Nature Boy, Peach

'Nature Boy' is book of photographs by Peach.

Time stretches, moments blur, and the essence of community and friendship all coalesce in a new work of incredible tenderness and beauty, 'Nature Boy', the debut book by the artist Peach, published by the independent press Driftwood Editions. 

'Nature Boy' began as a documentary project rooted in skate communities in Galway and Berlin, but evolved into something much wider and profound, capturing the essence of connections generated between friends and fellow travellers in liminal spaces and almost intangible places. 

“As it progressed, I realised the project is not so much just about the theme of skateboarding,” Peach says, “but more about how we relate to each other, and how we find each other.”

Woven tenderly with the natural world interrupting the urban and the urban interrupting the natural, both become a joint connective tissue that bonds time spent together, as 'Nature Boy' slowly usurps expectations of what “skate photography” can really be.

In 'Nature Boy', the tether of connection - be that through the mirroring choreography of skating itself, or the shared downtime of gentle communal adventure - becomes an intimate dialogue between those we spend time with and love; friends deep in thought, lost in play, free while skating, pensive while waiting, and looking back and on. 

This quiet celebration of hanging around and hanging out expresses at times a sense of calm, but also a frisson of uncertainty about what’s to follow. The movement of communal laughter, the surrounding architecture that looms as much as comforts, the familiarity of closeness, the joy and freedom of being outside the demands of labour and strife, wind through leaves and bare feet meeting soil and sand, all generates a tapestry of young friends on the precipice of lives and moments in transition.  

But this is not anemoia, nor a hauntology, nor bittersweet nostalgia. Instead, Peach’s images generate a longing for the time being experienced within the moment itself, even as it appears to already be edging towards a point of evaporation.

“There’s a desire to break away from the very restricted identity that you need to find within capitalism,” Peach says of this mode, “and to find something something that wants to exist outside of the mainstream or capitalism in general.”

'Nature Boy' denies the broad and useless characterisations of contemporary loneliness and isolation, and delves into something much more real: the tenderness of forged bonds, and the hands we clasp around boards, rolling papers, cameras, bottles and buckles, and ultimately, each other.

“It’s about love, really." - Peach