Footnotes, backgrounds, sheds, Hugh Strange, Max Creasy and Elizabeth Hatz

It is the seemingly peripheral details and gestures that come to anchor this collection of images. Like the building they document, these photographs of the Drawing Matter Archive at the working Shatwell Farm in Somerset, UK, find their bearings in the backgrounds, the contextual minutiae and the footnotes. Taking the form of a three-way conversation between the Archive’s architect, Hugh Strange, Norwegian-Australian photographer Max Creasy, and Swedish academic, architect and writer Elizabeth Hatz, this book not only offers a subtly poetic and expansive vantage on the Archive, the collection it houses and its place in the surrounding farm, but also forwards a wider précis on the built form; one in which architecture is layered, living and lived.

London-based office Hugh Strange Architects has developed a reputation for producing buildings that marry an attention to material and structure with precise, contextually considered responses to sensitive urban and rural sites. Strange's Architectural Archive was nominated for the 2015 European Union Prize for Contemporary Architecture – Mies van der Rohe Award, and won RIBA National and Regional Awards the same year.

Max Creasy is a Norwegian-Australian photographer living and working between London and Berlin. His photographic practice explores systems of meaning through architecture, the archive and still life. His work has been widely exhibited at commercial and institutional galleries including the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), West Space (Melbourne) and the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. He regularly collaborates with other artists, curators and architects including James Taylor-Foster, OK-RM and the REAL Foundation, and his editorial work is published widely. 

Elizabeth Hatz is a practicing architect, professor and art curator, sharing her time between practice, research and teaching positions at the University of Limerick and KTH Stockholm. Her built work includes Kodak Headquarters, Gothenburg; Stockholm Globe Arena; and buildings for AKSO-Nobel, Stockholm. Hatz curated ev+a 2010, Ireland’s pre-eminent art event. As head of SAR (Swedish Architects Association), she co-founded Fargfabriken, a renowned site for art and architecture in Stockholm.

Photography represents a mode of conceptual, material and historical enquiry for Melbourne-born, Frankfurt-based artist James Tunks. An expansion from his 2017 solo exhibition Elsewhere at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (Melbourne), his debut book Into Dust sees Tunks construct fake astronomical photographs using found and accumulated materials – crushed and pulverised to mimic interstellar nebular. While these sweeping vistas are immersive and engulfing in their aesthetic scope, their associated lists of materials come to form fascinating abstract texts, which echo the history of astrophotography and its pioneers (Edwin Hubble and EE Barnard among them) as adroitly as they tease out evidence of Tunks' day-to-day. As such, Into Dust forges an ode to the genre and sketches an indirect self-portrait in the same breath.

Published by Perimeter Editions
Softcover 
44 pages
297 x 210 mm
ISBN 9780648262855