Notes Journal

Notes is an artist-led Scottish periodical devoted to developing visual and critical discourses in contemporary photography. Its goals are to represent, examine and nurture Scottish photography thinking and practice through the creation of interdisciplinary and transnational connections.

The magazine and logo were originally designed by Marco Scerri and I was asked by Nina Bacos to work on issue 6 with The Anthropocene as its central theme. I revised the grids and some of the typography for this issue. It was a pleasure to work on such a publication with so many talented contributors.

In Ane Lopez’s Tiempo – the spanish word for time and weather – the artist records the movements of the glacier Sólheimajökull in Iceland, creating visual imprints of deep time. The reference to the geological shift is scaled down in Sean Patrick Campbell’s Swollen Utopia. Accompanied by Myles Painter’s essay Unhometowns the landscapes of Campbell’s childhood are fractured with monuments of exploitative capitalism, the precursor to the Anthropocene(s!). Maria Sledmere’s essay Estranging Natures discusses the implications of naming this thing – the Anthropocene – in a capitalized singular, problematising Western anthropocentric tendency to limiting discourse. The visceral aesthetics of The Cave, by the late Aase Goldsmith, paired with Anna Bokström’s images from COP24, give context to the cognitive dissonance Sledmere describes. Finally in Eyes as Big as Plates, a collaboration between the respectively Norwegian and Finnish artists Karoline Hjorth and Riitta Ikonen, we see yet another aspect of the complex Earth-human relationship. In these playful portraits, the protagonists are carefully nestled into the earth, stated not as separate from existence or divided but quite clearly as a part of it.

Available online or from CCA (Glasgow), Stills (Edinburgh), Street Level Photoworks (Glasgow), Dundee Contemporary Arts Shop, Good Press (Glasgow) and Gallery of Photography (Dublin).

Notes Journal website