Oliver Raymond Barker’s Trinity takes as its subject the Rosneath Peninsula, a stretch of Scottish coastline that has held, at different times, two very different kinds of devotion. Early Christian pilgrims came to such remote places seeking sanctuary and spiritual clarity through the elemental force of nature. Today the same land is overshadowed by HMNB Faslane and RNAD Coulport, the bases at the centre of the UK’s nuclear weapons programme. Between these poles, Barker finds the makeshift encampments of protesters—the Peace Wood and its traces of occupation—and reads the peninsula as a place where belief, resistance, and state power have each left their mark on the ground.
Barker works at the edges of the photographic medium. Using alternative analogue techniques and what the publisher describes as a portable camera obscura, he treats photography as a means of uncovering unseen processes rather than merely recording appearances, an approach shaped by his interest in culture, ecology, and spirituality. The resulting images register the slow, deep time of the land alongside the abrupt, recent time of the military installations, and the book’s immersive process draws these disparate threads into a single fabric. This is not documentary in the conventional sense; it is an inquiry into how a landscape carries its histories.
Loose Joints published Trinity in 2022 as a handmade artist’s book of 250 copies, out of print, with a special edition of 50. The 68-page volume measures 250 × 350 mm and contains 35 photographs. Its printed hardcover with black boards comprises two stitched booklets printed on six different papers, so that images and texts meet under changing conditions as the book is read. Texts are by Martin Barnes and Nick Hunt. The physical construction is integral to the work: the reader handles a made object, not a neutral container.
For a collector, Trinity is significant less for its scarcity than for the coherence of its making. Barker’s practice has been shown at RAW Phototriennale, Belfast Photo Festival, Unseen CO-OP, and Newlyn Art Gallery, and he has worked as a creative associate at the University of Exeter’s Environment and Sustainability Institute; his work sits within a considered engagement with ecology and belief. Trinity gathers those concerns into a single, carefully built book, and its sequence of photographs and texts rewards slow attention.
