Q&A
Karen Grainger presents the viewer with a disrupted version of the English landscape, using mirrors as an integral part of her practice to create a beautiful and arresting series of photographs that seem to have an almost mystical quality.
What ideas were you trying to explore through the creation of these landscapes?
As this was the first time I had worked with mirrors when taking photographs, these landscapes were very much about exploring a potential new way of looking, both at the world around us and its images. I felt so much had been seen and photographed already, that working with mirrors could both ‘reflect’ that aspect and also potentially show us something we’d missed.
Could you explain a little about the process of using the mirrors in these images?
I’d been collecting mirrors for sometime, being fascinated by them as objects of ‘representation’. In Re: Series, various sizes of old mirrors were taken out on location with me, ones with thick glass and beveled edges, and haphazardly propped or balanced in front of the camera lens whilst looking though the viewfinder. I would take a shot if I saw something interesting coming together. I couldn’t predict what was going to be formed as a composition, so I had to approach each shoot with no fixed ideas in mind, which was a really refreshing way to work.
How do you feel that the mirrors affect the viewer's perception of the landscapes?
I hope that the images hold the viewer in front of the image a little longer than normal, whilst they try to unpick what they are looking at. Some of the images present what appears to be a complete traditional landscape ‘view’, the blurred, beveled edge being a subtler interruption that hints that there’s something else going on. In others, the mirror creates a more prominent mirage or disturbance that more immediately demands an alternative interpretation.
You seem to have chosen a particular type of English landscape as the subject of your images, what was the relevance of this?
I wanted to approach familiar types of landscapes that would contrast with an interjection at odds with that familiarity. The landscapes are also ‘types’, generally accepted as attractive environments to be preserved and enjoyed, exemplars of ‘natural England’. Of course these types of places have partly been selected, formed and influenced through images made by us, both through painting and photography. It very much seems like a repeating back and forth of image to landscape and vice versa, this is partly why I use the mirror to underline this aspect.
What and who are your influences photographically?
I tend to find a wide range of photographic practices or perhaps genres as a whole interesting. How photography came about, how we use it and its influences on our perception of ourselves and the world around us. I’m interested in perception of the photograph in this sense but also in the sense of how it is as a material form.
Of contemporary photographers, I like aspects of Catherine Yass, Thomas Ruff and Andreas Gursky and also Alex Hartley who works in a more sculptural sense with photography.
What can we expect to see from you in the near future? Are you currently working on any more projects?
I’m working on a few things at once at the moment. All working with mirrors but in different ways; exploring other ways of interrupting the surface and form of the image and its perception. I’ve wanted to make more physical works as a strand of my practice for a while and I’ve recently developed a technique of physically laminating photographic prints and mirrors together, so I have a few ideas underway in that direction. I will also be continuing the use of mirrors ‘within’ the image content too. It will all look quite varied for a while but essentially I’m exploring the same things.
And finally; Spring, Summer, Autumn or Winter?
Yes, all quite useful.