These sets of pictures reference two bodies of work by Paul Nash; the ‘Monster Field’ (1938) and ‘Laocoon’ (1941) photographs, and ‘The Strange Coast’ (1920), his lithograph of the Hythe Martello Tower.

Paul Nash commended photography’s “incalculable power” and referred to the “wealth of matter it places at the disposal of the modern sculptor or painter”. In reprising these two subjects by Paul Nash, Michael Collins advances the properties of the contemporary photographic tableau.  The Hampstead Tree triptych (2017), with its formal echoes of the ‘Monster Field’ (1938) and ‘Laocoon’ (1941) photographs, acknowledges its antecedents while departing from them in its contemporary possibilities. At tableau scale, its depth and detail counter the flat Modernism in these works by Paul Nash. Similarly, Martell Tower No. 19 presents the collapsed fortification as a sculpture, depicted with sculptural depth. The intensity of detail lends it an immediacy – arresting its demise to the second – both recording the effects of the passage of time and suspending it.