'URBANWorks' By Paul Kenny

Foreword: By Katrina Porteous

Three years ago, after 35 years in rural tranquility, my wife and I made a huge decision to move back to inner city Newcastle. It has been a great move: not an easy one, leaving the proximity to the fabulous stretch of north Northumberland coast, but Newcastle is a young, vibrant place, and it has been stimulating and exciting to be close to services, culture and entertainment, all accessible with a free bus pass.

My studio was packed up and in a storage unit for four months before I could create a new workspace in the new house. I found it took me a long time to get going again. Everything about my working structure was disrupted. The visual and artistic environment was suddenly urban and it was hopeless trying to continue to make work about the sea. I had recently had a third book of seashore work published: 'STRANDLINE' By Paul Kenny Kozu Books. So ‘Strandline ’served as a very useful full stop.

The move to an urban environment has made me reflect on the lifelong threads that run through my work, and where they have evolved from. When I began photographic work in the 1970s I photographed the landscape as I found it. I was trying, as Minor White said, to photograph more than was actually there. Once I became good at it, I wanted to create the images instead of finding them, thus adding many new threads and layers to the work. That led to studio work, fetching the landscape inside so I could control how to photograph it.At the same time I started to set up situations in the landscape, within which my hand and the hand of nature combined to make the captured image. I engineered a situation to produce an imagined outcome. I would set up the construction of the landscape, guessing what might happen and setting up the possibility that it could happen, then capturing the results.

I started, as I always did, making work on small copper plates and instead of using collected seawater, I began using what was around me in my new urban environment.Scraps of litter and other material from walks in the park or the streets.

Obviously I didn’t have seawater to aid and enhance the processes of degradation so I had to find an alternative from within my new environment.Over the first year of living in town I became slowly aware of the widespread and almost universal use of chemical based products to “control” and sanitise the world.Supermarkets are stocked with canyons of differentiated products to clean and fragrance all aspects of the world.Once I’d started to notice, the thoughts widened to other uses of chemical based pesticides and herbicides for gardens, products for fabric, hair and body, car, carpet, patio and fence care.

I developed techniques for distressing and etching the glass or copper plates with readily available household materials, industrial and household chemicals (mainly kitchen cleaning and garden products containing acids).  These plates take several weeks to create after which an image is captured ona flat bed scanner.

Just iron and copper and plastic being broken down by oxygen, hydrogen and other “salts” and chemicals, creating visionary landscapes and half remembered worlds within worlds.

These URBANWorks are not photographs of the world but rather photographic objects made from it.

Chemical residues, abrasion, and oxidation create marks that echo both the history of photography’s early experiments and the material scars left by industry. This body of work reflects my ongoing fascination with the dialogue between the natural world and human intervention.

Each piece is at once fragile and enduring, intimate and monumental. What began as a response to new surroundings has become a meditation on scale, memory, on consumerism, on ecology, on decay and harm – on cities, and on photography itself.

Paul Kenny - July 2026

Katrina Porteous is a poet whose work is inspired by the micro and macro of her immediate surroundings on the Northumberland coast, from local ecology and language to geological time. She has published four collections with Bloodaxe, most recently Rhizodont (2024), which features an image by Paul Kenny on its cover. That book was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Laurel Prize 2025.

*Please note this is a Preorder, anticipated delivery - September 2026.

Book Spec

Printed in Bath, UK

Hardback

200mm x 250mm Portait

Cover: Printed Picture Cover

Text: 88 Pages Fedrigoni Symbol Freelife Satin 170gsm

End Papers: Colorplan

Thread Sewn & Casebound

FSC® Certified and Printed using 100% Renewable Energy

Please note: Cover and Spreads are for illustration purposes only and may change.

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