(click image for more details)After Ingres II, 2006
black and white photocopies, clay
24cm x 11cm x 6cm
Rachel Thorlby's work draws on late eighteen and early nineteenth century portrait and landscape genres. Combining 'traditional' mediums such as clay, paint and pencil with 'low' materials such as cardboard and photocopies she explores our relationship to place and history and the fragility of memory. Despite using such 'impoverished materials', Thorlby's work can nevertheless be read as an act of reinvention. She highlights the 'truth' of representation, and the unrealistic task that an artist faces when attempting to perform on a spiritual or symbolic level.
'In the work landscape often functions as a backdrop through collages that are made form a variety of found images. Here any previous human presence has vanished, leaving an absent space. I'm drawn to notions of the how the landscape
appears in our collective memory, a space unaltered through time, impervious to our own mortality.'1
'I am drawn to the portrait, the act of 'meeting' the image of a subject, and the uncanny effect of time being condensed through its surface... The cutting out and removal of the subject from its original environment becomes an act of reinvention thereby creating something alien out the familiarity of an existing image of a forgotten entity.'2
Paul Stone, 2008
1. Statement by the artist
2. Ibid
find out more about this artist
find out more about Paul Stone
