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O4 May 2O21

Running from Something, Looking for Something: photographic artist Jonathan Liu drives deep into the Icelandic glacier to capture the mystery of the sublime


A dirt road stretches out into the distance. Its miles, yet untraversed, point towards mountains far on the horizon and the landscape rolls away on all sides. Here begins Running from Something, Looking for Something, a series of photographs by Jonathan Liu... read more


8 Jun 2O2O

Health Is Wealth by Katie – New York-based fashion consultant Katie Cervini is on a mission to demystify women’s health


Health Is Wealth is a new blog from New York-based fashion consultant Katie Cervini, who writes about women’s health in a way that is refereshingly human. It is an open space for conversation with tips founded on Katie’s own wealth of knowledge to help women get to know their bodies, their health and the science behind it… read more


6 May 2O2O

Isolation 2020: ‘It’s whatever you want it to be’ – creative photographer Kirsty Marshall creates a montage of lockdown messages to explore what it means to live in isolation


We are stuck, in a way the world has not experienced before, inside our homes. The pubs are closed. The nine-to-five is working from home, in furlough or redundant. The planes are grounded, the trains are empty and the cars only start when they have to. The world we knew has stopped but, for the first time, we’re in it together. For the first time, we are joined together as a planet in experiencing a global pandemic, and that is difficult to comprehend. There are almost no words for it… read more


18 Aug 2O19

John Smith, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976)


The voice over the moving image suggests there is a story to tell, as though actors are following directions around a set and therefore moving towards a common cause – that of narrative. However, as we watch the film, we soon become aware of the director’s lack of authority and control over the people, vehicles and objects that move in, through and out of the frame… read more


4 May 2O18

Recipe for Being a Woman
by Hermione Cameron


Recipe for Being a Woman is a playful and pithy debut collection from a poet whose awareness and grip on language allows her to create a concise and deeply ironic sense of being in the world. Hermione Cameron speaks of, to and for the modern age in 28 poems, in which she shows us the world anew, as if standing on our heads… read more


14 May 2O18

Darker With the Lights On
by David Hayden


Darker With the Lights On is a collection of 20 short stories by David Hayden, a prolific writer of short fiction, published by Little Island Press. With an abundance of imagination through surreal and unbounded worlds beyond and the beneath the world we inhabit, Darker With the Lights On is like taking a train in the dark, the carriage so brightly lit that you struggle to see a world you know is there, beyond the pane of glass… read more


13 Apr 2O18

Bone Ovation
by Caroline Hardaker


Bone Ovation is the debut poetry pamphlet from Caroline Hardaker. It is a slim collection of 20 poems, published by Valley Press, that satisfies an interest in myth and folklore. Hardaker’s poetry is an example of mythology as a splitting open of the present, of stories and a deep-seated connection to the past. It considers an element common to all, ‘Composite of brittle chalk and precious like the stalks of daisies in chains.’ Bone… read more


3 Oct 2O17

Paul Hawkins’
Diisonance book launch


On Friday 8 September, a curious group of people met at The Gallery Café in Bethnal Green for the launch of Diisonance – a book of protest texts, art and collaborative experimental poetry… read more


29 Sep 2O17

Crump Redivivus 
by Neil Godsell


Neil Godsell’s debut novel Crump Redivivus, published by The Voidery Aperture in 2016, is a work of contemporary fiction that experiments with language and literary form. The novel is described by its publisher as ‘a stark exploration of a life given over to the observation of other, equally unsatisfactory lives’… read more
Mark

Running from Something, Looking for Something


Photographic artist Jonathan Liu drives deep into the Icelandic glacier to capture the mystery of the sublime.



A dirt road stretches out into the distance. Its miles, yet untraversed, point towards mountains far on the horizon and the landscape rolls away on all sides. Here begins Running from Something, Looking for Something (2017), a series of photographs by Jonathan Liu.

Born 1993 in Singapore, Jon moved to London in 2015 to study photography at LCC. He worked on his art practice and lived within the city, where time runs at an accelerated pace. In the spring of 2016, Jon left London to venture on a two-week trip across Iceland.

