AONB SDF

North devon with the AONB area highlighted                                               

I’ve just been awarded a grant towards my Graveyard of the Atlantic exhibition at the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, April–June 2012 and somewhere in North Devon in 2012. The grant was applied for from the North Devon Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB) Sustainable Development Fund. The photographs in the exhibition are all from within the AONB and will do well to promote the North Devon Coast and AONB in Bideford’s twin town in North Carolina, USA. The exhibition will be supported with explanatory text and maps and illustrated talks and workshops.

I was invited to show some of my photographic work to the director of the North Carolina Aquarium during an arts networking trip in 2010, and from this meeting was invited to exhibit there in 2012. Graveyard of the Atlantic is a phrase used to describe both our rocky shore and the 200 mile long sand dune barrier island coast of North Carolina for the vast number of ship wrecks each have sustained since the Middle Ages. North Devon’s relationship with North Carolina stretches back to the first ‘lost’ colony planted on Roanoke Island by Bideford’s Lord of the Manor Sir Richard Grenville in 1585. In recent years there has been a surge of interest in this relationship with the twinning of Bideford with Manteo and in North Devon as the source of America’s first English Colony. The display of constructed photographs and text of North Devon’s coast, emphasising its harsh rugged beauty in stark contrast to the sunny, sandy beach associated with North Carolina; will be the first time many locals and visitors have seen the North Devon coast or in fact a rocky shore.

After June it is planned to move the NC exhibition to the Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island. If you would like to host this exhibition in North Carolina, Devon or further afield please email me here: info@greengallery.co.uk

Keyhole Cave, Hartland