Bartholomew Square 4

The story

Materials, making and the idea behind Bartholomew Square 4.

Bartholomew Square 4 Fine art photography By: Tony Bowen Photography on archival 50×50 cm including frame limited edition of 10 From promise Collection: Summer 2021: a few parts of the world look forward to new beginnings with mixed feelings of optimism, anxiety, and uncertainty, alongside an urgent and profound need to see what the future holds. Material from diverse sources is interpreted to fit differing perspectives and interests: science, politics, pseudo-science, rumor, conjecture, and misinformation vie for attention in a schismatic maelstrom of media and social media output. Our yearning for signs, direction, and meaning exist throughout history and throughout the world. Bartholomew Square, meanwhile, bears witness to its own new beginnings, as the backlog of marriage and partnership ceremonies is tackled – joyful affairs, but steeped in superstition, rubric, and symbolism. On the ground outside, a succession of 'stormettes' of confetti (historically used to bestow fertility upon a marriage) briefly settle, move and resettle before they are swept or blown away. These beautiful, fragile residues are all that remain as the party moves on. Their fleeting, arbitrary configurations strangely recall the language of ancient traditions of divination such as the 'reading' of corn grains, sand, tea leaves, and the sediments of coffee or wine – still rehearsed today in various forms and involving generous helpings of invention, intuition, speculation, and bias. Hopefully, these photographs (aerial selections embedded with feint mapping grids) provide a playful meditation on our own attachments to ritual and belief. Tony is a UK-based fine artist working mainly with photography. Since his postgraduate study, he has divided his time between art and design education (teaching and curriculum leadership) and personal practice – in Manchester where he was born, and in Sussex where he now lives. With a background and first degree in fine art (painting) his interest in making photographs has developed over time: initially supporting work with other media and subsequently as outcomes in their own right. Alongside formal and atmospheric considerations, his work is largely inspired by the power of the trace, the fragment, and the unresolved to provoke the imagination in unexpected ways. A longstanding preoccupation with the found mark has led to work that observes, interrogates and documents banal and often overlooked surfaces. Residues of human and other actors present in domestic, natural, and urban environments are areas of particular interest. They suggest all kinds of narratives and stimulate broad lines of inquiry. Whether literal or metaphorical, responses to these encounters open up new, personal ways of reading the environment, and of experiencing, deciphering and relating to landscape. His work has been shown in galleries and venues throughout the UK. These include Manchester City Art Gallery, Stockport Art Gallery, the Castlefield Gallery (Manchester), Granada Studios (Salford), the Mall Galleries (London), Manchester Metropolitan University, Leeds University, the Regency Town House (Brighton), and the Old Market (Hove). Overseas venues include the San Diego Arts Institute (California), Davis Orton (New York), Fabrica Braco de Prata (Lisbon), Romantsa (Athens), and Werkstadt (Berlin). It is in several private collections and has been published, amongst others, by Manifest Gallery Press (Ohio), Fragmented Magazine (New York), the Workhorse Collective (London), and Chambre Fluide (London/International).