Lost Press – serie

Passing Through is a book concerned with nature, and our transient connection to it. Consequently, the human figure is seen only occasionally and rather vague, like something from the imagination or a memory. Nigel Grierson's visual journey through the seasons, treads a fine line between reality and fiction, in his search for abstraction and spirituality:"As adults, in search of sophistication, and jaded by the rigours of work, it's easy to lose the natural sense of wonder, and to take for granted the things that fascinated us so much as children. For Rudolph Steiner, the most direct route to spirituality for the adult, involves finding the inner child via the occupation of playing. For me, spirituality lies in nature, in its myriad of forms and colours, and in the elements; earth's chaotic beauty. On a personal level this book represents a journey; a return to childhood, exploring woodlands, playing in the dirt, finding little treasures and taking something home as a souvenir; the photograph.I once heard it said that spirits are in fact traces or energies left behind when beings repeat the same actions over and over on the same pathways. Perhaps that is why we can sometimes hear voices in the woods, even after the people have long gone."

Lightstream represents Nigel Grierson's most recent foray into photographic abstraction as he makes long exposures of figures beside the light of the ocean. Taking the maxim from Dieter Appelt "A snapshot steals life that it cannot return. Along exposure (creates) a form that never existed", Grierson makes beautiful images, which on the surface might appear to owe as much to the medium of painting as they do to photography. However, it is important to him that these are un-manipulated images straight from the camera: "From the outset, my work has been largely about 'photographic seeing' as I'm fascinated by what Garry Winogrand so simply described as'how something looks when photographed'. Hence, a sense of discovery within the work itself is very important to me; finding something new that I didn't already know. There's a huge element of 'chance, and the embrace of the happy accident within this approach, which is a sort of photographic equivalent of action painting. I'm often more interested inwhat something suggests rather than what it actually is, each image becoming a starting point for our imagination as it edges towards abstraction".Yet what is unique about photography is that it always keeps something of the original subject. So there's a dynamic duality, a dramatic to and fro in the viewer's mind, between what it is and what it suggests. The marks and traces created by the moving light, at times have a simplicity like a child's drawings. On occasion, the residue of a human figure might be reduced to little more than their posture or demeanor, which then seems more significant than ever, a sortof essence, whether that be elusive or illusive.