LENS CULTURE CRITICS CHOICE: I paid for written review when I entered the competition deadline 17.4.24

Portfolio review

I learnt from my previous review A smith gallery that I should be focused in what I want to get out of it. This time I submitted images, artist statement, Artist bio, and additional questions from the reviewer.

See detailed learning at bottom of this post, but in short:

• Be concise when explaining my concept & I edited my artist statement for my next submission
• Consider where I place the definitions with the footnote images

MY SUBMISSION IMAGES AND STATEMENTS: My submission: https://www.lensculture.com/submission-reviews/107428

See written review at bottom of post:

I submitted 10 images, to be judged as a series, that works as a group, thematically or aesthetically:

WHAT LIES BENEATH

Statement for Lens culture

What Lies Within, is a series of images taken in an ancient woodland. A conceptual project, it uses the landscape as a medium to express my thoughts on community. The photography transforms abstract ideas in my head, into something concrete, positioning the ancient woodland as a visual metaphor for community.

Though humans provoked the concept of the work, they are not evident in the images. The local community, often disharmonious and driven by difference, is in stark contrast with the harmonious characteristics of the woodland society. Footnote images signpost inherent qualities like cooperation, support, diversity, resilience, inclusion, networking, mutual exchange, and adaptation, which could be beneficially adopted in many human communities.

Known and accepted for some years, like other incomers in my neighbourhood, we are never adopted as local, no matter how long passes or the contribution to the community – a story common to settings across the globe.

Combining the world in my head with the one in front of me, through an internal and external passage through the landscape, has helped to heal some of the wounds that inspired the story’s beginning.

Niki South

ARTIST BIO for Lens culture

Niki South was born and grew up in England. From 1995 she began holidaying in Wales; this culminated in buying a second home there in 2009 and transitioning to a ‘dual centre’ life between the two places. In 2019 she relocated to Wales permanently.

Currently completing her BA (Hons) Photography degree with the Open University, she has a particular interest in community. Her previous documentary work ‘Layers of Truth’ was informed by her ‘insider/outsider’ position where she highlighted issues arising during Covid 19 from ‘incomers’ trying to integrate into a small traditional community.

Additional info I gave to the reviewer:

1. What is the single most important question/concern you have about your project that you wish to have answered here in this review? Do the footnotes combined with the artist statement adequately signpost the story behind the series? Can a viewer understand the concept of the woods as a visual metaphor?

2. What do you hope to accomplish with your photography in the next few years? To finish my degree, now 95% complete, to be able to move on and follow my inclination for combining narratives from my subconscious with images from the conscious world. I would like to publish other visual stories.

3. Is this an ongoing or completed project? It will be completed soon when I publish a book with the images and accompanying poetry that I have written, that completes the signposting for the narrative.

4. Do you consider yourself a ? photographer? advanced

5. What genres of photography do you work in (mark all that apply): fine art, documentary, imaginative storytelling

The review:

https://www.lensculture.com/submission-reviews/107428  26.4.24

Hi Niki,
 
You can view your completed Submission Review here»
 
Thank you for trying out our Submission Review service. We hope it helps you refine your future competition entries! And we’d love to hear what you think. Please email us with any comments or suggestions. Thanks again!
 
Cheers- 
The LensCulture Team

Reviewer Portfolio Feedback:

Hi Niki-

It isn’t happenstance that you are using a forest as a metaphor for community. Fungi, aspen groves and many tree species are known to have elaborate networks of communication that bind them together. Not to mention all the other small organisms that make up the ecosystem that sustains the life of what we are seeing in your photographs. You pull any single member of the community out, and the whole forest suffers. Despite that the knowledge is out there for humans to make sense of it all, we continue to make the same, irreversible mistakes, over and over. And this project brings these questions, and more, to my mind. 

In response to your request for feedback, I am still a little confused by the overarching idea that you are going for. If what I have said above rings with you, I think it would be helpful to state it somewhat directly and concisely. For example, instead of saying “The photography transforms abstract ideas in my head, into something concrete,” and defining your work as a “conceptual project,” I would simply say “”What Lies Within” uses the forest landscape of [name the forest] as a metaphor for human communities and civilization.” Or something like that. 

That being said, I still want to understand how you see human communities as stark contrasts to this forest communities, but are using the forests as a metaphor for the human communities. Perhaps they are not a “metaphor” but a “model?” In other words, are you suggesting that these woodland spaces are a model for what it means to be a part of a community and to live in an ecosystem where all things must coexist and support each other’s life processes? Again, I am very interested in the ideas. I just think it’s a question of being clear and concise: especially when submitting to a contest like this where jurors have so little time to spend with each submission/statement. 

I also don’t know if you need to include the words with their definitions beneath the photographs. I think you can say everything in the statement and then rely on the viewer’s intellect to realize that what they are seeing are prime examples of what those words represent. Perhaps you can include those exact words in your statement and then give an example of how that plays out in the woodland environments. But my sense is that this project could exist as two separate entities: image and text. 

Otherwise, I haven’t talked about the images themselves. And I personally find myself getting lost in the beautiful, dense and elaborate spaces you are creating/seeing. The compositions are complex, often surprising and always seductive. These are hard landscapes to render and it feels like you have an eye for figuring them out. 

It’s a pleasure to discover this series, Niki. Wishing you the best of luck. 

My learning:

I have taken away from this review in terms of my publicity PDF:

Regarding the introduction:

• Be concise/direct with my overarching idea – E.g. revisit my wording “The photography transforms abstract ideas in my head, into something concrete,” and defining my work as a “conceptual project,”
• Consider if I mean that the woodland is a model for an effective community rather than a metaphor – calling it a model makes sense to me and I think it is more explicit.
• Consider how I might use my footnote images and whether I should include the words with their definitions beneath the photographs.

I used this advice to edit some of my statement info when entering my next competition:

“What Lies Beneath’ expresses my thoughts on community, using landscape of an ancient woodland to create a visual model where things coexist and support each other. Footnote images signpost its inherent qualities like diversity and cooperation. My experience of local human communities provokes the project’s concept, where conversely they are often disharmonious and driven by difference. Sadly, incomers are never accepted as local, no matter how long passes or what they contribute to their neighbourhood – a story common to settings across the globe. This work has helped to heal some of the wounds that inspired the story’s beginning.

What lies beneath the emerald wrapping, embracing their collective realm? What lies elsewhere beneath man’s disguised demeanour, civil but deliberately divisive? “

I replied to the reviewer:

Thanks for the review. It comes at the beginning of my journey to ‘put my work out there’, so is very timely.

I understand your message to be more explicit and concise when conveying my ideas to viewers/reviewers and thank you for the practical ideas that you have given that I can consider in a reformatting of the project.

It was a very thoughtful, useful review.

Thank you!

LO4: independently disseminate your body of work by establishing relationships and networks with audiences, clients and markets