AIDAN MCNEILL: BORDERS BETWEEN

About

Presented by PayneShurvell with the Canadian High Commission Aidan McNeill's new photographic work dismantles, illuminates and inverts a commonly used subject matter, retaining the ‘core' whilst adding an element of visual poetry. Borders Between takes the artist's own large-format botanical images of English Roses and transforms them into lyrical works of light and shadow. The work draws on the still life, a tradition ripe with metaphorical and moral significance to create new works of conceptual vivacity and striking beauty. The work explores relationships between still life and landscape, the mechanical and the miraculous, transformation and abstraction of nature, colour and image. Through the manipulation of the photographic botanical details there is a transformation from the raw documented object into a new monochromatic visual language; the flora still life becomes a vehicle to explore new landscapes. The rose image becomes an abstracted form, dismantling traditional mechanics of aesthetics. Each unique piece is created, first by taking a high definition digital image of a blooming rose flower. McNeill's formal concerns of light, tonality, detail and composition are key to both the original capture of the image and in the restructuring of the image in digital post-production. After the black-and-white photograph has been processed, the image becomes encased within a circular border and inverted, allowing the light to shine out where the shadows originally were, adding a sculptural texture to the work. McNeill's practice investigates how the creative act reforms relationships with nature during periods of technological dominance. Her work has been included in Nature Morte (Thames & Hudson), described as ‘otherworldly' (Aesthetica magazine) and has featured in Prefix magazine. A selection from Borders Between was recently awarded Gold in Prix de la Photographie.