By Jason Swain
I started the week by helping Paul Blackley dismantle and pack away the very successful Wight Surf History exhibition, and ended it by putting up my own canvases on the same walls for my part of the ‘Ocean Seen’ exhibition which starts at Dimbola this Friday (29th June) and runs through to the 2nd September.
Not sure i was a massive help on Monday as I was nursing a slight hangover from a great Sunday Night at the Festival watching Bruce Springsteen followed by a very early start due to noisy baby and even noisier crows. But I was a pair of helping hands and carrying boxes of prints and surfboards to the cars was just about within my abilities on the day.
It was pretty sad to see the Wight Surf History show come down, it had a good run and we had a lot of fun at the opening evening and the Jubilee party with live music from The Shutes, just hope we can follow it up sometime in the future.
Ocean Seen exhibition of Oceanic Photography.
So that was Monday, and by tuesday morning I was back at Dimbola lugging boxes the other way, carrying 18 big canvases in ready for hanging for the Ocean Seen exhibition of Oceanic Photography.
This was quite an exciting day for me, because I was seeing 16 of the 18 canvases for the first time, I’ve been so busy these last few weeks that i hadn’t even had the time to take them all out of their very well packaged boxes! And although i know the images very well having shot them and created the huge panoramas over the last few years, up till now i’d only seen them as digital files on a computer screen, and now i would be actually holding the 5 foot long canvases in my hand and to be honest, i didn’t know what to expect.
Well I’ve got to say that i was really pleasantly surprised, i had no idea how well the digital ideas would work in the real world (a vertorama or panorama is created by putting multiple images together on a computer), and also how good the photographic printing process would be at that sort of size! In the ‘Round the Island Race’ panorama you can even make out all the boats on the horizon.
Helped by the brilliant JMCT curator Kimberly Piggot, the hanging was a mixture of great excitement at seeing all the new work unveiled for the first time, and great tedium as the task of fixings and hanging had to be repeated 18 times over.
Hanging the Ocean Seen exhibition
Was it worth it? i dont know, maybe you can get along to the show and let me know what you think? And if you’re reading this on the other side of the world, or some time in the future when the show has finisehd, here’s a a gallery of my images that are part of the show.
Ocean Seen – Images by jason swain
Here’s a link to Dimbola for directions and opening times etc…
And here’s a little bit of blurb about the show….
“Just in time for the summer sailing season – A collaborative summer show, bringing together three great oceanic photographers to celebrate the way we interact with our great British coastline.
From spending the day walking its beautiful shores and admiring the breathtaking landscapes – to riding the waves for a thrill on a high speed yacht, or looking at the hero’s that weather the coasts day in day out to keep us safe and also those that provide us with the ‘catch of the day’.
The exhibition, which is curated by Kimberley Piggott (Exhibitions Coordinator JMCT) will feature the diverse work of Jason Swain, Rick Tomlinson and Nigel Millard.”