Shorelines

Words by Hannah Tapping

A meditation on reduction and perception, distilling the seascape into its purest elements of sky, sea and shore.

The Calm – detail

As a master monochrome, photographer Chris Tuff has always eschewed conventional colour photography, preferring to work with the abstracted reality of black and white; so when he did feel inspired to try and capture the colour palette of the Cornish landscape it was perhaps inevitable that he would take an alternative approach. In the ‘Shorelines’ series the images are at once both familiar and abstract, inhabiting a liminal space between photographic representation and pure abstraction, inviting the viewer to see landscape not simply as topography, but as geometry, rhythm, and the interplay of colour and texture.

The horizontal bands or blocks of colour and texture that characterise many of the compositions carry both a sense of serenity and gravity, evoking the horizon as a threshold – between permanence and transience, the known and the unknowable. They are also suggestive of time’s passage: the drift of memory, the lingering trace of a place once seen. While anchored in photography, the works echo painterly traditions, evoking the meditative expanses of Colour Field painting and the disciplined restraint of minimalist abstraction.

Earthy ochres, muted greens, and infinite gradations of blue speak of a particular place and provenance, yet the fragile seams between sand, water, and sky generate a quiet tension, as if the image itself is holding these realms in delicate equilibrium. The artworks invite ‘slow looking’. asking the viewer to suspend the desire for detail and instead connect with atmosphere, essence and sensory resonance of a shoreline. It is less a literal representation of a seascape than an image of what it feels like to remember standing on a beach, staring out to sea.

The images are undoubtedly influenced by the meditative rigour of the Japanese Photographer, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s ‘Seascapes’ where horizon lines bisect the frame in austere symmetry. Like Sugimoto, they reduce the ocean to its essential forms, stripping away all anecdotal elements of place, evoking a sense of timelessness. But the Shorelines series is more aligned with the fluidity of perception than with Sugimoto’s pursuit of pure absolutes.

From a painterly perspective, the images resonate with Colour Field abstraction, especially the horizontal divisions of Mark Rothko or the landscape-based minimalism of Agnes Martin. The photographs share Rothko’s concern with immersive fields of colour, that suggest emotion rather than depict form, while their tonal shifts parallel Martin’s meditative grids and stripes, both artists seeking transcendence through reduction. At the same time, the seascapes inherit something of Turner’s atmospheric dissolutions, though pared down to the point of austerity. What emerges is a hybrid sensibility: photographic works rooted in the specificity of Cornwall yet reaching toward the universality of abstraction. They continue the long artistic inquiry into how little is required to summon a landscape – and how a horizon, reduced to a line, can carry the weight of memory, reflection, and the metaphysical.

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