Andrew Kemp’s photographic career started in 1993 when he embarked on the National Diploma Photography course at Kings Lynn College of Art.

He went on to study for a BA (Hons) Photography degree at Newport, graduating in 1998.

Working as a professional photographer and award winning cameraman, Andrew also built up a substantial collection of more experimental photographic work.

His interest in more experimental forms of photographic practice began with pinhole photography. 

He made his own Roto-360 degree Pinhole camera in 1995 shooting a panoramic image of his father in his garden. Citing photographers such as Eric Renner and Susan Derges as influences on his early work, Andrew went on to win the prestigious Royal Photographic Society Photographer of the Year award in 1998.

The early experiments with pinhole photography also offered a way of engaging with the image that drew upon ambiguity of agency, an absence of presence and a sense of play and random outcomes. 

The process it self requires the photographer to be very much there to facilitate the movement of the pinhole camera to capture the image, but the temporal span means the image is being captured over time, in absentia. 

This allows for random visual images and marks to appear, or not appear, in the final visual image. So the photographer is absent from the final image, but his/her agency is required to capture what is there.

The ambiguity of time and space, the mystery about what the final image will look like is something with which Andrew’s more experiments photographic practice has continued to be engaged.

The photographic works on display here represent a body of work that has sought to engage with the random out come of experimental practices with light, time and the camera frame.

Light painting, painting with light, light drawing, or light art performance photography are terms that describe photographic techniques of moving a light source while taking a long exposure photograph, either to illuminate a subject or space, or to shine light at the camera to ‘draw'.

Practiced since the 1880s, the technique is used for both scientific and artistic purposes, as well as in commercial photography.

The light works of Andrew Kemp are more concerned with the random outcomes of an analogue process of creating pictures by capturing light with a digital camera. With no defined end point, the camera captures the moving light. 

Andrew works in a dark studio space. The light source is then set in motion. This produces images that can never be reproduced, the variability of light, movement, and exposure come together at that point in time to create a unique image. 

The images themselves have a dynamism and energy that seem to reflect something both internal and external. 

Metaphorically they exist in a time-space continuum. 

The trace of light is the trace of the artist-photographer, but he is absent from the final visual image. The dichotomy of presence and absence; of physical agency and digital rendering of the final image; of carefully planned process and randomly generated outcomes give the works a sense of being something very fundamental. 

They allude to celestial objects, deep space images from the very beginning of time itself, yet others seem to resonate with the microscopic world and bodily interiors. 

Here the artist intercepts the time-space continuum capturing something both eternal and transitory and in doing so reveals something about both the individual and the essence of universal truth.

Dr Anna Middleton. April 2020.