Marked ground
Sep 24-Oct 4, 2003
Julia Giles
| photography (earth art) | space 2 | sponsored by Metro Imaging

Julia Giles is an earth artist. She grew up on a farm in west Cornwall but now lives in London, maintaining her connection to the land through her artwork.

She uses her own shadow as a starting point for much of the work in Marked Ground. In this exhibition she presents large scale digital photographs in which a two dimensional figure and the landscape co-exist with each other; the figure is in the landscape and the landscape is in the figure.

The gouges, patterns and lines on the ground — and on the figure — are created by the actions of people as they move around or work on a particular piece of ground, or they have been made by plant growth, or by seasonal changes in qualities of the soil.

Alongside the digital work, Julia Giles also shows us some snapshots. These are of her shadow, placed carefully in rows and series. Individually they may appear unremarkable, but seen together they reveal subtle changes in the appearance of a selected piece of ground over a period of several hours, usually the course of an afternoon.

These transformations in colour and texture point to the imperceptible movements of the earth; around its own axis — and, on an even larger scale, around the sun, bringing cycles of growth and decay across the seasons.