Kate Atkin, 'Lungs', pencil on paper.
'Dauntless island', mixed media.
'Nostrils', pencil on paper.
Reality and its ambiguities are two of the things that Kate Atkin's fragmentary, survey-like graphite drawings and reliefs of natural formations capture, things that cannot be seen by the naked eye - nor by the objective lens of a camera. Atkin is a photographer, but unlike other artists working with the familiar medium, she doesn't exhibit prints or films. The recent graduate from the Royal College of Art's photography department, produces two and three-dimensional work, magnetic, highly detailed renderings abstracting rocks, roots and foliage into unrecognisably captivating masses of depth. The images explore the way sight and seeing have been affected by photography's conscious and unconscious cropping. It's no coincidence the images in 'No foreign matter unconsumed', her debut exhibition at London's Museum 52, depict shapes reminiscent of islands - ordinary elements become isolated through the artist's conceptual pirate-like periscope, apparitions leading the viewer closer and closer to sites that are both existent and imaginary at once, microscopic yet distantly mirage-like.
Atkin's elaborate imaging process begins by making a thorough visual acquaintance with her selected subjects. She creates a documentary photographic record of a site, focusing on specific angles so that what's familiar becomes strange and ambiguous. Atkin says her drawings are 're-enactments' of what's captured in her photographs, but there is no sense of simple mimetic repetition in her depictions, rather of natural generation. 'Aesculus Hippocastanum II' transforms a pollarded tree into an entirely in-focus but unrecognisable chaotic organically growing monad through the sharp, sometimes even aggressive nature of her technique. Her lines are significantly different from a traditional surveyor's - they don't attempt to create likenesses, rather to reflect on photography's isolating powers and take them one step further, showing what we think is 'natural' and real as essentially a play of free associations between what's inside and out, defined by their shifting chosen borders as inevitably as islands are made by the sea.
Lupe Nunez-Fernandez
KATE ATKIN, 'NO FOREIGN MATTER UNCONSUMED'
To 31 Mar 2007
Museum 52
52 Redchurch Street
London E2
T: +44 (0) 20 7366 5571
)
)
)