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Guy Dickinson
Guy Dickinson is a multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the intersections between landscape, memory, and perception. Working primarily with photography, collage and mark-making, his practice is rooted in a deep engagement with place and process. A sustained meditation on movement, cycles and the ephemeral, it is at once an act of witnessing and a search for connection—between body and land, between memory and material.
Michéla Griffith
In 2012 I paused by my local river and everything changed. I’ve moved away from what many expect photographs to be: my images deconstruct the literal and reimagine the subjective, reflecting the curiosity that water has inspired in my practice. Water has been my conduit: it has sharpened my vision, given me permission to experiment and continues to introduce me to new ways of seeing.
When we last featured Guy Dickinson, his tracing silence project was already well underway, seeking the "quintessential manifestation of place." Since 2018, Guy's distinctive work has continued to mature and expand, embracing monochrome, and pushing to continually evolve series which mix photography, digital layering and collage. We talk about the extension of his practice into bookmaking, writing, and exhibiting, as well as what now inspires Guy.
I was shocked to realise that seven years have passed since we featured you, Guy. Has anything given you particular enjoyment or satisfaction, photographically, in the intervening period?
I’ve definitely reached that age where the passing of time seems to accelerate exponentially, but on the plus side, that has injected a sense of urgency and drive into the project and helps focus my attention. I’m happy to say I still find the project rewarding and creatively stimulating.
I’ve exhibited a bit more since our last interview and also published a book with Another Place Press, which felt like a bit of a milestone. It was great fun working with Iain Sarjeant; I was absolutely thrilled when he asked. Passage was a collection of work I made in 2017 in response to a walk across Iceland, from the mountains in Landmannalaugar to the coast at Skogar. Most of the images were made on the final day, on the stretch from Porsmork that runs between the Eyjafjallajokull and Myrdalsjokull glaciers, then follows the Skogar river down to the coast.
My self-published work is all done in isolation, so it was a new experience for me working with someone else on a book. It was great to hand over all the hard work and logistics to an expert. The way Iain responded to the images with his pairings and spreads led me to look at the work in a very different way, identifying cross threads and connections that hadn’t occurred to me before. I tend to work in a bit of a bubble, so it was valuable to be reminded of the benefits of collaboration and the stagnation that can result from maintaining too much control. You can be too close to your own work to always make the best calls on how it might be presented.