JENNIFER PATTISON

Jennifer studied at the London College of Communications receiving her Bachelor of Arts Degree in Photography in 2000. Having begun her career as a photographer agent Jennifer began focusing on her own practice in 2012.

Jennifer has received numerous awards internationally including second prize at the Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2012, first prize at the International Photography Awards 2013, Magenta Flash Forward emerging photography winner 2013.

In 2014 she exhibited this year at the National Portrait Gallery and Four Corners London. Her work has been published in the Financial Times Magazine, Port Magazine and the British Journal of Photography among others.

She spends her time developing personal work and undertaking commissions. Her work is part of several private collections internationally. In September 2014 she was the artist in residence at Instituto Inclusartiz, Rio de Janeiro, invited by the collector Frances Reynolds.

www.jennifer-pattison.com

Part One – Levitation, Ice and the Limits of Reality

As a child, I loved to read books that were full of magic. While playing in the wild woods where I grew up, images from these miraculous stories would transcend the limits of my thoughts and become almost real. Memories of these moments have stayed with me into adulthood. But as an adult, I have found it difficult to find the space to experience esoteric events, given the western culture I’ve grown up in, which says these things do not exist. I thought I had lost the ability to manifest imaginings to my childhood.

It wasn’t until I read books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez and The Magus by John Fowles that I realised I still had the capacity to do this. The words in these books triggered tangible feelings in me, and vivid images, that I had not experienced since I had stood in that Sussex forest as a child.

This project is a work-in-progress. I photographed Part One, in Rio, in Brazil, and was inspired by One Hundred Years of Solitude. I found inspiration in the natural world García Márquez describes in the novel – a real world setting combined with supernatural elements, enchantment and mystery. It is a reality where a woman levitates and disappears into the sky, but the event is described in a way that makes it seem as commonplace as the falling of rain.

In a similar vein, the author portrays something as mundane as ice with such wonder and awe, that it too becomes magical.

My intention was not to re-stage events from the novel, but to use it as a springboard to provoke a playful, and perhaps naïve way of looking.
While I was in Rio searching for locations to shoot the project, I never felt alone. Creeping alongside me were the aerial roots of orchids, clinging onto every tree, and string-like tendrils brushed the top of my head as I passed beneath them. At times I thought I could hear the plants growing. This ancient, green place was full of stories. It was as though the plants were weaving through my camera’s lens into my photographs to form part of another ‘real’ world.