FIONA CRISP
2012-06-18Generated at the National Trust site of Stourhead (Wiltshire, UK) in 2006, the images eschew any desire to document a specific location; instead, the historic house at Stourhead, along with it’s world-famous 18th century landscape gardens, are employed by Crisp as a formal device to reflect upon the colliding imperatives of heritage, leisure and history at a site of national cultural significance.
Implicit are questions concerning the democratising of cultural ‘assets’ or the space between the public and private sphere but ideas are also articulated through a formal visual language where tensions are set up between proximity and distance, between the flat plane of the photograph and the perspectival depth of landscape or between revealing and obscuring a ‘view’.
The phrase Negative Capability was first used by the Romantic Poet John Keats in 1817 when, in a letter to his brother, he identified the ability to accept uncertainty and the unresolved as prerequisite for creativity. The relationship between knowledge and doubt has long been at the heart of Crisp’s practice and is often reflected in her work’s wilful instability as it oscillates between illusionistic space and explicit, functional presence.
Exhibition runs through till July 29th, 2012
Matt’s Gallery
42–44 Copperfield Road
London
E3 4RR
