For her first exhibition at Matt’s Gallery, Fiona Crisp has installed a series of photographic works. With this installation Crisp continues themes established in earlier work such as Still Films, her series of large scale photographs, which have been shown in several gallery and non-gallery sites including Camerawork last year. Reminiscent of cinematic screens, the works approached photography as a physical as well as visual construct in our perception of space, place and time.

These new works were made during Crisp’s fellowship at the Berwick Gymnasium Gallery in the winter months of 1999-2000. Within the border town of Berwick upon Tweed, Crisp adopted a working method more akin to archaeology or surveying than photography, using her home-made cameras to excavate spaces of visual and psychological resonance within the town and its surrounding environment.

Coming from a background of sculpture, Crisp’s work is concerned with the interaction of the body and the space that surrounds it. In this new series she carefully plots the interior structure of mobile ‘containers’ such as a car or a caravan, as frames through which a view of the exterior world is formed, contrasting the banal interiors with the sublime beyond.

Works commissioned by English Heritage and Northern Arts through the Berwick Gymnasium Fellowship 1999/2000