From the Studio: new work by Nigel Power

A few years ago, whilst walking on a beach in Kuiburi I noticed a sand encrusted and tightly knotted piece of rope. It lay there partially embedded, twisted by the waves and baked dry by the early morning sun. With only a mobile phone at hand I took a quick shot and, hearing my daughter call, abandoned my stroll and waded into the sea. That evening whilst flicking through a day's photographs I once again encountered the rope and was struck by the odd beauty of its form and the intensity of its texture. The following morning (and many times since then) I returned to the strand to seek out other examples. Yet I built this large collection of images of twisted twine and knotted nylon with no real purpose in mind other than a vague sense that something interesting was lurking there. And whatever it was stayed there until recently when, looking for something else, I stumbled across a stray piece of rope yet to find its way from the photo archive and into the dedicated but largely ignored folder. The image cried out to be printed, to become work. Over the next few days, I spent many hours working through the many hundreds of images and finally—after various schemes of sorting, classifying and shuffling—settled on a small set of twelve images that seemed to encapsulate my emerging sense of what these humble objects spoke to: a set of oppositions between leisure and labour, nature and culture, chance and purpose, the lost and the found, country and city.  For after all, these formally beautiful objects are the detritus of of fishermen's work, swept away or cast aside, and discovered during the holiday strolls of an urban foreigner.