6 June– 4 September 2011
London based artist Edith Marie Pasquier works with moving image, photography, sound and text installations. Wild birds and animals are her subject and she presents a philosophical and performative enquiry into our relationship with the wild and nature. In this, her first major solo show, she will include a number of new works produced in Sweden.
Edith Marie Pasquier has developed a persistent body of work photographing and filming birds and other wild animals. Through her artistic practice Pasquier explores our relationship with animals—how animals are made to represent human myths and conditions—a complex relationship that is particularly pertinent with regards to global ecology and our impact on the environment.
A number of works have been developed specifically for this exhibition such as Consider the Birds: On Intimacy, shot during the ringing of migrating birds in Falsterbo, Sweden, this past spring. “A wild bird or animal cannot be controlled, they allow you a moment, but it is always ephemeral—you blink and there is nothing,” Pasquier says commenting on her photographic practice. The title of the exhibition—3 983 birds—is also the title of a specific work included in the show, a text installation which references a current Swedish court case, of a man obsessed with capturing and collecting wild birds. Pasquier considers the various levels of morality that exists in our dialogue around the animal and her work draws upon new research that overturns our historical understanding of their moral makeup.
In the photographic series Conundrums: Study of a Howling Wolf she looks at the issue of re-wilding predators in the UK as wolves are due to be introduced back into the wild in Scotland. In these black and white photographs she is asking us to question our preconceptions of the wolf, portraying a pack of European Wolves in England awaiting transfer to Scotland.
With a background in sound, performance and writing, Pasquier has developed a poetic visual language in her conceptual approach to photography. She is interested in the failure of vision, in its seeming transparency, as well as with the activity of looking.
Edith Marie Pasquier graduated with an MA in Fine Art (Photography) at the Royal College of Art in 2008. Her interdisciplinary practice has included awards and commissions by The Serpentine Gallery, Film London, Artsadmin and Soho Theatre. She has also contributed as a writer and critic to art catalogues and magazines in America and in the UK to include amongst others Words Without Pictures (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), The Museum of Modern African Art (New York).
