Keith Parry

Parry’s lens draws us quietly into topographies full of absence, and slowly reveals the traces that endure. We experience the stillness of his minimalist landscapes visually at first, but the intensity becomes progressively palpable, the silence perceptible. And once inside the frame, inhabiting his imagery, we pause for a moment, as he did, and notice more.

Keith Parry – Fen #13

The traces of nature in the snow, which initially appeared as a fragile layer of the picturesque, unveil traces of their own: delicate columns of snow betray the direction of the wind on the trunks of delineating trees; at the forest edge, a tree lies fallen near to another newly sprung; off-white specks graze in pristine fields; and a melted heart speaks of the liminal moment between settled snow and water yet to freeze.

Elsewhere, tell-tale traces of humanity’s eternal battle with nature emerge: endlessly broken and endlessly mended fences traverse the land; autumn-coloured storehouses, mimicking defiant trees, rust the monotone of winter; and stripes of salt etch fine black lines across the snow-white canvass.

And in the flatlands of the fens we can trace the passage of time to the distant horizon: along an ancient straightened road that has sunk into the past so often its surface has become little more than a patchwork diary of repairs; and in the steely incision that cuts through the soft peat tissue layer – of a brown so old its darkness seems deeper than black.

Parry graduated in Fine Art in 1987, and since focussing on photographic image making has exhibited widely, most notably in England and the United States.