Frances Gaffney
Graduate Certificate of Visual Art
This series is a meditation on the Western nature–culture binary, which also contemplates the notion of the so-called anthropocentric era. My works explore the relationships and tensions between concepts of human and nature, portrait and landscape, negative and positive space, presence and absence. By using found images to create and recreate memories and imagined narratives in a series of collages, the element of serendipity becomes an important part of the process. Referencing these found-image collages, my subsequent oil paintings provide a sense of scale, depth and gravitas to the narratives I explore. Repeated imagery such as the mother, the child, water and industrial scenery serve both as metaphor and as a direct response to the overarching theme of environmental precarity.
