Mike Perry’s photographs examine the interactions of landscapes, nature and industrial society. His practice focuses on Britain’s national parks, and increasingly the immediate surroundings of Pembrokeshire where he lives and works, questioning the romantic mythology of national parks as areas of wilderness and natural beauty. He uses large format photography to simultaneously capture the painterly tones and aesthetic qualities of the landscape’s surface, while detailing the impacts of humanity’s exploitation of nature for commercial gains. His series of smaller photographs show objects found in the landscape at 1:1 scale, capturing the effect of natural processes on the surfaces of industrially produced materials. In these images the objects become poignant symbols of the entanglement – both literal and metaphorical – of human consumption, waste and nature. 

Among the many artists documenting ecological collapse, Perry’s work is distinct in the hyperlocal and apparently mundane nature of his subjects. Rather than epic, aerial vistas of glaciers or oil fields, Perry directs his and our attention to the overlooked hedgerow or the shell-incrusted flip-flop. The drama of these micro-studies are nonetheless global, holding a tension between their extraordinary aesthetic beauty and the damage inflicted upon nature by human activity.