Great Britain's Graveyard of the Atlantic

Here is the illustrated text to accompany my exhibition Great Britain's Graveyard of the Atlantic which opens at the Aquarium on Roanoke Island, North Carolina, on April 5th. Click the image for a giant version.

The Iron Coast

 

 The Iron Coast, or Iron-bound Coast is another name for Graveyard of the Atlantic. It originally refered to the reefs of hard, sharp rocks that line Bideford Bay and Hartland at right angles to the steep cliffs. Later the name was associated with the amount of metal ship debris from wrecked vessels all along this coast. It could also be linked to the natural iron deposits in the sedimentary 'devonian' rocks and to the rusty colours, particularly this vein of clay at Portledge.

These are some of the supplementary images to the Exhibition Graveyard of the Atlantic, North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island, April to June 2012. More supplementary images here: link

Thanks to North Devon AONB

Supplementary Photographs

This blog has been put aside a little over the last month with a greater concentration on my Facebook posts and with all of the work I seem to have this year including the build-up to my major American exhibition. One of the good suggestions from North Devon's AONB team, which is funding the exhibition prints through their Sustainable Development Grant, was to include more than just caves. This was a great advice and I've been inspired through earlier posts to put my pictures of North Devon's caves in context through other more general landscapes of the coast here, all be it in extreme weather.

Another addition to the show will be almost 200 snapshot sized photographs that I've taken on the ND coast from over the last 6 years. This blog is a set of rusty images from the MS Johanna and other related photographs. I was interested to see how a large metal ship can slowly disappear and start to blend in with the rocks with their natural iron content and with yellows and browns of the wider landscape. If only plastic did the same!

The exhibition in the North Carolina Aquarium on Roanoke Island will be in two large glass cabinets, 8ft wide by 5ft high and 15inches deep. The supplementary images, along with some tourist postcards will line the bottom shelf of each cabinet and give a real context in terms of place for my fine-art images hung above. This will emphasize how two coasts with the name 'Graveyard of the Atlantic' are so different; one a sandy beach the other a rocky shore.

There are more supplementary images here: The Iron Coast