Newhaven Open: Gin Rimmington Jones and Elissa Jane Diver, West of West Beach

Gin Rimmington Jones and Elissa Jane Diver are Sussex-based photographic artists who share an approach to connecting with, responding to and making through landscape.

We have chosen to work collaboratively in the dynamic coastal environment of West Quay Beach, just south of the growing creative nexus of BN9 Marine Workshops and The Sidings. Here, incorporeal time meets material space, and geological time is made visible in this wild, fragile landscape; layers of chalk, clay and flint in the towering cliffs record the passing of millennia, regularly collapsing through erosion from elemental forces. The sea, beach and cliffs exist in an enduring relationship of coexistence and change, unmeasurable in human time, while the tidal ebb and flow is a daily flux more
easily grasped.

We are interested in what happens when we put this living ecology and our ways of experiencing it into conversation. During September, we will make repeated day and night-time visits to the beach, working in relation to its presence and to one another. Two bodies moving through the same landscape, responding to the changes in light, tide, and atmosphere. Our collaboration becomes an evolving feedback loop. Through walking, observing, and making, the work becomes a process of exchange
between us, the spaces we inhabit, and the photographs themselves.

We both understand landscape photographs as sites of imagination rather than objective records of place. Gin’s work explores the shifting spaces between self, other and time. Elissa locates the wild in the body and the imagination. Together, these ways of relating create a visual language in which the landscape is unfixed, moving between what is known, felt and imagined.

Image above: Elissa Jane Diver – Experiment – fragment – composite seascape