Events Archive
Tales from the Grid
Contributing Artists
Tales from the Grid is a series of newly made works by Dutch artist Edwin Zwakman. The large-scale photographs that make up this exhibition have been made during the artist's Leverhulme Fellowship at the University of Derby.
The photographs show reconstructed objects and models from the artist's memories of the Netherlands and make up a narrative distorted by distance and time. The grid mentioned in the title of the exhibition refers not only to the ordered nature of the cityscapes featured in the photographs, but also to the rigid nature of his native Dutch landscape made up of man-made and cultivated land. Compositions comprising apartment blocks and electricity pylons are offset by sublime backgrounds of ominous clouds and the grey skies commonly seen in many northern European cities.
In creating this work away from the Netherlands, Zwakman has distanced himself from any stimuli that might allow him to update or redress the scenes he originally saw as a child and later as an adolescent in the Netherlands.
Paying the minutest attention to detail, Zwakman draws only upon his own personal memories of growing up in the Netherlands to make his intricate Gullerverian models. Using any materials to hand and sometimes employing children's toys as props, the artist carefully constructs a 'mix and match' version of reality.
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