Andrew Cross
Andrew Cross’ photography and moving image work reflects a certain attitude of looking. One which lingers at a threshold between passive contemplation and the impulse to seek and touch. The landscapes which feature in his work are less receding space and more a sense of palpable proximity.
Nearly all Cross’ images have some relationship to childhood memories spent in remote locations waiting and observing. An early fascination with trains and military vehicles, has led to the wider consideration of technical, social and historical configurations of place. His explorations have taken him across North America, to the cities and deserts of Somaliland, rural France, and the sites of 1970s rock festivals. In all cases, he is never far from his childhood experience of Wiltshire’s Salisbury Plain.
Cross situates his work within a tradition of landscape observation, including painting, where various methods of mapping space and plotting time are used to measure and record a changing environment. His visual journeys and considerations of place are simultaneously about the still and the moving, the near and far, presence and absence. Situating the viewer between these formal tensions, his images are moments where multiple narratives of memory and history converge and diverge.
If it is possible to think of photography as two distinct practices: hunting and farming. Cross is very much the latter. Although his work can involve pursuit and spontaneous reaction, there is patient rigor to his method: the careful germination and tending of ideas over time. Never insistent on meanings he offers an invitation to share a reflection on personal and cultural memory, history and art.
As much as Cross’ camera may be pointing at something, or some place, the work is heavily imbued with a sense of the self. This is the fundamental quality of photography that draws attention to the artist being in a particular place and point in time. Whatever procedures have led him somewhere, whatever thoughts have accumulated, what may or may not have occurred. Among the focus of attention, the minutia of composition and visual texture, there is the coalescing of perceptions in a single moment of awareness confirming “I am here, now and this is who I am”.
The son of a real farmer, Andrew Cross studied painting at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham. After finishing his studies in 1983 he developed a career organizing exhibitions of other artist’s work. He began focusing on his own work around 2000 and in 2002 published his first book of photography Some Trains In America. His first moving image work was shortlisted for the 2004 Beck’s Futures Prize. Since this time his work has been exhibited widely including exhibitions at Turner Contemporary Margate, Ikon Birmingham, Barbican Centre London and Dakar Biennale 2014. Cross is a subject of the Alex Nevill’s 2021 documentary film Ferroequinolgy which features the artist doing one of the things he likes best, filming and photographing trains in the mountains of California and Nevada desert.
