Entry Title: " Smoke and Mirrors"
Name: Ellie Davies, United Kingdom
Category: Professional, Trees


Entry Description: This work explores the idea that notions of beauty and our understanding of landscape are constructed, and in doing so they subvert the notion of beauty as truth, and reference wider issues of authenticity within photography.

The intention is to request a more personal response to the landscape, an experience embedded in memory, history, storytelling and folk law to engage the viewer in a dialogue with the image and in a sense of the familiar, drawing on an awareness of cultural fictions which persist in spite of any conscious knowledge about the material, social or political status of landscapes, to create ‘rural myth’ and romanticism, obscuring an understanding of the land as threatened and exploited, dangerous and unknown.

Ellie Davies (born 1976) current lives and works in London. She has recently completed an MA in Photography from the LCC, University of the Arts London. Recent Group exhibitions include the London Independent Photography 20th Annual Exhibition 2008, Circles of Latitude � a Photomonth 2008 Show at Four Corners Gallery London, The MA Photography Final Show at LCC, and �Hanging On� (2009) at Oblong Gallery, London. Publications include Biuletyn Fotograficzny Magazine, Londynskie wł�częgi, Photomonth, (London wanderings, Photomonth), November 2008 Issue, the 2008 New York Photo Awards Publication, the 2008 London Independent Photography 20th Annual Exhibition Publication and the 2008 PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris Awards Publication. She was recently awarded the 2008 New York Photo Awards: Honourable Mention for Personal Fine Art Series and the 2008 PX3 Prix de la Photographie Paris, with 3 Honourable Mentions. Silent, Dark and Deep The forests depicted are those of the imagination, traces of woods from memory. Exploring the fine line between reality and a constructed visual fantasy they draw on the strangeness hidden beneath the surface of the commonplace. This series addresses the undertones of danger and anxiety that thread through modern life and the ways in which spaces are characterized as safe and unsafe. The boundary lines emphasize the delineation between inside and outside, welcome and unwelcome, seen and unseen, known and unknown.