The classical convention of photography rejects any tampering with an image as seen at the moment of exposure...

 

 

Taking courageous steps from this well trod-path is the contemporary photographer and printmaker Malcolm Leyland. Making combination prints from several images is the special interest of Leyland, who has redefined this technique to point of virtuosity. Unlike the nineteenth-century pioneers in this technique, Leyland combines disparate images and strongly contrasting light-effects to produce strange, often disquieting and ambivalent compositions. By playing with our world of reality and using commonplace subject matter, Leyland’s images reflect back to us a world of discord and unreality. Strict compositional balance reminiscent of experiments in cubist painting and collage, harmonise, the disquieting notes in Leyland’s work, and appeal to a true sense of aesthetic beauty and rationale.

 

We surround ourselves with man made things - objects. Some useful, some essential and some not useful nor essential.

I want people to look at these objects, to re-experience them and reveal an intimacy not previously observed. In doing so, the 'thing' becomes some other 'thing', a 'Thing' of art - an object which is useful and essential ?

 

 
 

How do we observe and experience the world around us to enable our memories to return to places with some level of accuracy?

I'm interested in how we re-experience our memory of Places.

 

MALCOLM LEYLAND : INTERVIEW

by Kailas on Feb 14, 2014

 

WEAVING WORDS TOGETHER, YOU’LL SPEAK MOST HAPPILY WHEN SKILLED JUXTAPOSITION RENEWS A COMMON WORD

 Horace, Ars Poetica.

Skilled juxtaposition, whether in words or imagery, is the remit of the artist. Presenting the known in unknown ways, teasing out the unfamiliar from the familiar. For Malcolm Leyland, an earlier career in commercial photography lacked the opportunity to apply those visual twists and turns to subject matter.

Eschewing that commercial direction gives Leyland the freedom to take his work into more expressive areas, using composite photography to address that conundrum most intriguing to visual artists throughout time – the rendering of three dimensional reality and human perception onto two-dimensional images.

‘…part of my curiosity/investigation is to look beyond the conventional ‘single viewpoint / stolen moment’ framework as typically defined by the camera. For many, the ‘single viewpoint / stolen moment’ is the end of the road in creative terms. 

For me, it is just the beginning.’

Malcolm Leyland talks to Trebuchet’s Kailas Elmer