Being so precisely balanced between metaphor and description, these pictures have a raw energy that undermines their essential nature as fiction. That tension is a key strategy for Haydock, playing the apparent visibility of his subject matter against its rendering as an element in a personal drama, where meaning is necessarily an unstable complex of discontinuous sensations, always in motion. The imperative of this series, then, is to somehow contain the shifting dimensions of experience within a coherent framework. To that end, he makes use of an intuitive structure that orchestrates the palpably real encounter in counterpoint to what we know as the subjective dimension of the images themselves. The sum of this difference between what is seen and the fact that it must always be understood through the filter of an essentially private experience remains central to Haydock’s work. Its effect is to show how little of the world we can know at any given moment, or rather, to insist that we are forever positioned at the edge of what can be known from within the limitations of our necessarily finite perspective.

Darren Campion