It is 25 years since Fay Godwin’s Landmarks show at the Barbican in 2001, her last and biggest retrospective. She died in 2005. We both visited that exhibition and since then have had the good fortune, as well as the opportunity, to become closer to Fay Godwin’s work.
In 2017 we curated a show of Fay Godwin’s ‘The Drovers Roads of Wales’ (original prints loaned from The National Library of Wales) and other photographs’, all new prints from original negatives held in The British Library Archive and printed for us by Fay’s best known printer, Peter Cattrell. This was shown at MoMA, Machynlleth. While here in Pen’rallt, we featured work by some of the photographers influenced by Fay. During that exhibition we made further contacts, with the show attracting great enthusiasm.
In 2018, this moral support and interest enabled us to start work on an expanded exhibition, ‘Under a Turbulent Sky’, with additional new prints produced, again, by Peter Cattrell, chosen by additional family members, friends and colleagues. That show was toured to Kestle Barton, a very special gallery in the heart of Cornwall, when it gained national attention:
But that work, in its entirety, was yet to be shown here. Until now.
In the ‘countdown’ to the opening of the exhibition, we’ll be featuring some of the photographs with their accompanying captions here.
This ‘self portrait’ by Fay Godwin with its extended caption written by her friend Brett Rogers, is a good place to begin
Brett Rogers, friend of Fay Godwin and Director of The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2006 - 2022), writes:
‘Pett Level’ takes an everyday and often clichéd photographic subject – a beach scene and turns it on its head.’
‘Whilst clearly acknowledging this is a landscape scene, she translates the subject into an abstract composition as well as a self-portrait. This image (which hangs above my bed) repays constant attention. Depending on my mood, I appreciate different aspects of the image such as the strong formal composition which plays on the horizontal elements that are enhanced by the vivid play of light across the pebbles and the dramatic dark movement of the impending storm clouds. The sun on the pebbles summons optimism and reminds me of pleasant summer days spent with my children on this particular beach, whilst the impending clouds indicate dark times ahead.
Added to these qualities, I particularly enjoy the fact that Fay herself is reflected in the image. By situating her shadow right in the centre of the image she embeds herself in a place which had particular significance for her. Pett Level and the neighbouring area of Rye and East Sussex became her mental landscape providing her with a constant source of inspiration. Fay was a staunchly independent person with a very particular photographic vision and looking at this image, always reminds me of her steely determination, her intuitive sense of composition and her dramatic use of light, texture and form.’
Brett Rogers