Jez Hastings

Jez Hastings is an artist using photography and stories to document his walks and journeys. Coming from a deep sense and understanding of ecology as well as environmental activism, he has worked in creative arts for over forty years interpreting and questioning place, ownership and landscapes. His journeys are many fold and layered like the environment he occupies. He has recently began a practice based research PhD examining landscape changes beyond the picturesque.

'Being on the journey is always more satisfying than reaching the goal’ E. Kaage (2019 p126)

Statement:
Travelling and working, walking for me is both a political act as well as performance. Allowing a questioning of power and ownership, not only physically but intellectually engaging with philosophical disciplines as well as pictorially over established territories and landscape. This life has been like my practice: peripatetic.

A physical and immersive exploring of terrain and environment at a human pace of travel – on foot, unmediated, following traditional routes, investigating space, borders and frontiers. It is both temporal and transitory, a visceral encounter when mind and body engages with the land. Using photography and text these moments become places of documentation. Capturing both ‘now’ and ‘then’ from something passed.

By accepting the ordinariness of territory, taking only what I need; stoic in its approach, maybe frugal, austere, acknowledging temporality, I am creating a walking weaving into the nature through direct daily contact with the land. Finding a silent comfort of being part of nature. ‘The body becomes steeped in the earth it treads. Gradually, it stops being in the landscape: it becomes the landscape.’ These multi-day journeys bring with them a sense of longing, melancholy, searching and memory. An individual performance, as a labourer toiling the land, this work is hidden once the yield is realised. Documenting and illustrating moments of my journey, exploring the ‘gap’ between juncture and translation to audience. These incidents (viewed as transparencies and texts) manifest as an assemblage of hidden stories.