Shedding new light on
familiar landscapes
When was the last time you walked down the street and actually ‘looked’ at your surroundings? Shops, houses, signposts, trees are more often than not just a backdrop to our daily routine, while characters and events form the nourishment on which our primary senses and thought processes feed.

For the scenery to become a character in its own right it must join the drama, and this is exactly what you will see if you visit the Burslem School of Art in the next couple of weeks.

Constructed Spaces by Mark Wood describes itself as a “series of visual essays” based on the urban landscape of Stoke-on-Trent and Newcastle. It “combines photographic reportage with digital composition” to offer up new vistas out of familiar scenes, all the time causing you to question your own supposed knowledge of your environment.
It intrigues, fantasises, tantalises and disorientates. Each picture is explained as a composite photograph, and as such you will see buildings and other landmarks in various stages of compression, repetition, reversal and relocation, although sometimes the tricky thing is being able to spot exactly what it is about the image that is the subject of the manipulation.

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'Keep the Home Fires Burning’ at first appears as a row of average local shops in an average residential street. But you know it is unreal. When you look closer you will see the same car mirrored on the opposite side of the scene. Or the same upstairs window with lamp, same treatment as the car but different coloured exterior paintwork.

Constructed Spaces is awash with this kind of visual trickery, but then that is partly the point: much of our daily backdrop is homogeneous to the point of its familiarity being generic rather than specific.

‘Home (development)’ and ‘Home (estate)’ are similar in that they appear, like some bizarrely proportioned model diorama, impossibly lit and arranged in perfect symmetry, normal but surreal. They are metaphors for the places where we live.
Constructed Spaces works on many levels. Those merely curious to pick out local landmarks will enjoy scouring the re-mixed town centre-scapes. Those whose business it is to construct and design our urban environment will find questions arise out of the challenge of a new and fantastic perspective. And those whose eyes seek mystery from the mundane will truly relish it.

Gabriel Gregory
for the Sunday Sentinel
8th July 2001