A Clearing

Number 193 out of an edition of 500. Signed and numbered by the artist. Following up his richly emotive debut collection, Ray Meeks expands the range of his vision with equally stunning technique, suggesting visual rhymes between the sentient and the inanimate, between stratigraphic lines and telephone wires, between a bulldozer’s tread marks and a boy’s ribcage. Whereas his earlier book, Sound of Summer Running, invited us inward, into the expressive interiors of family and place, a Clearing presents us with a world that averts its face, a world we haven’t yet learned to read, where meaning still seems to be gathering itself, where verticality is a sign of defiance. Figures in the landscape appear so isolated, they take on mythic force. The sky is resistant as eyes turned back in a head. Meeks’s camera records the naked geological and human assertion of presence against the flattening insistence of time, erosion, and poverty. In a Clearing, the world speaks itself in a language of origins: stone and child and woman and man cry out from elemental silence, Look, I am here. The first printing of this gorgeously-produced artist’s book is limited to 500 numbered and signed copies, each with an original print on the back cover.