Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s most influential and respected artists working in photo-media. Her work delves into the uncanny and the provocative effect ambiguity has on interpretation.

Seemingly innocent, her images are at once charming and menacing. They rouse a sense of disquiet as they subtly and humorously scratch at the underbelly of the human condition. In her unique way, Brassington blurs the boundaries of the real and the imagined, stripping photography of its authority,
bestowing it instead with a logic of dream or fantasy. 1

Her images open up like a flower, gorgeous and dream-like, then morph into a psychological Rorschach. In her work, the endless possibilities of our complex inner states – narratives of sex, memory and identity – run quietly rampant.

 

________________________________________________________

Pair Bonding (2015) is a visual montage composed of three elements – a face, a shirt and a bench-top with pear. I utilise combinations when I discover elements that interact in strange ways in my ‘mind’s eye’. Here, the compression of space may have something to do with my fascination. I aim to pitch my images just off the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry.

Pat Brassington – March 2016

 

1 Pat Brassington, artist profile Arc One Gallery, Melbourne