Leeds Topographics

Photograph taken in Armley for Outside Time project, 2016

Hidden Power

Hidden Power, Kirkstall Valley, Leeds 2016

Michael C Coldwell

The Trance of Light series

The Spectres of Modernism

High Rise, 2016, Michael C Coldwell

From the series

Spectres of Modernism 

In memory of the late great Mark Fisher

Here lie the artefacts of progress. As Derrida put it, "the time is out of joint."

That so-called Modernism should now reside so far behind us feels uncanny, a temporal disjunction if not a contradiction in terms. Brutalist buildings, these great concrete totems from that utopian future which failed to materialise, are now being destroyed and transformed on a mass scale - they are effaced and mourned, and also increasingly lionised. Park Hill flats are now protected. Some of this vast site is being renovated, but huge tracks are likely to remain abandoned - a meta-anachronism, a distant past future, forever in the present.

Self-landscape

Me At Point B, 2016, Michael C Coldwell

The Light Web

Denial of Service, 2016, Michael C Coldwell

What does the internet look like? It pervades all modern life, yet most of us are in the dark about how it works. In media theory it is seen as Baudrillard's great simulation, a comlete virtual world for us to explore and inhabit, a completely immaterial space. But this view of the web belies the fact that this apparently immaterial world is totally dependent on an incredibly complex material infrastructure - one that is often surprsingly old-fashioned when examined closely.

These are photographs of that physical 'web' that we routinely ignore.

Womb with a View

Reciprocal Structures

a different kind of spectral investigation

splitting light and sound

a commission for

Shelley James and Scott McLaughlin

More images here:

http://www.michaelcoldwell.co.uk/reciprocal5.html

Project details here:

http://reciprocalstructures.blogspot.co.uk

scir ac

from The Spectral Forest

the marks and traces of those who came before, here at the site of the

Skyrack Oak or scir rac (shire oak)

the old tree finally collapsed in 1941

I wonder if there are still roots beneath the pavement?

The Skyrack Wapentake

The Skyrack Wapentake I (2017)

The Skyrack Wapentake II

the dead-centre of an ancient kingdom

reflected in the window of a empty office unit

a tree stood here for one thousand years

now gradually forgotten 

Womb with a View

further back and time collapses away, as perspective collapses towards the horizon