The NORTH involved Brennan taking what were in 2006, low grade mobile phone landscape images and enlarging them to monumental proportions.

 

These painterly landscape photographs were then brought together with a series of Hubble telescope images transcribed as miniature watercolours. 

 

The NORTH toured the UK and was shortlisted for the Northern Art Prize in 2007.

Sunrise, Ryhope Colliery 2006, Lightjet Print/perspex, 112 x 150cm (left)

Thornhill Glade 2006, Lightjet Print/perspex, 112 x 150cm (right)

 

The History of Blue Clashmach Hill, Lightjet Print/perspex,  2006, 112 x 150 cm (right)

Various watercolours (left/ background), Spacex Gallery Exeter, 2007

 

The NORTH excerpts from the series, from left to right:

Wearmouth V838 Monocerotis Light Echo’ watercolour on paper, 2006, 10.5 x 14.8 cm

Horden Colliery, Supernova Remnant LMCN 63A  watercolour on paper, 2006, 10.5 x 14.8 cm

Blue House Drift, Keyhole Nebula watercolour on paper, 2006, 10.5 x 14.8 cm

 

 

 

Top: The NORTH, installation view, Northern Art Prize, Leeds City Art Gallery, 2007.

Brennan was one of 4 artists to be shortlisted for this prize. 

                                                                                                                              

 

 

 

                                                                                                                                 

 

Brennan, T.  (2007) The NORTH Sunderland: Art Editions North essays by Peter Davidson, Alistair Robinson   

The NORTH brings together Tim Brennan’s poetic exploration of northern landscapes and the celestial depths of deep space, revealing unexpected affinities between the everyday and the sublime. Using mobile-phone photography transformed into painterly images, Brennan captures fleeting moments of light across the towns, coasts and coalfields of the North—scenes that echo the atmospheric visions of Cotman, Turner and Whistler. These landscapes are paired with meticulous watercolours inspired by NASA imagery, each linked to the region’s mining heritage through titles that bind former collieries to distant nebulae. Between them sit miners’ spar boxes—crystal constellations formed underground—bridging the earthly and the cosmic. Together, the works question how place, memory and identity are constructed, proposing a “progressive regionalism” that reimagines the North as simultaneously rooted and infinite, intimate and universal. The NORTH is a meditation on light, labour, imagination and the resonant idea of northernness.      

👈 Access a full digitised copy of The NORTH publication here .