In collaboration with The British Institute Florence, I'm putting together an exhibition that looks at the history of Florence's 1966 Great Flood. I've been working on this project for around three years now, and hope that its climax will fall on the month and year that mark the 50th anniversary of this catastrophic event: November 2016. Below, internationally renowned author David Hewson (The Killing) describes his own critically acclaimed response to the flood, in relation to my project:

"In a single night in November 1966 the birthplace of the Renaissance was reduced to a sea of mud as the Arno burst its banks, engulfed some of the most famous and historic buildings and sights in Europe and took the lives of more than thirty people."

"And yet, as I discovered when I came to write a novel partly set during this extraordinary period, the event is now largely forgotten outside Florence itself, overshadowed in the public imagination by the dreadful aqua alta in Venice at the same time. The city, its stalwart people, and the thousands of angeli del fango who flocked to Florence to help the city recover deserve better. During many visits to the city while I was writing The Flood I was astonished to see how the disaster continues be visible on the face of the twenty first century city, from the signs in the street marking the level of the water down to more subtle effects, among them the restoration of the damaged masterpieces in the Brancacci Chapel to remove the prudish additions of earlier centuries."

“Four years on from working on The Flood David Cass’s evocative paintings took me straight back to that terrible night in November 1966, a timely reminder of the fragility of beauty against the elements of nature, and the defiant human spirit that swept away the mud and restored Florence to glory. I hope they find a place in the heart of the city fifty years on from the events that inspired them.”

— David Hewson

I'm an artist who has spent the last five years working on very specific artworks – mostly under the umbrella of painting. As of mid 2014, I embarked upon a new series of projects that see my camera as a medium equal to my paintbrushes. These projects are wide ranging in their exploration, but unified by theme. I'm looking for evidence, for traces of past lives – the lives of places, the lives of people.

My painting practice is heavily concerned with the past, as well as the changing fate of our planet. I work exclusively with found objects, creating artworks with, and upon, items and objects of considerable age. I create paintings which bear witness to their previous lives, picking surfaces that speak of function, of use. In these paintings, the subject matter has always been to do with sustainability (recycling) and the passing of time – most evidently in my paintings of sea.

These new-media works inform and support my painted works, whilst also documenting research. None of this work could have been made possible without the guidance and support of artist Gonzaga Gómez-Cortázar Romero, whose work I urge you to explore.

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Gonzaga and I met at an environmentally focussed arts residency in the Almería arid-zone. His photographic works, particularly those created in the surrounding Los Vélez park possess a potent undercurrent, an energy that subtly emanates from each photograph. On initial viewing – the images which make up his series Espesuras for example – seem to be concerned mostly with a fleeting light, captured at a specific time of day. But for me – in the works we have made together – it is the darkness that speaks the most.

His photographs describe an imagined world, one stuck in permanent twilight, one where neither day nor night exist. Waves of claustrophobia distract from focusing solely on the beauty of these photographs, not just because they offer no sky, but because they’re deceptive: they overwrite the landscape with a light which has little to do with their subject. They’re surreal, dream-like, and for me – very powerful. In all of our collaborative endeavours, this aesthetic has been vital in conveying themes related to climate change and landscape abandonment.

Above image: forest fire aftermath research, created whilst filming El Bosque Encarnado.

Above: Espesura VI, one from Gonzaga's Espesuras series.