Gina Glover | Investigations: People, Places & Perceptions
Gina Glover
Gina Glover
Photofusion is pleased to present a solo exhibition by co-founder Gina Glover. Timed to coincide with Photo London, this exhibition features a selection of work from nearly four decades of Glover’s photographic practice, from her early years as a social documentary photographer to her more recent landscape investigations of the Anthropocene, the new scientific term for our current phase of human-directed planetary evolution.
In the late 70s and 80s, as joint founder of The Photo Co-op (the precursor to Photofusion), Glover was one of group of activist photographers during an era of social and political upheaval.
Glover’s politically engaged focus on life drove her to document feminist movements, motherhood and family, housing and public health. Triggered by her own health issues - arising during an assignment in Africa for British Red Cross and Oxfam - Glover began to explore the potential for photographic art to enliven healthcare environments. In a growing body of work that has continued on through to today she has endeavoured to make images which give eyes and voice to patients and staff at health institutions and clinics across the UK.
In exploring photography’s potential to construct a more meditative experience of visual form from 2000 Glover began to explore a slower, more abstract approach to her image making, experimenting with the use of the pinhole camera. In so doing she uncovered for herself a means for conveying experience of the threshold points between our inner and outer worlds and a means for drawing attention to the more pensive qualities of human perception and questions of time and impermanency.
Building upon her fascination with landscape, Glover’s photographic investigations using digital technology, have taken her to remote locations, places where delicate ecologies and natural artefacts face increasing threat.
Glover’s photographic work is diverse, technically, thematically and aesthetically. Even so, it contains a strong unifying thread, her always-present investigative intent underscored by both a belief in social progress and the potential for photography to reflect upon the human condition.
About the Artist
Gina Glover trained in Fine Art at Chelsea School of Art, and in Photography at the University of Westminster. She co-founded The Photo Co-op in 1979, then in Wandsworth, which in 1991 became the Brixton-based Photofusion Photography Centre, where she remained a Director until 2015.
For her work improving healthcare environments for patients and staff at a wide variety of healthcare institutions Glover won the Royal Photographic Society’s Hood Medal in 2008. For her more recent explorations within the biomedical sciences, she won the MRC Visions of Science Award (twice),
Glover’s 20-year project, Playgrounds of War was exhibited at the 2009 Photo Biennale at the Guangdong Museum of Art, China, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels in 2012, as well as galleries in the UK. Her lensless landscape project, Liminal World was exhibited at Hooper’s Gallery, London, in 2010, and Le Cinq Gallery in Rabastens, France, in 2013. The Metabolic Landscape was shown as part of the Fototfest Biennial Changing Circumstances in Houston, USA in 2016. Glover’s biomedically-based works are currently on show in more than 20 hospitals, clinics and private collections across the world, including the Gregor Mendel Institute, Austria.
The Metabolic Landscape: Perception, Practice and the Energy Transition - co-authored with Geof Rayner and Jessica Rayner - was published by Black Dog Publishing in 2014. Earlier books include Objects of Colour: Baltic Coast and Playgrounds of War, published by Foxhall Publishing Ltd.
Glover has received funding from Arts Council England on three occasions and has been interviewed for the British Library SOUNDS archive. In 2016 Glover received funding from the Wellcome Foundation for her project Life in Glass on the work of the Nobel biologist Sir Robert Edwards in collaboration with Prof. Sarah Franklin of Cambridge University. In 2017 she continues her photographic investigations of anthropogenic landscape change and is preparing the exhibition Poisoned Water on the theme of Hydraulic Fracking.