Graduated from London College of Communication
Selected by Moira Lovell
Re: Series, 2007 - 2009
Re: Series
On the walls of the newly created gallery at the LCC, Karen Grainger presents an intriguing series of English landscape photographs. Grainger subverts the traditional encounter with place through a process of intervention, creating what appears upon first glance to be a mirage within the scene. This effect is created by placing a mirror within the pictorial space. Grainger describes the use of mirrors in her work as stemming 'from an interest in the photograph being simultaneously both object and image', reminding us that the photograph emerges as something that we not only look through but also look at. Grainger's artist statement highlights a further reading of how she perceives and reflects the photographic back into the world: 'much like a mirror, the photograph - which Barthes referred to as, 'the thing itself' - is usually invisible, subordinated by and looked through to the image below. In the Re: Series, to overcome this, the mirror as a stand-in for the photograph is relocated to the internal world of the image, in an attempt to make the transparent tangible.'
Through these works I am led to reflect upon man's desire for photography and the use of the mirror within the pursuit of its invention - Brunelleschi's mirror, the Claude Glass, the Camera Obscura and the daguerreotype or so-called 'mirror with a memory'. I am also encouraged to consider photography’s special relationship with time and process, memory and illusion.
(Moira Lovell, 2009)
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