Vanessa
Harper-Mathews

I am a multi-disciplinary experimental visual artist, specialising mainly in photography. My visual imagery work draws on objects and experiences in the natural environment with the desire to stimulate the imagination and internal psychological responses of my audience. This visual investigation of the subject matter seeks to engage the viewer on several levels; to prompt or challenge social collective memory and to evoke the viewers’ internal dialogue of their experience. My work spans multiple visual mediums, including photography, painting, sculpture and drawing. I primarily specialise in combining 21st century digital imagery with 18th and 19th century historic photographic printing processes, such as cyanotypes, gum bichromate, and four colour carbon, creating hand crafted, unique state works, often combining them with other mediums. The result is a wonderful intersection between the material nature of these one of a kind, precious and historically based articles and the ephemeral nature of the digital image in the internet age. It is through this intersection that I seek to create a pause for the viewer to see the digital world through the paradigm of a more refined, artisan framework.