21st February 2008
Outpost's first solo show of 2008 debuts Bess Shipside.
Even the most isolated landscapes have been documented and framed for consumption. We have all observed the flora and fauna of tropical climes through television documentaries; at times we have even entertained the idea of our own survival in these environments, albeit in the company of Ray Mears. Shipside reacts to this cultural phenomenon - a western obsession with returning to nature - with her own packaged experience of the natural world, but one that is problematic for our perception. She uses materials that are familiar from every day use, for example a white nylon rope binds bamboo, acknowledging that we enter her environment from the synthetic. Our surfaces are plastic, our colours artificially enhanced.
Shipside's practice involves the mapping out of pictorial space in three dimensions. Her installation, on first encounter, might read with conventional landscape hierarchy, however the experience of passing through and in to the picture plane has the effect of spreading out the various units which had hitherto made up the scene, so that they now stand around us marking locations on the floor. Where distance was initially described in terms of perspective, it can now be travelled...
