In the run-up to this year's showcase, Source are elisting a number of bonus selections by the directors of the country's photographic courses who are choosing their favourite body of work from a university that is not their own.
Jim Hamlyn, subject leader on BA (hons) Photographic and Electronic Media at Robert Gorden University in Aberden, has selected Volitant by 2012 Photo Art graduate Beverley Cornwell. On his reasons for choosing the work, he says:
"My toddler son is fascinated by animals at the moment: the four legged kind especially. He is so attuned to their characteristics that he often calls out 'horsey' or 'wuff wuff' long before anyone has even spotted the tell-tale outline in a rough-torn piece of bread or in a tiny illustration buried amongst a clamour of abstract shapes and colours. Such fascination with animals is surely universal - one that is expressed in the earliest cave paintings as well as in religious iconography and even the sounds and concepts that we use to communicate. Whether in reality or representation animals stare back at us in inscrutable silence. For millennia this mute incomprehensibility has provoked us, sometimes toward acts of celebration and veneration and sometimes towards acts of cruelty and invasive scrutiny. Beverley Cornwell's images talk of this paradoxical relationship of fascination and violence. They speak of hunting and of simulation, of brutality and deathly precision. And in this play of the real and the imagined they refer also to photography's transformation of the real into fiction, of representations into things of ardent fascination. And in those implacable shining surfaces, like eyes that stare back at us, we see only ourselves reflected."He can see the selection page for yourself here, and for those who are graduating this year and are interested in submitting their own work, click here.
