The works in the show prove not only the long-standing connection between women and nature but also reflect on the complexity of representing the landscape and its power to transform and enlighten the viewer. Her Nature is a group exhibition featuring the work of: Amparo Sard, Caroline Rothwell, Elizabeth Magill, Céline Frers, Dafna Talmor, Emilia Sunyer, Mercedes Baliarda and Renata Fernandez.
Sard’s works are based on nature – on human nature -, her fears and anxieties are the subject of her pin-perforated papers and sculptures. The viewer is introduced to her subconscious dream like world through self portraits, landscapes and 3D installations. .Elizabeth Magill landscapes also contain an element of meditation however; this is done in a more intimate level. Magill’s often presents us, bare desolate, and even forbidding landscapes. It seems that for the artist, is less about representing a real panorama than about reflecting her emotional response to the experience of it. The photographs of Céline Frers present us the precise moment when the landscape has been understood. Therefore, her photographs can be read as visual meditations of the sky and the horizon. The artist captures and exposes the given moments when nature seems to explode and everything takes on a new meaning. In her Constructed Landscapes, Dafna Talmor uses collage to transform landscapes into unreal locations. To make these pictures, she draws on negatives, cuts them with a scalpel and then intertwine to another, the negatives produce new places a combination among elements of Israel, Venezuela, the United Kingdom and the United States The resulting landscapes represent a projection of nature, an ideal.
On the other hand, Emilia Sunyer , Mercedes Baliarda and Renata Fernandez seem to expand on the element of metaphor. Sunyer’s works take cues from nature, religion and literature, creating visual metaphors, where different systems of order interrelate – chaos versus order, objects versus meaning. Baliarda’s metaphor lies on the apparent delicacy and harmony on her drawings, she elevates the harmless beauty of these flowers, as they become a warning of the inevitability of death. Meanwhile, Renata Fernandez arrived to the tropical flora thematic through her early works inspired by a soldier’s clothes, his camouflage. Today, the soldier has been replaced with the rebellious beauty of tropical plants. These plants, these urban jungles have become monster-like metaphors.
Caroline Rothwell’s work is particularly keen on one aspect of the post-colonial world. Mainly the biological invasion that the early European settlers made on the landscape as they migrated into unchartered territories, both real and romantic. Artist is basing her research on colonial drawings, museum displays and faulty scientific studies.
This exhibition will showcase works from Caroline’s latest ‘Museum and Exhibit print’ series, which were created for a joint project ‘Antipodes’, made in collaboration with the Cambridge University in 2015. The prints are research on actual object from museum collection, like extinct passenger pigeon and finch that Charles Darwin collected from the Galapagos. Thus, Rothwell pieces can be seen as a grand macro-analysis of human activity and its effects.
