Artist Statement
The recurring themes of faked realities and present absence are the underlying motifs of my work. Within a predominantly photographic practice that investigates the nature of the medium itself and the structure of institutions - simulations, prop making, gunshots, forgeries, forensic training and explosions have found their way as subject matter into series I’ve made for almost a decade.

 

 

Sarah Pickering researches truth versus verisimilitude through the medium of photography. Her unmanipulated images preserve actions whose causality and construction seems to be part of an alternate, but no lesser, reality. She has worked with the emergency services, pyrotechnic manufacturers, tv prop makers and the police to produce some of her most recent bodies of work. Exhibitions include How We Are: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain 2007; New Photography in Britain, Galleria Civica di Modena, Italy, 2008; Signs of a Struggle: Photography in the Wake of Postmodernism, Victoria and Albert Museum, 2011; Theatres of the Real, Fotomuseum, Antwerp 2009; Manipulating Reality, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, 2009/10. Solo exhibitions include Ffotogallery, Wales 2009, Incident Control at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago 2010 and Art and Antiquities at Meessen De Clercq, Brussels, 2011. Her monograph Explosions, Fires and Public Order is published by Aperture and MoCP. Gallery Representation is with Meessen De Clercq, Brussels.

 

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