In his photographs, the young West Country-based artist Darren Harvey-Regan draws on what he calls the Romantic use of the landscape encounter to create contemplative space. He sees photographs as ‘sites of reflection on the human presence’ and is interested in how landscape generates a particular kind of mythology or shared social meaning.

Although he uses traditional camera and printing technologies, which may encompass digital processes, he has also experimented with the moving image and with written narrative. The results often take on a meditative, almost spiritual quality which has much to do with absence and the ways in which absence…

In his photographs, the young West Country-based artist Darren Harvey-Regan draws on what he calls the Romantic use of the landscape encounter to create contemplative space. He sees photographs as ‘sites of reflection on the human presence’ and is interested in how landscape generates a particular kind of mythology or shared social meaning.

Although he uses traditional camera and printing technologies, which may encompass digital processes, he has also experimented with the moving image and with written narrative. The results often take on a meditative, almost spiritual quality which has much to do with absence and the ways in which absence can suggest human presence.

The Sticks series comprises what the artist describes as ‘gestural interventions within the landscape.’ The images all partake of a simple conceit - photographing items of clothing suspended on the end of a stick in isolated moorland, framed against a mist-shrouded horizon. They have a certain cinematic poetry, akin to stills from a medieval epic by Tarkovsky.

Clothes mimic the shape of the human form and in these images they function as part for whole, signifying the absent body while evoking more abstract ideas relating to loss and memory. The unparticularised nature of the landscape (this barren heathland could be almost anywhere in the world) opens the image to a broad range of interpretations. Clothing is attached to sticks by explorers to mark their prior presence in a location, or to guide those following in their tracks; it can function as makeshift memorial, as a primitive grave-marker; it is both flag and totem, mannequin and scarecrow. But a tattered dress on a stick can also carry more morbid connotations, conjuring the hanged body itself.

Harvey-Regan has said of this series, ‘Sticks offers neither questions nor answers but rather a representation of the space in-between and its inherent tensions: the ambiguity between absence and presence, known and unknown, the hidden and the revealed. I feel it is through the absence of something that its essential nature might be more fully considered.’

The photographs in Sticks were taken on a medium format camera, primarily on Dartmoor and around the Exe estuary. Each photograph is a C-type print by the artist - one of an edition strictly limited to ten.

Darren Harvey-Regan graduated with a First Class Honours degree in Photography from the University of Plymouth in 2006. The Sticks series is the first group of works he has exhibited with Eyestorm.