Richard Hoare

 

Threshold

until Friday 17 March 2023

 

“All these places are just places, the random legacy of erosion and deposition, ancient volcanic activity, isostatic rise. When we look at the mountains, we see shape and monumental stillness animated, if at all, by the weather: passing rain-showers, the smudges of fog and cloud, sudden bursts of sunlight. But we would not be human if we did not do what our species has always done in these empty, dramatic locales. We ponder the big questions. We reach for story. We people the wilderness with ancestors, with vanished communities, those forced into exile in clearance or famine, or earlier groups who erected dolmens and megaliths, giants and ogres who formed islands by throwing rocks at each other, or prayer-filled mystics pushing off from the shore in tiny vessels, in search of what isn’t there, what can never be reached in this life.

Richard Hoare’s images are rooted in the real. They celebrate the physical shapes encountered on these coasts, the skyline of island and mountain, and they are moments – freeze-frames of the ever-shifting atmospheric drama, the angle and intensity of light.”

Philip Marsden, author