Mark Hemsworth

Mark Hemsworth was born in 1968 in Reading and grew up in Cholsey, Oxfordshire with his family. Mark has a very broad base in the visual arts: he is a skilled draughtsman and accomplished watercolourist whose interests in recent years have shifted towards photography, film and video. He is particularly passionate about walking and the landscape.

Mark is an obsessive photographer, taking thousands of images annually on his photography walks. He is particularly interested in nature and landscape, aviation, and large-scale events. During the earlier Shadowlight project RISING, Mark began to experiment with the potential of collaging large numbers of photographs into large-scale digital prints, which he continued to explore during LUMINOUS.

Mark teamed up with a new collaborator, photographer and lecturer John Blythe for LUMINOUS. Mark had planned to travel to more remote locations to create series of images to combine into composite digital images showing the changes in lighting conditions across most of a daylight period, and create a film about his working process. The advent of the pandemic made this original plan impossible, due to the need for isolation and limitations of travel.

Mark modified his plan and decided to focus on amassing large collections of themed images, which he carried out independently. These were then assembled in collage grids, organising the images according to colour and composition to create overarching compositions across the grid.

“I found it difficult, particularly at the start, in March and April. I still managed to get out for walks and cycle rides. It was more difficult to get to distant places, for the longer walks.

In my photography, I’m doing mainly sunset photographs and collaging them to get the colours to run together. My project changed a lot. We weren’t able to do so much of the filming, it was mainly photography. The original plan was to go somewhere a long way away for a walk, but with Covid I haven’t been able to do that. I’ve been working with John Blythe to make collages over Skype. Originally I had planned to take photographs as the light changed through the day, but that wasn’t possible. It’s made me feel not so happy. I miss not being able to do the original plans, but I hope to do it when it’s all over once Covid has gone.”