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Opaque, disquieting and dark, one of the strengths of the photographic and installation work of Pat Brassington is its resistance to narrative, its refusal to be contained by a singular, definitive response. Brassington's practice can be read also as an extended engagement with the notion of collage: a mental and physical gathering together and shifting around of images, ideas, and memories. Many of her works are in series, or are single images built from several others. In early works this was a manual process but, more recently, she has used digital technology to create new representations. Her choice of imagery is mysterious, sexual, and often sinister, or is made to seem so through juxtaposition.
A recent selective survey of her work, curated by Helen McDonald as part of the Work in Progress series of exhibitions at the Ian Potter Museum of Art, the University of Melbourne, allowed the viewer to approach the work via its own logic.1 The possible entry points into Brassington's practice are multiple, overlapping, and often surprising, echoing the structure of the works themselves. McDonald's choices, whilst acknowledging a small debt to the strictures of chronology, affirmed this.2 Over several visits to the exhibition I found myself, quite unexpectedly, lingering over the series of black and white photographs entitled Pond (1995).
To create Pond, Brassington photographed several items submerged in water. The resulting twelve photographs are imbued with both a sense of sadness and a dark sexuality. Exhibited at the Ian Potter against the floating, headless female figure of In the Pines (1995), Pond's sodden, ambiguous, often vaginal forms resembled objects that might be left behind by a drowned Ophelia, driven mad with desire. This analogy is... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline