(click image for more details)Bright The Vision That Delights, 2008
paper collage
31cm x 28.5cm
Tracey Eastham uses collage and cut out techniques to assemble scenes of 'nature' that are, in fact, anything but what they first appear to be. Her depictions of nature, landscape and the rural are mediated through mass culture and art history, bringing together images appropriated from both classical and contemporary sources, and high and low culture. The resulting clash of styles, historical periods and skewed proportions between different elements within the one picture frame are simultaneously completely absurd and totally revealing of how we formulate our perceptions of the world through 'second hand' representations that are so common place that they have become part of our daily reality.
Eastham's assemblages present us with fictive
landscapes, sometimes in formations akin to heraldic crests that serve to highlight the stylised reality of these depictions of nature. These works reflect the sentimentality for nature and the countryside that has existed for centuries, propagated through art and literature, and one that is at odds with the often harsh and brutal reality of rural life. Ridiculous and beguiling, they debunk the myth of the rural idyll and unpick and expose our pretension that we can ever really understand – or represent – the 'truth' of these subjects.
Paul Stone, 2008
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find out more about Paul Stone
