Felled (2008)

Penelope Stewart is an artist, curator/writer and publisher whose multi-disciplinary practice encompasses expansive architectural installations/interventions, alternative photography, artist books, and works on paper. Re-current themes address notions of cultural memory, of time and space and a considered approach to the relationship between objects, architecture, gardens, landscape and the places between – places to intervene, inhabit and above all activate. Whether it has been historic sites such as Musée Barthète, a small museum in France, or a museum like the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY or the deconstruction/reconstruction of a 19 th century book of botany using cyanotype, her intentions are to create sensory spaces, haptic experiences, transforming our perceptions and possible readings of space, time and memory.

Felled, 28” x 97” lambda archival print

Felled is a composite photograph of a felled tree I came upon in Golden Gate Park This tree mirrors the melancholy nature of photography. It reflects the trace of things that have been and imparts an element of mourning, of time lost, a spectre of before. My intuitive reading of this scene provided the impetus to take a series of sequential images which were later montaged to create the whole. At first I considered a smooth seamless panorama but soon realized that the disjunctive nature of the varied exposures was far more suggestive of the flux and instability of the referent.