Foreword

What might it mean to be ‘Overly Blueish’? Against a backdrop of accelerating climate catastrophe, digital revolutions, and the subsequent atrophying of our senses, global pandemics, a costof-living crisis, war, and superpower militarism, it would be easy to think of it as a title with a purely melancholic sensibility; a sensibility produced from the effects of a continued period of instability and uncertainty on our lives. But look a little closer and we can see this play on words resists such a simple reading, instead inferring a paradox, a desire for hope in an age of despair.

The collective desire for a more optimistic hope for the future is manifested in the individual explorations of this graduating cohort, with many abandoning traditional models of photographic image making in search of new ways of seeing, perceiving, and speaking for their subject matter. Through explorations of identity, politics, history, place, memory, myth and material trace, each body of work presented within Overly Blueish seeks to ask important and challenging questions of the times we live in.

Staff of the Photography Department at Swansea College of Art, UWTSD wish to thank the Overly Blueish collective for the harmonious organisation and deft execution of their exhibition, to congratulate them as emerging artists on producing such engaging bodies of work, and to wish them all success with their future endeavours.

Ryan L. Eynon-Moule Head of Undergraduate Photographic Studies Swansea College of Art, UWTWD.