Ned Pratt
One Wave
The world in bold; Newfoundland in abstract.
"It is the landscape that endures, it is the landscape that remains in control." — Ned Pratt
With Ned Pratt, there is no nostalgia, no romance, no theatre. His interest in the Newfoundland landscape forms the foundation for his photography.
Pratt's approach to the act of looking transcends place. He distills the landscape into abstractions of form and colour. Disrupting depth with close architectural details and incisions of poles and wires, he undermines the traditional, romantic notion of “looking out” to sublime geometry.
Ned Pratt: One Wave charts a decade of Pratt's breathtaking photography. Echoing Pratt's aesthetic, this beautifully designed book presents Pratt's works in formal conversation with each other. Stark imagery of buildings is juxtaposed with forays into abstraction and celebrations of the inherent geometry of natural forms — whether a single wave crashing over a wall or stones cracked by freezing and thawing.
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"Pratt embraces this harsh land, celebrates it, in all its glorious starkness. His sharp, in-your-face angles crash hard, whether he’s giving us a glimpse of ocean from a ferry, a wave crashing over a breaker, a snowdrift, a red-striped trailer or a guardrail by the roadside, fog on rocks, a frozen slab of seawater or a lone shack shelter in a storm of white." — Atlantic Books Today
Mireille Eagan is curator of contemporary art at The Rooms Provincial Art Gallery, St. John's. Prior to this, she was curator at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island. Eagan has lectured nationally on Canadian art and has published several catalogues and essays on Canadian artists. She has a special interest in promoting the activities of artists based in the Atlantic provinces.
Sarah Fillmore is Chief Curator and Deputy Director of Programming at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia.
Ray Cronin is Director of Exhibitions, Collections and Curatorial Initiatives at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery. From 2001 to 2015 he worked at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia as Curator and as Director and CEO. Cronin is a graduate of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, the University of Windsor, and the Getty Museum Leadership Institute. In 2025 he was named a Fellow of the New Brunswick College of Craft and Design. He is the founding curator of the Sobey Art Award and the author of fifteen books on Canadian art.
Jonathan Shaughnessy is Associate Curator, Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Canada.
