(click image for more details)Hansel & Gretel (Black Forest), 2008
PVC, reading lamps, cabling
29cm high, variable width
Rose & Heather, 2006
200cm high approx
Emma Bolland creates nightmarish yet fantastical installations, using light and negative images, whether in the form of silhouettes or the removal or blanking out of the information from images that we rely on for their readability. Often mundane objects are weaved together into fairytale landscapes where - just like the fables of old - good and evil, beauty and ugliness co-exist and threat, anxiety and fear lurk in the shadows. Several recent works have drawn on narratives of sexual crime, and their lingering social and cultural influence in contemporary fiction, history and folklore.
For example, in 'Rose Heather' (2006) a suite of white lamps lit with coloured bulbs, their shades stencil cut with scenes that hint
at sexual disquiet (in fact, drawn from amateur pornography), throw uncanny shapes of contorted and truncated body shapes against the walls of the gallery. Rather than an invocation of fragrant flora, the title of the piece in fact makes reference to Rose and Heather West: the infamous murderer and the daughter she was complicit in killing. Bolland states that the piece is not about murder per se, but about the 'Gordian ampersand' that intractably binds together predator and victim in the popular imagination.
Paul Stone, 2008
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find out more about Paul Stone
