Biography

Gareth Phillips graduated from University of Wales, Newport, in September 2007, with a degree in Documentary Photography. That year he was accepted into the Eddie Adams Workshop in New York, in which he won the B & H Assignment Award in recognition of his work.

In 2008, Gareth became a freelance photographer, regularly commissioned by the Guardian, The Sunday Times Magazine, Financial Times Magazine, Wall Street Journal and the British Council. His photographs have also appeared in, Newsweek, British Journal for Photography, The Observer and The New Yorker.

Gareth’s work has been internationally recognized in exhibitions and awards, most notably the Ian Parry Award 2007, Welsh Livery Society Award for Photographic Excellence 2007, the Magenta Photography Awards 2008 and the British Council Open Cities Photographic Commission 2010.

Gareth is part of the MJR Photographic Collective based in New York and works out of London and Cardiff, UK.

Y Tir Newydd | The New Land is an artistic translation of the furthest points of the Welsh Landscape – north, south, east, west, high and low. An imagined world collides with abstract reality summoning the demons, perils, beauty and mystery that many only experience when voyaging far past the comfortable confines of an urban world. Y Tir Newydd | The New Land is a personal voyage inspired by a departure from these comforts, aiming to connect and reach the soul of an indigenous landscape left untouched, even forgotten, in the wake of a shift away from the land for the modern world.

Ti amo da qui alla fine del mondo di nuove all infinito – I love you from now till the ends of the world back to infinity.

Living in different continents means days, weeks, months on end apart. A testing scenario for the strongest of couples, but a fierce love brings together Ling and Giovanni. This story animates the emotions of love and life of this couple. Shot over a tense three-day reunion in Rome this documents pre, during and post rendezvous and expresses the anxiety, elation and the heartache felt over the seventy-two hours. It highlights the intimacy of a young relationship, and how distance and time affect and the difficult pathway of love.

Gareth Phillips Tiamo Infinito 001 Border

Gareth Phillips Tiamo Infinito 004 Border

Gareth Phillips Tiamo Infinito 007 Border

What do we experience leading up to the finality of life? What is left of our presence? What do we leave in the aftermath of our demise? These are questions I asked myself whilst carrying out a project about mortality and my suppositions are observed within the work produced here.

This artwork documents a presence made up of the physical and the spiritual that is felt when one has reached the end of life. The physical tangible presence, observed within the body at its limits, skin wrinkled and aged, a mind fearful of the next impending journey. And an imagined spiritual presence, the shapes and contours the soul might leave in the deceased’s bed sheets, the ambiguous movements of curtains and shadows, or the lights that might illuminate a pathway from the this world to the next. All these attributes make up a presence I observed and felt while on my own pathway to try and understand the finality of life.