Nature Up Close

The Green Room
Wednesday 2nd April- Sunday 4th May

This small and unpretentious photography exhibition showcases the work of artist Sarah Patel who, fascinated by the commonplace and everyday, has captured some exquisite images of simple, unassuming British nature ‘up close’.

Her work isn’t there to portray the fabulous or the exotic, nor the incredible and the breathtaking. Nor is it charged with the bravado and brag of a lot of nature photographers’ work. Instead, we are invited to speculate on a world familiar to us Brits, one which hosts a rather mundane and unexceptional natural world, and to enjoy these scenes up close, glossy, rich and simply beautiful.

This modest simplicity is paralleled in the curation of the exhibition, each photograph hanging in the bar area of the ‘Green Room’ in neat conventional rows. Though a pleasant addition to the bar’s already decorative green velour walls, the venue doesn’t quite give some of these works justice by having them displayed behind a small ad hoc stage block in a darkish corner of the room.
 
Patel states “By capturing them [the image] in a moment, we are able to hold on to natural beauty even after it is gone.” At the centre of her exhibition is her sadness for the little space we find for nature within society today. Her work is motivated by her regret for man-made construction and its sometimes jarring and unfitting position alongside nature.

Images of a pebble beach matched with the holidaymaker’s parasols, or tangled undergrowth spouting out of the crack of a pavement, convey nature’s attempt to reclaim what is hers. But not all her photographs are devoted to spelling out this rather overworked message. The exhibition is worth a visit simply to indulge in some really lovely, tasteful and smart photographs of the nature we so often take for granted.

9/10