ALICE OLIVER
Somewhere & Nowhere
27 September - 3 October 2019


Somewhere & Nowhere documents the journey my father and I took across South Wales at the beginning of 2019.

My father was born here and grew up in the town of Bridgend, but moved to London almost 50 years ago, and has not lived in Wales since. It wasn’t until I moved to Swansea a few years ago that the landscape of South Wales once again became a district of situation for my family. It was important to show the chorus of memory and place, not just with the timeworn land and Silurian rocks, but also the Wales closer to us - the council estates and pebbledash.

The effect of such small and forgotten impressions on memory is well-known. Whether we like it or not, we are isomorphically bound to the places that formed us, and thus the very shape of memory is that of the land. Even from a distant past, out of which nothing subsists, it is the land that may bear something, imperceptibly, from out of deep time, long untouched. So, I handed my dad a polaroid camera and asked him to document our journey alongside me.

We passed in unison through this vacant terrain, along invisible lines, breathing older airs that we had been absent from. The further we went, the gentle tilt of the green hills retreated up into the distant peaks and beacons, where the seconds grind the mountains down again, down the valley and river, over the steelworks and the coal fields and the people, into grit and sand, washed away and blown out into the almighty recesses of the further and unquiet sea. And while there is sometimes a sense of no time, of stasis, there is also the reminder that all time is running here, all at once, stacked and looped upon itself. Perhaps then, under all that is human, you find the true path of memory, as it is eroded from the great ranges and edifices, transited into silt and dust, down the incline into nothing.

It was in the car that he began to tell me the stories of his time there. Fragments only, but precious things, to be kept. For it’s well known - ‘the old land of my fathers is dear to me’.

Alice Oliver is a photographer based in the United Kingdom. Alice's work considers the interactions between the spectator and the art being viewed and explores temporality though the use of installation and moving image. Her installations incorporate found archival footage to create a new subversive narrative or aesthetic, questioning whether we, as humans, still have to ability to feel affect whilst we being consumed and inundated with imagery through technology.

Her work has been showned in several group shows in the United Kingdom and magazines.