The Glasgow School of Art

For the last 18 years Thomas Joshua Cooper's creative practice has been guided and informed by philosophical issues developed out of the physical act of visually mapping territory. This has been realised through a single multiple-segment project: By photographing the extreme edges of the entire Atlantic Basin, Cooper makes a physical acknowledgement of the sources and extent of Western cultural heritage. The Old and Classical Worlds of Europe and Africa collide and clash with the New Worlds of North and South America, and the Polar regions pressure outwards, pushing physical and psychological boundaries into unexpected tensions. Through the long-term interrogation of openness and non-enclosure, Cooper examines the state of modernity's problematic technological 'being'. In this lecture Thomas will discuss and preview the newest segment of The World's Edge Project, which contains pictures from the Polar Regions, titled 'true'.

Thomas Joshua Cooper is Professor and Senior Researcher of Fine Art at The Glasgow School of Art, where he has worked for 26 years. He describes himself as "a picture maker and a story teller" who began his commitment to the making of photographic pictures in and of the land in 1969. He says of himself: "I was born in San Francisco, California at the end of WW2. By inclination I am a Westerner, whose preference is to live and work as closely as possible in the natural world. Obviously, something went wrong with this notion when I came here... I am now hybrid - part Western American, part Western European - in my outlook and in my work".