Jem Southam
The Seventh Winter
January 2023
Huxley-Parlour Gallery
Extract ---
For the past seven years, Jem Southam has returned to the same, short, 100 yard stretch of the River Exe to photograph the liminal period between sunrise and daybreak during the winter period. Arriving in darkness, Southam waits and watches as the sky brightens, observing the gradual awakening of the river’s wildlife, and as each day passes, the cumulative encroach of Winter.
The Seventh Winter brings renewed meaning to the ‘presence’ of the photographer, the landscape’s slow evolution contrasting with his ritual return. Gestative and expectant, Southam’s photographs describe the ‘theatre’ of the landscape: ‘each and every day the sculptural form of the view I am contemplating is different, and presents a quiet drama of which I am a part. The river and its immediate banks, the stage; the distant view, the surrounding trees and the sky, make up the wings and the backdrop.’
Southam’s photography in particular bears witness to the subtleties of the South West of England’s unique atmospheric conditions and the arrhythmic geological and atmospheric forces at play: the steady transition of the seasons, the slow evolution of the days, and the volatility and activity of the River Exe, which floods often. Presented in emphatic series, Southam’s photographs are testament to both the endurance of the landscape and the ephemerality of the riverbank: the building dawn, the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and the coming and going of waterfowl.
The works in The Seventh Winter are tinged with the messianic, the mists of the early dawn lending mythic presence to his photographs. For Southam, the motif of the swan evokes a European folkloric and Mediterranean imagination, these birds harbinging change, transformation, and particularly the hope and renewal of each new day - the same ‘renewal which our ancestors celebrated as the swans or horses pulled the chariot once more from out of the underworld’.
In situ
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07:13:13 26 Feburary, 2022
Jem Southam
Extract ---
For the past seven years, Jem Southam has returned to the same, short, 100 yard stretch of the River Exe to photograph the liminal period between sunrise and daybreak during the winter period. Arriving in darkness, Southam waits and watches as the sky brightens, observing the gradual awakening of the river’s wildlife, and as each day passes, the cumulative encroach of Winter.
The Seventh Winter brings renewed meaning to the ‘presence’ of the photographer, the landscape’s slow evolution contrasting with his ritual return. Gestative and expectant, Southam’s photographs describe the ‘theatre’ of the landscape: ‘each and every day the sculptural form of the view I am contemplating is different, and presents a quiet drama of which I am a part. The river and its immediate banks, the stage; the distant view, the surrounding trees and the sky, make up the wings and the backdrop.’
Southam’s photography in particular bears witness to the subtleties of the South West of England’s unique atmospheric conditions and the arrhythmic geological and atmospheric forces at play: the steady transition of the seasons, the slow evolution of the days, and the volatility and activity of the River Exe, which floods often. Presented in emphatic series, Southam’s photographs are testament to both the endurance of the landscape and the ephemerality of the riverbank: the building dawn, the ebbing and flowing of the tide, and the coming and going of waterfowl.
The works in The Seventh Winter are tinged with the messianic, the mists of the early dawn lending mythic presence to his photographs. For Southam, the motif of the swan evokes a European folkloric and Mediterranean imagination, these birds harbinging change, transformation, and particularly the hope and renewal of each new day - the same ‘renewal which our ancestors celebrated as the swans or horses pulled the chariot once more from out of the underworld’.
In situ
07:13:13 26 Feburary, 2022
Jem Southam