T i n a  C a r r  &  A n n e m a r i e  S c h ö n e

are

SIMPLY SOLAR 

Two award-wining artists who work together on many diverse projects combining their skills of photography,

video and design in innovative, socially conscious and environmentally friendly ways.
They design and build gardens, exterior features and public art.
They initiate and execute photographic projects, video installations and photo-sculptures. They exhibit both nationally & internationally.
 

All Images, Designs and Artwork are Copyright © 2006 Tina Carr and Annemarie Schöne. No reproduction of any kind without prior written consent.

Biography   Contact   Links   Terms & Conditions

Tina Carr & Annemarie Schöne are two award-wining artists who work together on many different projects combining our skills of photography, video and design in innovative, socially conscious and environmentally friendly ways.

We initiate and execute photographic and video projects and exhibit them both nationally and internationally and we design and build gardens.

We work with and for communities, generating and realising ideas, fundraising and managing projects from start to finish.

Recent work includes the design and build of a 'Memory' garden for sufferers of dementia and their carers in a residential home and a photography and video exhibition in the Ruhr area of Germany relating to the former coal communities and industrial past of a South Wales Valley.

We accept commissions and invite you to contact us if you want to discus any future projects you are considering for your community.

Simply Solar Community Gardeners

Simply Solar designs and builds formal and informal gardens for all those individuals and institutions interested in transforming their existing unproductive green spaces and derelict corners into sensory and enjoyable recreational surroundings.

We plant up with a wide variety of herbs, flowers, vegetables shrubs and trees, wherever possible from organic sources.

Often we build the gardens with the help of local individuals and voluntary groups and so find ourselves organising

workshops on specific aspects of the garden such as building with willow, tyres, clay and stone.

We create fountains, water features and lights powered by the sustainable energy of wind and sun.

All our work uses wherever possible recycled or reclaimed materials.

We adhere to environmentally safe practices and products.

Simply Solar Still & Moving Images

We have been working together on photographic projects since 1980 when we won a Kodak Bursary to document

 the landscape along the 'River Tyne, from Sources to Sea', using black & white infrared film.

Two years later we won the Greater London Council's Photography Prize for a series of portraits documenting the people that

 lived in the 'Same Street as Us' in Fulham, West London.

These images were exhibited at the Royal Festival Hall & later toured the country.

We have carried on in much the same way, initiating and pursuing projects that interest and challenge us as individuals

hoping to engage with our audience in a discourse as well as stimulating the senses with our imagery.

Annemarie works in collaboration with Tina Carr. We are lens based artists who work collaboratively on issue and researched photography projects. We also work with video and make three dimensional installations, gardens and land art often in partnership with voluntary organisations and community groups. We have exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and have made art in public places. We have created several substantial bodies of work about Wales, where we have lived and worked for the last twenty years, two of which, 'Pigs & Ingots, the Lead/Silver Mines of Cardiganshire' and 'Coal Faces, Life After Coal in the Afan Valley' have been acquired by the National Library of Wales.
The tenets of our work are coherence, intensity, accessibility and personal accountability. Our photography tries to go beyond superficial photographic accuracy, surface naturalism, and habitual seeing to where the spirit of the picture becomes retrospective, contemplative, and not only a document but also a talisman or relic.

The subjects we have chosen to focus on reflect our engagement with the wider issues such as the destruction of the environment - 'River Tyne, from Sources to sea' (Kodak Bursary): the effects on people of the erosion of feelings of belonging and participating in a community - Same Street as Us' (Greater London Council Photography Prize' and 'Brent, the Eighth Most Deprived Borough in the Country (GLC and Brent Trades Council): the destruction of the coal industry in Wales and it's effects on people living in isolated ex- coal villages - 'Coal Faces, Life After Coal in the Afan Valley' (ACW & Gulbenkian Foundation.)

Our latest body of work, 'The Interior,' represented here, is a still life series, intimate studies of abandoned homes, barns and places depicting a rural way of life in Wales that has almost disappeared. These images evoke the minutely detailed devotional imagery contained in Medieval 'Books of Hours.' In the same way as the artists who made those illustrations explored the laws of vision in their world, often drawing directly from Nature for the first time, so we are exploring the physical world around us with similar, almost forensic intensity.