New limited edition print by the British artist Fiona Crisp.
Archival Pigment Print on Hahnemuehle Photo Rag 308gsm
Edition of 50 (+ 5 APs)
Paper dimensions: 505 mm (w) x 415 mm (h)
Image dimensions: 405 mm (w) x 315 mm (h)

From the series Catacombs
Produced to coincide with the exhibition Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle at Matt's Gallery, 20 June - 29 July 2012

The Stourhead Cycle is a series of eight large-scale photographic works that will be shown for the first time in the installation Negative Capability: The Stourhead Cycle at Matt’s Gallery, London.
Generated at the National Trust site of Stourhead (Wiltshire, UK) in 2006, the images eschew any desire to document a specific location; instead, the historic house at Stourhead, along with it’s world-famous 18th century landscape gardens, are employed by Crisp as a formal device to reflect upon the colliding imperatives of heritage, leisure and history at a site of national cultural significance.

Implicit are questions concerning the democratising of cultural ‘assets’ or the space between the public and private sphere but ideas are also articulated through a formal visual language where tensions are set up between proximity and distance, between the flat plane of the photograph and the perspectival depth of landscape or between revealing and obscuring a ‘view’.

The phrase Negative Capability was first used by the Romantic Poet John Keats in 1817 when, in a letter to his brother, he identified the ability to accept uncertainty and the unresolved as prerequisite for creativity. The relationship between knowledge and doubt has long been at the heart of Crisp's practice and is often reflected in her work's wilful instability as it oscillates between illusionistic space and explicit, functional presence.