SHEEPFOLDS AND PHOTOGRAPHY

The photographer Paul Kenny spent three days with ten Sixth Form students at Keswick School in October 2000.

His own work is based on landscape, often focusing on a small detail and creating an alternative universe from its patterns, shapes, textures and structure. Sometimes he makes a deliberate intervention to emphasise the tension between natural forms and the marks we make on the land. As he has said, 'man's interference with the natural landscape is at the root of a lot of my work. The organised within the chaotic. The macro reflected in the micro. Sheepfolds ... are a symbol of man's interference with the land ...'

Within the project he wanted pupils to 'explore issues raised by Sheepfolds eg protection, control, landscape, farming, man-landscape interface, physical work, economics, history, heritage.Ž (From Paul Kenny's aims for the Keswick School workshops.)

As well as drawing their attention to aspects of the environment that influenced his own work, Paul Kenny also structured the workshops so that the students understood and used his working methods. Like a painter, he spends time looking, sketching, making notes and selecting his subject very precisely before he sets up a camera. This research process slowed down the students' looking so that they learnt, as one said, 'how to interpret nature in different abstract forms, for example, the edge of a stone bridge became the edge of the world.'

The workshops were organised to allow Paul to talk to the Sixth Form about his own work and the influences on it; to have a preliminary visit to the Mungrisdale sheepfolds to look in detail, discuss and sketch ideas; to return there with cameras and take selected photographs; and then, finally, to have a technical session in the schoolŽs darkroom, learning developing and printing techniques to produce their final, high quality, photographic images.

Artist Paul Kenny
Contact teacher: Helen Sadowski, Head of Art. Tel: 017687 72605

Paul Kenny classroom workshop photographs: student photograph 'Post at Mungrisdale'.