Pat Brassington’s series 1+1=3 is one of her earliest artworks. It is a significant series because it prefigures her longstanding interest in the psychodynamics of family life and the presence of uncanny forces in domestic spaces. These works employ oblique perspectives and asymmetrical framing to affect a dreamlike pictorial space. An interest in the history of surrealist photography is particularly evident in the way Brassington has cropped body parts and focused on classic fetish objects such as women’s shoes and body hair. This early series of work also captures the importance of photography in the development of Brassington’s practice, which has increasingly embraced the flattened pictorial space of collage and print-making.
(2014)
Gelatin silver prints are black-and-white photographic prints that have been created using papers coated with an emulsion of gelatin and light-sensitive silver salts. After the papers are briefly exposed to light (usually through a negative), a chemical developer renders the latent image as reduced silver, which is then fixed and washed. This technique was first introduced in the 1870s and is still used today. Most twentieth-century black-and-white photographs are gelatin silver prints. They are known for being highly detailed and sharply defined prints with a distinguishable smooth, even image surface.
