MARC CHRISTMAS

Instagram: @Marc_christmas_eyeseen

Marc Christmas lives and works on the Romney Marsh, Kent. He is a Senior lecturer of Photography, and a practicing fine art photographer for over 35 years. His work is represented in numerous international private and public collections. 
 
 
I work primarily with historical and analogue photographic processes, salt prints, albumen, photogenic with uncertain outcomes. Employing large format cameras and experimental, techniques.
For me the intrinsic beauty of photography is in the making (all prints have value) not the result, which is not so important. It is the process of remembering, the unravelling and overlap.
 
The themes in my work are concerned with places of my adolescence (home and heart). The local spaces of family history (how a location possess you in its absence). The visceral and the loneliness of places, traces, and strolling (the ritual) I am a solitary walker, journeying to undertake pilgrimage to these spaces to find spiritual solace, reinterpreting, memory is my principal concern.
 
 
Often Marc’s selected exhibition pieces are taken from limited edition handmade artist *book folios. Each chronicle continues to grow and expand fuelling its own relationship.

The Furthest Lands. Dungeness. 2013-2021. Continuum 2022 onwards.
This series, experimental large format, chronicles Marc’s solitary journey across all points of the Dungeness beach Kent, from 2013 onwards. Creating hauntingly beautiful and etheric photographs - permanently evading all demarcations of time, space, and fixed bearing.
 
 
A place much like the earth. Dungeness. 2013 onwards.
Marc’s pictures imagine his first encounter with the surface of the beach. A new world. A transformative moment more important than reality, Something inside of us all. Referring to early Nasa scenes (1960’s) of the Luner surface and cinematographic language. He looks towards the distance ridges and beautiful terrain in awe.
 
 
Always searching for the moon. Romney marsh. 2015 onwards.
Marc takes us on a journey, documenting “The places of my father and self”. Surrounded by echo’s as he travels the flatland, tree lines, pathways, canal, dewponds. A ritual of stories and ghosts through his family generations, rediscovering “lost worlds” that inspire our love of the Romney Marsh.
 
 
Beyond the whisper of the tree. Folkestone. 2015 onwards.
Inspired by the poem: I Hear You Call, Pine Tree. Yone Noguchi, published in “Selected Poems of Yone Noguchi” (Four Seas, 1921). Marc chooses to display the beauty of Folkestone leas. Marc takes us back through the history of photography often printing these works using the earliest photographic processes *salt prints, photogenic and with a series of silver gelatin prints, Marc has us reaching out to grasp these views in what he title’s *palm or *prayer prints. Beautiful handmade versus. 
 
 
Mass. Folkestone. 2018-2021. Continuum 2022 onwards.
Mass explores the physical forces, geology, gravity of the *zig zag path and surrounding coastline of Folkestone. The need to undertake pilgrimage through and to these spaces to find light.
Marc’s pictures refer to gravitational power, impact, geology, shift, alter and awakening of this cathedral of the beach.
 
*The true reading of the aesthetic is in the valiant efforts, hopes and dreams of the people who are never visible.
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