Pat Brassington

Brassington is renowned for her beguiling surrealistic imagery. Throughout her oeuvre, interior and domestic spaces have been a consistent theme. Set within cloying patterns of carpets and wallpaper, corners and doors, her figures have enacted a theatre of the unconscious and the absurd.

A Perfect Day takes us outside although, as expected, Brassington’s outdoors isn’t all blue skies and sunshine. The colour palette in A Perfect Day is a little post-apocalyptic, featuring bleached and acrid tones of yellow and green or shades of black and white. The inspiration for this series came from reading a novel by Cormac McCarthy, The Road, the story of a man trying to survive and protect his son in a post-apocalyptic time. It caused Brassington to reminisce on ominous childhood dreams and their menacing and uncertain spaces. Within these uncertain spaces though, there is Brassington’s characteristic wryness and strange beauty. In Floating Chrome, her onetime pet dog Elsa drifts along in the empty grey space alongside a planet, in Rub Your Eyes a woman lays splayed face down on the grass, swamped by her mountainous skirts.

More recent works on exhibition reference traditional photographic language but present it with a twist. In Coming and Going for example, two photographic staples, the sunset and the road leading off into the distance are presented in blood red hues with hallucinogenic overtones. Brassington’s imagery erodes the easy consumption of the idyllic.

Pat Brassington is considered to be one of Australia’s leading photo-media artists, producing work with great originality and vision. She has exhibited widely both in Australia and overseas for the past 20 years, and in 2004, her work was included in the Biennale of Sydney at the Art Gallery of NSW and the Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is held in many of Australia’s major public collections.