27 May - 18 June 2011

Topographies of the Unconscious continues Aimee Fairman’s exploration of the psychology of landscape through a series of photographs that document time-based and kinetic assemblage pieces. The subjects of Fairman’s photography combine organic, found and artificial materials with atmospheric phenomena to create suspended miniature environments. These environments explore the role of landscape and the experience of time in psychological or imagined spaces.

Psychological landscapes here are spaces of flux and ambiguity, characterised by fluidity, calcification, disintegration, hybridisation, crystallization and rot. An amalgam of real, imagined, dreamt, remembered and forgotten spaces, each image summons a detrital place, an artificial kingdom of composite form, where emotions take the shape of a petrified nature.

Taking inspiration from geological processes, aqueous growth and the Mariana Trench, Fairman aims to synthesise conventions derived from Romantic ideals of metaphoric landscape with natural phenomena to generate an oscillation between the real and artificial, semblance and process, nostalgia and melancholy.

With a background largely in installation and ephemeral sculpture Fairman uses photography here as a tool of mediation, employing its potential to produce confusions and ambiguities in scale and illusion.

Merging material reality with dreamscapes, Topographies of the Unconscious traverses the shifts in territory between reality and imagination, experience and memory, and representation and perception.

What guides poetic thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things “suffer a sea-change” and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living. . . .

Hannah Arendt

For available works, please contact the gallery.