Felicity Hammond
Monday, 4 January 2016
Work from Capital Growth
“My large scale photo-installations refer to a forgotten industry; industrial relics become urban follies, shrouded as they lie precariously between construction and deconstruction, archaic and futuristic. Manufacturing and industrial process has been discarded, and in its place stands computer generated imagery of luxury living, posters pertaining to a better future. It is utopic yet grotesque; it talks of an unobtainable capital, a capital which proliferates without labour. In ‘Capital Growth,’ I am interested in the way in which these sites that were once producers of power have now become a product of it.
My installations all lie within the limits of photography. They use the material language of urban regeneration; the fake opulence that encases luxury developments as a way of dissecting the linguistic value of urban manifestos. Photographs become sculptural; the ruin in reality is fused with the digital ruin, and refers to renders of futuristic spaces. It refers to a growth fetish, where capitalism is constantly defined and redefined; a hybrid of the ultra-modern and the archaic. The photographic installations and worlds that I create borrow the indeterminate nature of the virtual, fusing digitally warped visions of opulent living with the discarded material that it conceals.”