Recent Work

 

Ultima Thule
Stephen Vaughan's work explores the connections between geology, archaeology, history, and memory. In Ultima Thule, the persistent human urge to explore unknown territory is considered within the context of complex geological processes, over vast periods of time, and the formation of the Earth itself.  The potential for discovery or transformation from beneath the surface or beyond the threshold is a central theme in much of  Vaughan’s work. His photographs are concerned, on one level, with the scrutiny of natural phenomena and, on another level, with the landscape as a site of encounter and revelation.

Ultima Thule was initially inspired by the exploratory voyage of Pytheas, in 325 BC, from the Greek colonies of the Mediterranean to the far north Atlantic, beyond the edges of the known world.  Vaughan's photographs were made in Iceland, which is thought to be the location of Pytheas' Thule. His images of volcanic fissures, shifting tectonic plates, vast glaciers and steaming, sulphurous pools, also connect Pytheas' ancient voyage of discovery to contemporary inter-planetary exploration.  They describe landscapes that are the nearest equivalent on Earth to the surfaces of the Moon and Mars, including sites that were used by Apollo astronauts for field training before the first Moon landing.

Ultima Thule is a study of some of the rawest and youngest surfaces on Earth.  Vaughan's photographs retreat in time to the imagined primordial beginnings of landscape and the formation of the Earth itself, void of any human presence or history.

 

A Catfish Sleeps
In 18th century Japan, the belief emerged that the Shinto deity Kashima held a foundation stone (kamame-ishi) upon the head of a giant catfish (Namazu), thus protecting the population from the terrors of earthquake when the catfish stirred. Drawings of the Namazu showed it as an ominous threat before the great 1855 earthquake, but also as a source of redistributed wealth for post-catastrophe developers and craftsmen. The photographs in A Catfish Sleeps have been made with this metaphor in mind.

The images record a journey that corresponds with significant points on the tectonic map, where the Eurasian, Pacific, Philippine and Okhotsk plates meet in a complex subduction zone that moves beneath the landscape of Japan and the seismically threatened metropolis of Tokyo. The relatively new science of plate tectonics provides a heightened awareness of the dangers caused by movements in the earth’s crust. In Japan, the complexities of the underlying geology are apparent in the form of numerous active volcanoes and the ever-present threat of major earthquakes. Nevertheless, civilisation pushes forward relentlessly above the geology. Human efforts to mitigate disaster and to control the forces of earthquake, eruption and tsunami are evident. Yet nature in its rawest state remains a focus for pilgrimage, fear and spectacle.

 

Extracts from David Chandler’s essay A Catfish Sleeps
from the Pavilion Commissions 2009 catalogue
‘The extraordinary quality of Stephen Vaughan’s recent photography….specifically draws strength from a carefully crafted balance between a quasi-scientific mode of investigation, and a feeling for picture making that tends towards the visionary. Vaughan’s work unveils strange and unfamiliar landscapes at the edges of human experience. They are remote but also invoke primordial and other-worldly states…

‘Stephen Vaughan’s approach to photography is scholarly and serious. It is informed by ideas that make unique connections across different disciplines and areas of knowledge, and in this his photographs do reach for something new, a new way to look and to understand. And yet, as willful and directed as it is, and as much as it aims for clarity, his work also quietly absorbs and dwells upon what he can never fully predict or hope to entirely know, and so can only represent with a sense of wonder and imagination. In remaining open to its extraordinary and beguiling complexity, Vaughan’s  photographs allow the world to talk back.’