the strata of the cliff where the geological record of how the landscape and climate changed has been lost due to erosion in the past. Questions are asked of how ideas of place are preserved in this ongoing process of erosion, and the resulting work expresses how the memory of the past erodes with the landscape.