Hanover Project’s final show of 2019 is CONCOMITANT; a collaboration between third-year students and outgoing Hanover Gallery interns Robin Fanner and Rikki Kirby, and professional artists David Howe from Liverpool and Jules Hefferon from Preston.

Reacting to Howe and Hefferon’s works Fanner and Kirby have pushed themselves with their own practice, incorporating techniques, media, and scale hitherto unused in their portfolios.

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Howe’s intensely observed charcoal works are drawn directly from his personal experience of a recent research trip to the exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear reactor and abandoned town of Pripyat. Despite being allowed access for only a short time under strict supervision the pathos he imbues in these arresting pieces is clearly palpable.

In response Fanner contrasts how the UK’s most notorious nuclear establishment, Sellafield, hides in plain sight in bucolic Cumbria. This is despite it being the location of Europe’s worst nuclear incident and the site’s unenviable catalogue of entries on the International Nuclear Event Scale.

Hefferon employs an analogue photographic methodology largely unchanged since the birth of the medium. Deploying a large format negative camera almost seems counterproductive in our point, shoot, upload era but by limiting himself to two or three exposures per field trip he meticulously strives to find idiosyncratic elements on every outing. Immersive large-scale prints are rendered in such a way as to conjure thoughts of colour-field paintings, drawing the viewer into the minutiae that only a large negative can extract.

Kirby answers this with an approach to using digital photography that by necessity slows the process down; an unusual tactic for someone used to the rapidity of capturing phone-camera imagery. Instead of seeking out quirky motifs, she takes them with her, taking then the time to place them in mundane locales and await the right conditions.