Out of Whack, an exhibition of photographs by Frank Watson, opens at Joseph Wales Studios, Margate on 3rd July.

The exhibition will predominately show work from two projects, one about the Thames Estuary and the other the Kent Coast. More broadly Frank Watson’s photographic work considers the English landscape in its many shapes and forms; how we abuse and mistreat it, whilst on the other hand idolising picture postcard depictions of pastoral scenes.

The projects, spanning the last twenty years, attempt to reveal an aesthetic towards often unloved spaces, whilst at the same time offering up a critique as to how industrial zones clash with the natural world, where housing developments level natural habitats and military ruins dot the landscape, some memorialised while others lie redundant.

Soundings from the Estuary looks to the Thames Estuary as a site where the river was once seen as ‘The Highway to the Empire’ and now seems to have become a lost world that awaits its predictable urban colonisation if rising sea levels do not claim the estuary first.

Rollercoasting is a response to the separation of the Kent coast from the rest of Europe both geologically and through recent political events, hinting at a longing perhaps to be reunited with our European allies.

Out of Whack is open from Friday – Sunday: 12-5pm between 3rd-12th July, with a free artist’s talk on 12th July at 3.00pm. More information via the gallery website here.

The exhibition of photographs also exist as books: Soundings from the Estuary (2014) and Rollercoasting (2022). More information here.