The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows

Sophy Rickett’s The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows is a mixed media project that combines photography and text to create a powerfully allusive work addressing ideas of female agency, the history of photography, and the landscape and geography of the Gower Penninsula in Wales. In it, Rickett attempts to establish links between a remote world of Victorian privilege, early photography, and her own experience of life, work and photographic culture in 21st Century Britain.

Works from The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, and fragments of wall text were presented in a solo exhibition called Cupid and the Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows, at Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea 2019–20.

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The initial inspiration for the project was the life and work of Thereza Dillwyn Llewelyn, a little-known female photographic pioneer, artist and astronomer who was active at the end of the 19th Century. Combining field visits with research into Thereza’s papers and extensive family photographic archive, held in the British Library, and Museum of Wales, Rickett ‘s project quickly expands across time and geography as the artist’s idiosyncratic approach means that she inserts her own subjective associations and memories into the context of Thereza’s ‘original’, thereby creating a new narrative.

Moving between different locations, points in time, and subjective positions, this narrative operates both as a source of information about Thereza and her life as well as a distraction away from it; tangents, interruptions and other forms of aside function as a conceptual device to allow a distracted and restless yet fully embodied self to construct a new non-chronological version of events.

Woven through the text are photographs made by Rickett at locations associated with Thereza’s life, film stills made on location, and images sourced from internet searches. Photographic representation thereby oscillates between abstraction, pictorialism and illustration.

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One of Rickett’s key themes is the female subject in photography. In the project, women are represented through different categories of imagery; the family album, the school portrait, the pornographic image, medical photography, as well as staged documentary. The artist also explores the idea of the female subject in her text, through descriptions of the photographs of Thereza taken by her father, her own daughter’s nursery portrait, an ear examination and, more obliquely, memories of her own father’s camera.

Rickett uses the project to develop her interest in archival practices, in particular how the heritage industry stages ‘entry points’ through which the past is made visible. Using photography and text, she explores the limits of these points, understanding that the place where a trail goes cold – the denial of access, the withholding of permission - can be productive and generative in itself.

In Summer 2020 it was announced that The Curious Moaning of Kenfig Burrows had been shortlisted (final three) for the prestigious 2020 Kraszna Kraus Photography Book Award, which “celebrate[s] excellence in photography and moving image publishing. They recognise individuals who have made an outstanding or original contribution to the literature of, or concerning the art and practice of, photography or the moving image.”

The book was reviewed in several publications in the UK and internationally (Photomonitor, UK; The Brooklyn Rail, NYC, US; British Journal of Photography, UK) & the exhibition formed the basis of an opinion piece by Tom Jeffreys in Frieze Magazine (Nov 2019).

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