Its an
old adage of academic training that in painting you are not trying to create
something where there is nothing, but rather trying to create space where there
is none. In her Solipsism Series, artist
and curator, Sarah Iremonger has taken the works of academic landscape painters
and digitally divested these worlds of their subjects. Historic landscape
painting invites the viewer to the comfortable pose of the surveyor; the world
laid out for the viewer to enjoy. All the pleasure of ownership and none of the
obligations of stewardship. The complete worlds of others’ making are suddenly
vacated. By removing the scenes for
which they are titled, Iremonger performs a paradoxical act upon them. By
opening space, she insinuates herself as viewer/maker/squatter into them, and,
by extension invites us in as well. In offering entry through she also imparts
the viewer to a kind of peculiar responsibility. She, and we, can no longer
merely survey a world, the cost of our imagining is the new found imperative to
act within our imagining.
In her
new digital drawings Iremonger creates shapes from forms repeated, reversed and
redoubled creating a form of recognizable parts that takes on a new identity. The Solipsism drawing, takes as its base
one of the ships removed from George Mounsey Wheatley Atkinson’s Ship in Stormy Seas c.1854 and by
flipping and reproducing its form creates something of a Rorschach test image;
taking what was a titular subject and making of it playful ambiguity.
In an
earlier series Iremonger creates a campaign for Landscape Unions and all the attendant visual propaganda of
buttons, badges and postcards. The landscape, as genre of art and image history
which belongs to cultural history is unlike land, hard to delineate. Its
borders are not easily drawn out. By making land; landscape, she abstractly
liberates. Even as a playful gesture, a subtle awareness of the often arbitrary
delineations of power structures become apparent, in a way that argument could
not equally elucidate. Iremonger works at the borders of worlds, where the abstract
world of story becomes space, where image becomes, where play can become
politics, and here, she creates space where there was none and invites the
viewer in.
By Daniel Ferrari for the catalogue World View of an Oyster 2013