Charlie Hillhouse

Description

Charlie Hillhouse’s exhibition ‘Sometimes one must stand on the edge of a man-made cliff’ consists of eight photographs. Four photos of Man-made cliffs and four seemingly unrelated photographs of a smaller scale. At the end of the corridor a poster presented in a comic typeface reads Sometimes One Must Stand on the Edge of a Man-made Cliff. This light hearted yet profound sentence underlies the feeling in which the photographs should be read. 

Although the photographs and poster are not always directly linked in subject matter the sentiment remains constant, a facetious absurdity. However, an intensity remains present, sometimes overtly as in the poster, or more subtly as shown in the photograph taken underneath a house of a freshly constructed bessablock wall.

The man-made cliffs dominate the space but they are of no more significance than the other five pieces. The cliffs sit larger, they command more space because of the momentous structures photographed. Charlie started photographing these machine carved cliffs because of the great faces that could be found in the odd formations. But this exhibition cannot be broken up into two sections. Throughout Charlie’s work it is the feeling that comes before the form. It’s hard to say why all these works fit together but they all share something, a quiet punch.

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