Platonic
6-31 January 2010
Bristow’s paintings are landscapes with a difference; she constructs careful tableaux, rich in both formal composition and narrative play, using found imagery of other places, primarily in Northern and Eastern Europe, book covers and hand-made maquettes of real architectural features or fantasy structures. Her arrangements of condensed and re-imagined landscapes evocative of stage sets are often presided over by a geometrical element, recalling Cezanne’s exhortation to ‘treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone’.
These forms of assumed perfection betray nostalgia for Modern ideals replete with utopian aspirations that never came to fruition. With Platonic, Bristow has taken this geometric rationalisation one step further. Each arrangement, overlaid and cut with a Euclidean net, offers instructions to fold and stick. Once assembled, each page is transformed into one of the five Platonic Solids: tetrahedron, cube, octahedron, dodecahedron and icosahedron.
Join Louise Bristow on Sunday 17th January for a free drop-in workshop and make your own artists' books. Find out more.
