Newhaven Open: Toby Lamborn

“Did you know the South Downs used to be blue”, a stranger asked him. He did not. Toby was later told that this blue-shimmer effect was caused by the vast Chalk Hill Blue butterfly populations that used to inhabit the very hills that watch over Sussex. This sight has long disappeared however, muffled by human interventions to the landscape. Although spontaneously emerging against all odds in 2012, the South Downs have not regularly turned blue for almost 100 years.

Sparked from a conversation Toby Lamborn had at his last Photo Fringe exhibition in 2023, his project, The Shimmer, explores in tandem both the emotional experience of the imagined phenomena alongside social historical shifts in relationships to ecology. Shifts so big that now the land itself cannot sustain the very spectacle that his mind endeavoured to imagine.

The Shimmer began with a conversation during Photo Fringe 2024, when the artist was told that the South Downs had once appeared blue with vast populations of Chalk Hill Blue butterflies. This sparked an investigation into the disappearance of the phenomenon and the changing relationship between ecology, land management and social history. Through photography and research, the project explores how landscapes are shaped not only by what is physically present, but by memory, stories and what has been lost. Yet The Shimmer is not solely concerned with absence: the emergence of around 860,000 Chalk Hill Blues at Friston Gallops in 2012 offers a glimpse of the spectacle returning, and a reminder that landscapes and ecosystems remain capable of change and renewal.