Mick Hartley

Strange ruined coastal structures, from photographer Victoria J. Dean's project The Illusion of Purpose:

Untitled VIII

Untitled II

Untitled V

Untitled IV

Untitled III

Untitled VII

Untitled VI

Untitled XIX

Untitled XV

Untitled XIV

Untitled XI

Untitled XII

Untitled XVII

Untitled XX

[Photos © Victoria J. Dean]

Here's her commentary:

Technology is restructuring our communication methods, transforming our perceptions and interactions with our environment, and rendering the physical realm comparatively cumbersome and slow. Disconnected from the modern digital world, these material structures and the systems in which they once functioned are obsolete. With the simplicity and directness of a symbolic form, each structure withholds its message, alluding to a relic from a forgotten language.

The Illusion of Purpose explores ideas of materiality, monumentality and the sculptural, questioning the relevance of the physical in our increasingly virtual age, and in a world of communication hijacked by technology.

I like the photos, and I like the idea of the project, but I find this striving for philosophical significance a bit strained. All these structures – chimneys, kilns, whatever they may be – will have been built for a purpose. For most if not all, that purpose will be easily discovered with the help of a few guide books and maybe some local historians. To name every image "Untitled", to offer no geographical or historical information, and then to talk of "the illusion of purpose" seems a bit, well, tendentious.

Yes, I can understand the pleasure of coming across these structures by chance, and enjoying their strangeness and singularity without being bothered about their history – but that's not really what she seems to be doing. She's ahistorically cutting their purpose away, and then saying…ooh look, these things have no purpose….it's all illusion….digital age….questioning the relevance of the physical in our increasingly virtual age. Eh?

She's based in Northern Ireland. Are these structures in Ireland? I don't know. [I'm assuming the photos are all genuine, and not digital reconstructions.] The fifth down, Untitled III, looks very much like this, in Cornwall, and the last one, Untitled XX, could well be this, again in Cornwall. Of course the Cornish coast is littered with chimneys and the like, mostly from the old mining days. 

For me, I'd much rather have the location and original purpose of these objects than the philosophy. It's a shame that photographers feel they have to come up with this kind of jargon-heavy exposition now. But, yes, good photos.