Isla Gray

Isla Gray is a series of images made in England and Scotland over the past few years. The rainy, foggy, and sometimes snowy conditions in Britain work like atmospheric veils to diffuse, conceal and transform familiar landscapes. The resulting images are simple in the way that a haiku or a line drawing is simple. They suggest additional layers, more detail, or a bigger story, but they also suggest that there is elegance in restraint and that what is withheld is at least as important as what is revealed. On another level, these images, which are distillations of form, shape and colour, explore concepts such as isolation, melancholy and transformation.

This work was made with an old school Holga. The reductive nature of the Holga image, the way shadow detail is lost or peripheral detail is softened, for example, made it the right choice for this project. The prints were made on Ilford Art paper, a textured paper that utterly transformed these images into the renderings that I had in my minds eye at the outset of the project.

“It’s no easy business to be simple.” Gustave Flaubert