'White Goods', Sarah Pickering
The images are of purpose built environments that have been set on fire as practice exercises for Fire Officers to extinguish. The blackened spaces reveal traces of human presence – marks where fingers have dragged across surfaces and bodies have rubbed past objects. Rather than the charred piles of debris expected to be seen in a burned out building, these locations are strangely pristine. Objects are schematic and approximate as they are designed to be repeatedly burned, and have to retain a distinguishable form. The spaces catalogue potential sites of fires and resonate as an echo of an event. This is photography that draws attention to the photograph – the dark areas often appear where lightness should be, creating a slippage between negative and positive; the matt surface of the print echoes the carbon-covered surface in the spaces; the photographic trace a record of multiple moments – anticipating the future and referencing the past.
In Pickering’s work the scenarios that are set up as part of training exercises can only be imagined by the viewer of the photographs. We have a cultural obsession with simulation, preparedness and controlling and predicting the future. There is a tension between what is perceived as real and what is actually real, and how we relate to extreme events such as war and disasters (eyewitnesses often describe their experience as “like a film”). Pickering is interested in the separation of the real from the imagined, and the complexities in negotiating and representing this.
Incident was organised in partnership with Brighton Photo Fringe 2008, and was selected through a UK wide open submission call for mid-career, lens based artists. The panel included David Chandler, Director of Photoworks, Brighton; David Campany, writer and critic; Clare Grafik, curator at The Photographers’ Gallery, London; and Karin Mori, gallery manager at Phoenix Brighton. Special thanks to Gordon MacDonald.
www.sarahpickering.co.uk |
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The Incident series is a body of work produced as Artist in Residence at the UK Fire Service College from 2006-8.
The set of photographs in black and white document the spaces that are used to simulate emergency incidents in training exercises.
Preview
Fri 3 Oct, 5–7pm
Artist talk
Mon 3 Nov, 6pm
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