'LOST IN RUST': Solo Exhibition

 

New Photographs by Gered Mankowitz 

 

Internationally renowned photographer Gered Mankowitz is best known for creating some of the most enduring images in the history of Rock and Roll. Following the completion and cataloguing of his extensive archive, Mankowitz has increasingly turned his attention towards more personal subjects and the quiet beauty found within the natural world.

 

NoonPowell is proud to present Lost in Rust, a collection of seventeen photographs years in the making. This intimate body of work explores the passage of time through humble garden tools and everyday objects—items once valued solely for their practical purpose, now transformed by exposure to the elements into subjects of unexpected beauty.

 

Through Mankowitz’s lens, rust becomes a painterly medium. Oxidised surfaces reveal remarkable variations of colour, texture and form, created not by the artist’s hand but by nature itself. Stripped of context and isolated against a neutral background, the objects transcend their original function, revealing themselves as almost abstract studies of colour, texture and time.

 

What might initially appear to be objects in decline are transformed into meditations on renewal, inviting viewers to look more closely and reconsider notions of value, utility and permanence. As scale and perspective shift, familiar forms dissolve, allowing the eye to wander through landscapes of rust, pigment and surface detail.

 

Lost in Rust celebrates the poetry found within decay and the extraordinary aesthetic qualities that emerge when time, weather and material interact. Once gleaming instruments of purpose, these objects now exist as quiet monuments to the passing of time, bearing witness to nature’s ability to create beauty through transformation.

 

 

 

"Like many photographers since photography's earliest days, I have been fascinated by texture, whether it is the gnarled hands of an elderly person, peeling movie posters on a wall or bubbling paint on an old garage door.  But Rust has always held a special magic. The colouration and slow decay have intrigued me since I found a discarded padlock in the garden of my father's studio in the Southwest of Ireland many years ago. This was the beginning of a collection that has gone on to this day, putting decayed found items of metal in boxes, or burying some in garden flowerpots to encourage further decomposition, waiting until I had the time and space to find a way of recording them that I felt would do them justice and relay their inherent beauty and mystery to others. 

 

As my commercial career evolved and working with my archive took over, I assumed that I would finally have more time to work on personal projects, but interest in my archive just intensified and became a full-time occupation, so it wasn't until relatively recently I felt able to put some energy and focus into Rust. 

 

The first piece I recorded was the original padlock and I developed a technique that would allow me to enlarge it to huge proportions - it worked beautifully, simple and uncomplicated it allowed the inherent beauty of the subject to be revealed, and I became Lost in Rust".