‘I’ve always believed in my desire leading me to where I needed to be,’ he says when we spoke last May, ‘it was just about identifying it at this point, using this project as a cathartic way to work through whatever problems I was facing, to identify it through making photographs, finding therapy through creating.’ Jon drove the periphery of the island, photographing its mountains, fjords, rivers, moss-covered lava fields and surrounding oceans while writing notes in a diary.

The island is at odds with our sense of time. In summer, the hours follow the midnight sun, which hardly sets, and time stretches out into endless days. In winter, the island can see as little as four hours of light each day, and the night creeps in as quickly as it left. In his photographs, Jon captures the sky dappled with dark clouds and within the expanse of uninhabited land the absence of humans is palpable. The landscape is visually intense and physically hostile, it seems to exist outside of time and, in this sense, it is sublime.

The sublime in art is a term that describes a feeling of negative pleasure, an overstimulation of the senses experienced when a person is overwhelmed by the environment that surrounds them. Traditionally, eighteenth-century Romantic poets ventured into nature to test the heights the soul could reach, and similarly Jon’s exploration is an act of romantic escape. His journey into nature is an artistic pilgrimage, leaving a familiar estrangement with the city in search of the power of nature and its sublimity.





Two streams of water meet in a sluice, the water breaks between rocks worn away by the flow of its minerals over hundreds of years. An imposing form sits in the centre like a silent void, the earth moves and shifts around it. A corrugated shelter sits on the edge of a dense mist. A lighthouse stands at the precipice of open sea, a symbol of safety that also signals danger. Markers buried in the snow reach to measure the tide that hurls and then subsides. Two birds circle above a rock fixed within the turmoil of ocean waves.

The images are full of shadows that distort and obscure the distance that stretches away at every angle or closes in at the edge of the frame. Jon captures the landscape in black and white, which intensifies the sense of isolation and imposes a feeling of shrinking or falling away. Time is suspended. In his diary, Jon writes down thoughts, memories and lyrics as they occur, each one marked by intervals of a 24-hour digital clock that acts like an anchor through a deep, tumultuous sea.

13:00 A fear of turbulence 15:22 I was told to drive through a sandstorm and never stop 19:30 spun out of control 19:52 a snow spiral 20:58 I am too busy staying alive, getting used to the stillness 08:39 All white 08:50 Freezing, shivering 09:19 Fire is life 09:30 Fucking perfection 10:15 I was stuck in beauty so tragic I am alive, conscious 10:25 Maybe I’ve felt too much, now there’s nothing left to feel…

Reviving old technology in the digital world, Jon shot the series using analogue cameras that might soon fall obsolete: a Graflex Crown Graphic camera (1940s), a Leica M2 (1950s) and a Braun Nizo (Super 8 motion picture camera from the 1970s). He expresses a yearning for slowness amongst the massive digitalisation in the arts today, ‘I think all non-digital art forms are dying,’ he says, ‘but that doesn’t mean they deserve to just fade away. I often find more beauty in these processes.’

For Jon, this mode of photography is about the physical act of creating something tangible. Each image takes considerable time to shoot, first setting the camera on its tripod, measuring the light and focusing the lens. ‘Large format cameras allow you to slow down and see everything through the ground glass, so you notice more detail,’ he says, ‘You think about the shot and ultimately it allows you space and time to breathe.’ As a result, the stillness of time is captured in the details of the rocks, the waves, in each fissure. Time is large, vast, and we are lost in the eternity of it, at the same time reminded of our own ephemerality.




In the city, time is wound so tightly that we forget to breathe, to look at the sky, to find stillness even in chaos. Amid all the distractions of modern progress, Jon presents a world that might one day be lost. He travels to Iceland to explore the possibility of something else, something other than his life in the city, and to rethink the value of labour and creativity. Nature, in extremis, becomes a kind of salvation: a chance to feel something raw and to move in a more sidereal rhythm of time.

In Running from Something, Looking for Something, the noise of the city is disbanded into silence. We are suspended in a place between here and there, in perpetual departure and arrival, moving around the unknown, looking back to the past and ahead to the future as we stand with our feet on the ground. We are, as Heidegger put it, coming into the nearness of distance. Nothing is happening, and it brings everything into focus.