Wilhelmina McFadden

At its core my practice is an exploration between my idealised fiction and its limitations in reality. My work centres around form, material, colour and abstraction and is underpinned by a keen interest in the natural world. Through photography, I try to capture illusory moments, ranging from deliberate geometric works into tactile and material abstractions. The importance of composition and subject matter is an integral part of my photography and equally dictates the way I collect and utilise the archival images I source. While for the most part, my photography exists in a purposeful stasis, it plays an integral role in providing the inspiration and the necessary material for the creation of both of my surreal landscape collages and my sculptural work. My invented landscapes represent my continued interest and investigation into the fantastic and the sublime, through these idylls, I see my work realised in a physical space, one that connects them back to the natural world, and one where the works existence is not constrained by any of reality’s actual limitations. It is in trying to bridge this gap between fantasy and reality that a key component of my sculptural work emerges, like artefacts from some last great unexplored wilderness, bastions of places and spaces now lost or perhaps newly found.