Smoke and Mirrors
New Landscape photography by Ellie Davies
Private View 12th May 2011 6pm - 9pm
13th May – 5th Sept 2011
art@10gs
10 Grosvenor Street
London
W1K 4QB
Smoke and Mirrors brings together new landscape work by photographer Ellie Davies. Produced over the last three years working in the New Forest, she explores her relationship to the landscape, its role in defining personal identity and the notion that all perceptions of nature are in some way mediated by culture.
The term ‘landscape’ can be seen as a socially constructed description of nature embedded in memory, history, storytelling, folk law and magic, obscuring the reality of the land, veiling it, transforming the natural world into an idealization.
Davies plays the role of a witness and a narrator as she becomes actively involved with the forest space, inscribing on it and weaving into it, building a personal experience and interaction. Introducing interventions such as pools of light and darkness, pathways of wool and paint, golden trees, and marks drawn into the landscape, she captures a trajectory or a record of an interaction like an ephemeral self-portrait. The materials weave, sew, thread and connect her tangibly to the landscape for a short time, catching and locating herself within it. Imposed and over-laid on the landscape they transform the natural world into an object as well as a photographic image, an ‘inscribed space’ which questions the stability of ‘nature’ and landscape’ as concepts. The process of ‘making’ in these images and the craft materials used reflects upon the ‘constructed’ nature of landscape and explore the boundaries between the natural and the cultural.
ellie@elliedavies.co.uk
www.elliedavies.co.uk