Aliki Braine: Into the Woods – 2023
Benjamin Parsons X Hannah Payne Gallery, Oxford, 14 April – 6 May 2023
The Hunt
The idea behind this exhibition stems from a work I had seen by Aliki in 2009 called The Hunt, inspired by Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest. This celebrated painting resides in the collection of the Ashmolean Museum, where Aliki visited it often as an art student.
Both works, separated by more than five centuries, led me to propose an exhibition to Hannah and Ben at Meakin + Parsons x Hannah Payne, to coincide with the Photo Oxford Festival, and its latest theme, The Hidden Power of the Archive.
Both Uccello and Aliki’s hunts are mesmerising images, presenting us with the mysterious setting of the forest, the former as a stage for a nocturnal hunting party and the latter a space for artistic experimentation. Aliki’s work allows me to connect these seemingly divergent histories, bringing them back to a shared genesis within the sphere of art: that of an artist experimenting with the possibilities of the craft: composition and geometry, scale, rhythm, negative and positive spaces (and subsequently absence and presence), transparency and colour.
I am obsessed with the figure of the circle and find myself especially drawn to it in Aliki’s work. In The Hunt feel these circles have an eerie presence, their different sizes and locations within the image give the impression of them existing as three-dimensional spheres, or voids, in the theatrical space of the forest.
On closer inspection these circles reveal their true nature. They are actual holes ‘punched out’ of the surface of the photographic negative. An action of subtraction, which in turn creates a presence in the opposite world of the positive print. We can also see this in the two Hunting images which lead to The Hunt, tracing the first appearance of the whole-punch circles in the forest, which then become the cut circles on the larger scale print.
Working at the Studio
Key to this exhibition is to understand Aliki’s process, her experimentation with photography focused on the analogue process, and its materiality. Working together, we created an area to recreate the space of her studio in London. To fully understand Aliki’s creative process I think it is paramount to see the tools she uses, and the materials and references she surrounds herself with whilst at work.
In this ‘studio room’ I included an early work of hers entitled Draw me a Tree… Black Out from 2006, which is one of the first images I saw of her work, more than ten years ago. It is still as intriguing now as it was then, the many circular punch-outs making a new sculptural object, made from empty space. A tree of pure void or pure mass, standing there, an uncanny manifestation in the middle of a field. The sheep around it grace undisturbed by its presence. I cannot help but think of the black monolith in Kubrick’s Space Odyssey, an object from another time and dimension.
From Punching out to Spotting
Continuing along the back wall of the gallery we find a development of Aliki’s hole-punch experiments. What was originally a punching out, becomes a process of addition, bringing in a completely new creative process, working with round stationary stickers.
The game of absence/presence (of punching out and sticking in) becomes even more elaborate, evidence of this are three works included in this show: A Thousand Fallen Blossoms, Entre’acte and Pieces of Sky.
We can see how Aliki starts recomposing the fragments which had been punched out of her negatives, printing them together in different configurations. In A Thousand Fallen Blossoms we see how she scatters the circular punchouts to resemble the fallen petals of a cherry tree. I particularly like how she has named the process of this work ‘colour photograph from negative confetti’. The arbitrary position of the images in the circles allows for a completely new and haphazard reconstruction of the photographic image.
Entre’Acte and Pieces of Sky are subsequent experiments with this process, each made with ‘negative confetti’ of land and sky. The trope of the circle is further emphasized by framing the prints in circular frames. This emphasizes the multiple nested layers of her creative process but also for me is a reminder of the playful nature of her work. The whole-punched circles printed on a paper which is then punched out by a circular frame. The wall of the gallery becomes a new surface and each frame a new piece of a larger confetti.
Field No 1. brings the experiments with the addition of stickers back into the photographic darkroom, revealing the many layers as a series of intersected transparencies, creating abstract compositions, based on famous paintings from the history of Western Art. Field 1 is an example of this, and so is a smaller print entitled 15 Ugly Spots (after Giorgione).
From Spotting to Shredding
Spotted (after Uccello) is Aliki’s return to the master’s hunt, this time ‘spotting’ the different figures in the scene, recomposing the painting by choosing stickers of different colours and sizes. Along with Shuffle (after Uccello) these two works on paper are a part of a series developed by Aliki, working directly with commercial mass reproductions of her favourite masterpiece paintings. Integral to her practice is a passion for the history of western art, and how our generation grew to learn and love art through reproductions in books and booklet collections, years before the existence of the digital world and the internet.
Working uninterruptedly through the covid pandemic, Aliki found a new source of inspiration experimenting with different ways of deconstructing and recomposing these master paintings, intervening found reproductions from art history encyclopaedia collections. Shuffle (after Uccello) is another take on the Italian painter’s work, recomposing his famous and multiple Battle(s) of San Romano first by cutting them into strips, and then weaving them together into an orthogonal grid.
This work signals the latest turn in Aliki’s work, shifting from the punch-outs and stickers, to cutting and shredding her negatives into strips. It brings us to her two final works in the gallery, created especially for this exhibition. In Into the Woods, Shredded Aliki uses a hand-held paper shredder to cut her negatives into strips, which she then uses to recompose the image on the glass plate of the enlarger.
These images of forests allude to the woven strips of Shuffle, and the experiments with overlapping of the confetti negatives. Areas of white sky contrast with abstract shapes created by the complete opacity of the overlapped negatives. The result is a complete reconfiguration of the photographic image, expanding it into the material space of the print.
In this exhibition we can see how this unique combination of photographic image and sculptural object has been a constant in Aliki’s work, from the punched-out trees in 2006 to the most recent shredded works, almost 20 years later. It is an introduction to a disciplined practice, experimenting with the materials and processes of analogue photography. It is also an insight into Aliki’s creative universe, fuelled by her passion and knowledge of the history of art, specifically western historical painting. Echoing back her views of some of her favourite artists, I can say the same of her work: there is a great mastery in creating images which seem playful and light-hearted, and at the same time so considered and rigorous in their craft.
Aliki Braine: Into the Woods
Benjamin Parsons X Hannah Payne Gallery, Oxford, 14 April – 6 May 2023
Artist: Aliki Braine
Photography by Damian Griffiths, Courtesy of Benjamin Parsons X Hannah Payne Gallery