Official opening on Sunday at 3pm, Peter will discusses his photography and the current project:
“I am an endocrine surgeon with an abiding interest in landscape photography.
My professional life involves a tiny working space of about 5 cubic centimetres filled with critical anatomical structures which I see magnified through 2.5x loupes. When I am not operating, I like a more expansive vista.
In 2015, I was fortunate to have my work highly commended in the Bowness Competition. Those landscapes from the Faroe Islands involved 4 weeks intensive photography in difficult weather conditions with my son, a Tokyo based photographer. In 2016, we collaborated with my wife, a textile artist, in a joint exhibition which featured our landscape photography and feltwork, bringing Nordic vistas and colours to an Antipodean audience in Sydney at the Corner Gallery in Stanmore.
My current project was inspired by the work of Hokusai. His woodblock print “The Great Wave off Kanazawa” is ubiquitous in collective art consciousness and reproduced on ephemera to the point where it becomes like “The Birth of Venus” or “David”: invisible in plain sight. The Sydney Harbour Bridge is like Mount Fuji, so over-photographed as to become trite. Hokusai brought Western Renaissance vanishing point perspective to an Eastern audience and placed Mount Fuji with the everyday, thus defining its relationship in the landscape yet keeping it aloof and sacred. He introduced Prussian Blue to print-making in the East. James A Mitchener,the author of “Tales of the South Pacific” and Pulitzer Prize winner said that Sydney Harbour Bridge was “big, utilitarian….it is very ugly.”; yet it stirs in Sydney-siders flying in from overseas a feeling of place and belonging. My challenge was to re-imagine the bridge as part, and yet apart from the city in 36 views. My complete set of 36 views will be exhibited in October at the Corner Gallery, again collaborating with Lizette Campbell.”