Celebrating 13 years of the ground-breaking international MFA Photography course at UCA Farnham, Raising the Roof featured 27 past MFA graduates including two members of COLLECTive - Hayden and myself. Described as an historical survey show, the alumni artists showed work from their final MFA projects showcasing a wide variety of subject matter and style.
Raising the Roof at The Lightbox, Woking 2023
UCA’s MFA Photography course is one of the only two-year full-time post-graduate photography courses in the UK and was conceived and led by the legendary Anna Fox. Known for her colour documentary photography, the course inevitably attracted photographers keen to make documentary work in all its guises.
Hayden’s MFA project, Wading in Black Peat, is an ongoing body of work, started in 2018, documenting the rural landscape where he grew up in Dartmoor looking at themes of psychogeography, memory and place attachment. Hayden went on long immersive walks in the landscape of his childhood, creating a mental map of each associated memory and thought to a specific location, photographing these places as he went. It is an image and text work shot on medium format film and including Hayden’s signature poetry. To learn more about this project and Hayden’s process visit his website.
Hayden Wilde, Peat Bog Edge, from the series Wading Through Black Peat, 2018-2023
My work in the show was from my series Lost. It was made when my children were young and growing up on the edge of a forest but immersed more in the virtual world than the natural one. Worried by accusations that i-generation children were suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder. Determined that my children would connect with their local natural environment, I started to photograph them in the woodland spaces that we both grew up in, albeit 30 years apart, looking for engagement or detachment - I am not sure which. The result was a series of large format contact prints that perhaps say more about me, than them. To look at more images in this series please go to my website.
Corinne Whitehouse, Untitled #1 from the series Lost, 2019
The show was itself an exercise in remembering and reflecting as well as reconnecting with student friends and artists who all share a place attachment to the university where they studied. Hopefully the course will continue for another thirteen years.
Raising the Roof at The Lightbox, Woking 2023
And I hope the great local gallery, The Lightbox in Woking, can also endure. All members of COLLECTive have showed work here in the past. Run as a charity, it has, like so many local art institutions and initiatives, struggled to secure funding, and it looked like the gallery’s days were numbered. However, only this week, it was in the local news with the hope that Woking Council might give it a lifeline. And so they should. If we want to encourage a future generation of artists and makers in the UK we need public funds to support creative educational establishments and galleries so they have a place to learn and show.