"Ugly beauty"

Wales is renowned for its natural beauty, but Treforest-based photographer Jon Pountney finds himself instinctively drawn to the opposite: the distinctly unnatural beauty of crumbling buildings and a landscape radically and irreversibly transformed by heavy industry. His most recent exhibition Allure Of Ruins - featuring work prompted by two previous projects, Beachcombing and God Forgive Me - includes images of nature attempting to heal wounds (the long incision made for the Brecon railway at Fochriw, for instance, now only a scar) but also of landforms that are entirely manmade (most obviously Splott Foreshore, constructed out of the rubble from the demolished East Moors steelworks).

Pountney has previously spoken of his fascination with "horizontal archaeology" - the sort you can find on the surface, without having to dig - and there's a sense in which the conical spoil heaps are South Wales' own pyramids and the overgrown Penallta Colliery silently overlooking new-build houses is a remnant of some ancient civilisation, hidden in plain sight. The exhibition booklet carries Myfanwy Evans' apt comment on painter Paul Nash: "No interest in the past as past, but in the accumulated intenseness of the past as present." That Pountney shares this hauntological perspective is evident in (for instance) the photo depicting the great towering mound of slate that continues to cast a shadow over Blaenau Ffestiniog.

Like David Wilson, Pountney appreciates the rich colour and textural quality of rusting metal (especially against blue sky) and characteristically uses light to best advantage, capturing the warm glow of the setting sun on the red brick of Dowlais Ironworks and finding poetry in an open-air urinal.

Allure Of Ruins illuminates the ways in which we continually make and remake the landscape around us, and the significant human toil required to do so. It also asks us to reflect on what we consider worth conserving and what we let fall into disrepair.

(This review was originally written for inclusion in the Offline monthly newsletter.)