Featured photographer

Tess Hurrell

Most of my practice and interest lies in the contractions and paradoxes that the photograph holds, visually, within society and within its own history. At once this humble medium is the emotional gatekeeper to our dearest, a visual delighter, a projector of suggested desires and aspirations. And so too is it an educator, a cold recorder of events and discoveries.

Chaology grew out of a fascination with the visual power of the photographed explosion. These silent and still forms are created from images of explosions caught at a point of expansion. Source material includes the received images from Hiroshima, nuclear tests, the space shuttle disaster, burning oil and white phosphorus bombs. The sculptural forms are created from naïve materials, cotton wool, talcum powder and pipe cleaners.

The series is concerned with the ironic beauty of these formations; the impossible fragmented time that the camera allows, and my distance from the reality of these mediated events.

Tess Hurrell has been commissioned by Pavilion to produce a new body of work for exhibition as part of the Pavilion Commissions Programme 2008.