Fertile Ground

Nilupa Yasmin, Madeleine Muir

18th January - 17th February 2018

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This year’s Fertile Ground features two young female artists whose use of photography as a process explores issues of identity, body politics and image.

Nilupa Yasmin draws on her South Asian heritage to create woven photographic installations that explore the notions of the self, the home and the idea of belonging.  Here she presents two series, Grow me a Waterlily and Baiyn.  Comprising large scale installations in which she makes herself present both visually and metaphorically, together with striking self-portraits that study her identity through the politicised notion of fabric, the work is an exploration of her complex identity as a British Bengali Muslim woman.

Madeleine Muir has created a series of self-portraits that examine teenage identity.  Applying some of the principles of Jo Spence’s ‘photo therapy’ each collection of images explore the artist’s innermost feelings of confinement, apprehension and vulnerability.  As an analysis of self-consciousness, with moments of sudden, explosive self-expression, they give a glimpse into a private, inner world behind the masquerade we perform when we go about our daily lives.