Paul Nash and Swanage
Paul Nash was an important figure in the development of surrealism in Britain and I looked closely at the relationship between his painting, his photography and his writing in two chapters in So Exotic, So Homemade.
Chapter Two specifically concentrated on the work that Nash made during his period in Swanage, Dorset, centring on his 1936 essay ‘Seaside Surrealism’.
That same year (2007), I was invited to present a paper at the symposium ‘Land and Relic’, organised by the Research Group for Land/Water and the Visual Arts at the University of Plymouth.
Out of that developed the opportunity to write this essay, expanding on that research and particularly what I had learned through my own visit to Swanage. It was published in 2009 in the book Relic, one of a series of volumes edited by Liz Wells and Simon Starling and published by the University of Plymouth Press.
The text here is scanned here from that publication and includes some of my own photographs from Swanage, which connect with Nash’s pictures now in the collection of Tate.
