Ilkla Mooar

Walter Lewis is a photographer who uses his work to explore his emotional relationships with, and sensibilities towards, the world around us. A search for deeper empathy with the non-human. It's a practice based on time and place as the photographic motif. Hence here we have Ilkley Moor as our subject. But whilst documentary in form, he seeks to use his photographic imagery to 'materialise' emotions and feelings. His images are the building blocks through which he translates somatic experience into something more material. The results are something complex - kind of visual poems, something intended to be felt before it is understood. His aspiration is that viewers will be moved to explore their own deeper emotions towards the earth at a time of environmental crisis. To look at things anew as an antidote to the materialism of contemporary living. Alongside the iconic landscape itself, Illka Mooar is very much inspired by the pithy words of the folk song, On Ilkla Mooar Bhat 'at. Usually sung to the tune of Cranbrook written by Thomas Clark in 1805, the song itself cannot be attributed to known writers. Tradition though has it that it was composed by members of a Halifax church choir on a visit to Ilkley Moor around 1850, when Cranbrook was well known as a Methodist hymn tune.