With the opening of her survey show, Carbon Slowly Turning, at MK Gallery in March (now running at Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 25 September), 2022 had already shaped up as a major year in the career of photographer and visual artist Ingrid Pollard. Then in April she was nominated for the Turner prize, commended by a jury “struck by bold new developments” in her recent work as well as for the way she has “for decades […] uncovered stories and histories hidden in plain sight”.
In works ranging from The Cost of the English Landscape (1989), which connected romantic visions of the Lake District with references to the slave trade and nuclear power production at Sellafield, to Landscape Trauma (2001), where the geological structures of Northumbrian rock formations are writ large on vast photographic panels, Pollard has, for more than 40 years, reflected the inadequacy of simplistic narratives about England’s landscape and in contrast offered an artistic vision of engagement with the natural world that grasps, above all, its movement and complexity.
