Nick Meek, finalist of the AOP Photography Awards !

 

 

"Heliotropion"

A Heliotropion is an ancient form of sundial – heliotropic motion is the diurnal and seasonal movement of leaves and flowers, slowly turning to follow the sun.

These solar installations in the Nevada desert echo the mechanics plants have used to harness the sun’s energy since the dawn of the natural world.

Here we see over ten thousand heliostats, each one a mirror over a hundred square metres in size, combining to make a colossal circular solar facility more than a million square metres in size.

As the sun travels through the sky each of these giant mirrors reflects solar energy onto a towering central column two hundred metres high, driving monumental turbines.

As the sun dips below the horizon, the heliostats tilt their mirrors to dramatic angles before manoeuvring them back into a sleeping position, facing the sky, ready for dawn.

These huge installations are seen here as a kind of kinetic landscape sculpture –an unintentional beauty, the byproduct of humans working in harmony with nature.

 

 

 

 

"My Beautiful Laundrette"

With inspiration taken from the 1985 film of the same name, My Beautiful Laundrette is an ongoing series made in the the small towns of the American West.

There is a fragility to small town America that is very ‘ boom or bust’… towns flourish for some years and then suddenly fall on hard times leaving a faded grandeur and a sense of something that once was.

In the series we see seemingly banal street corners, the backs of buildings…. a lonely chair… our camera simply pointing at the bubbles in the moment they pass by.

The fragile perfection of the bubbles is at an immediate contrast to the gritty environment and once they collide they’re gone forever. Sometimes we can see America as a giant film set where the line between what's real and what’s make believe can be a thin one.

A closer look at these incongruous bubbles could perhaps pose the same question….. the size, movements and position within frame. Is this world based in reality or seen through just another Hollywood lens?

 

 

 

 

"Luna"

The examination of the Carrara marble mines reminds us of the complex relationship between human activities and the natural world.

There's an irony in the beauty that can be found in marble sculptures and the marble mines themselves. While marble is renowned for its aesthetic appeal the very process of extracting it from the mines can also reveal its own unique beauty.

The term "Luna" has been used since roman times as a poetic metaphor to describe the pale and subtle colour of Carrara marble.