Andy Sewell’s first book The Heath was a winner of the International Photobook Award 2012 and is included in Martin Parr’s The Photobook: A History Vol. III. His work is found in private and public collections including The V&A Museum, The MAST Foundation, The Museum of London, Columbia University Art Collection, Eric Franck Collection, The Hyman Collection and the National Media Museum.
He was born in East London and grew up in the commuter belt north of the city, a place part rural and part suburban. He now lives in East London again. His work explores the permeable quality of the boundaries we put between things.
The Heath is about the paradox of a place managed to feel wild. Something Like a Nest explores the gap between the countryside as an idea, somewhere often imagined and depicted as an escape from modernity, and the messier, enmeshed landscape we find there. His latest book, Known and Strange Things Pass, just published by Skinnerboox, looks at the cables carrying the Internet across the Atlantic and costal locations they link. Exploring, in these places where the digital network is concentrated, a literal and metaphorical entwining of worlds we think of as separate - the ocean and the Internet, the close and the distant, the physical and the virtual, what we think of as natural with the cultural and technological.
Andy’s work is defined by the relationships created between pictures. It is driven by a fascination with the contradictory quality of seeing – the feeling that as we look closer at things they become more lucid, more themselves, and yet, and at the same time, more entangled, unknowable, and mysterious.
On episode 139, Andy discusses, among other things:
- His new book, Known and Strange Things Pass
- Having two bodies
- The importance of chance
- Noticing what’s there
- Researching the project
- The feeling of embodiment from being in water
- His Previous book, Something Like a Nest
- First book, The Heath
Referenced:
- Hyperobjects by Timothy Morton
- Seamus Heaney
- Hiroshi Sugimoto
“As I grew up, I was taught the more closely you see something, the more you know about it. The more data we have on it, the less mysterious it becomes. I find the opposite is true. The closer you look at stuff the more mysterious, the more entangled it becomes.”