Room: Jubilee Lounge
Commissioned to make five individual editions for the Unilever’s Four Acre site in Kingston, Ahrens has based the series of photo gravures on the gardens of Four Acres, as a site of Unilever’s history and present concerns with wellbeing and sustainability. The notion of bringing the outside inside works to extend the natural aspects of Four Acres into the living spaces of the building.
The photo gravures themselves are made with sustainable processes, using non-toxic plates and developed in water, as well as hand collected and frottaged colour pigments.
In this way, the human and the mineral collide on the surface of the photographic image, and this in turn brings the hand made into a viewing of the site itself. In each edition, two photographs work side by side alluding to the stereoscopic view of the landscape in the 19th century, and the colour pigments change subtly to reflect the subtle changes that occur in the natural world as seasons and light conditions alter over time. There is a sense of the historical as these processes reference traditional photographic processes and look to create a dialogue with the site at Four Acres through time with sustainable processes.
Hand pigmented Photo Etchings Raw Sienna, burnt umber and indigo On Somerset paper. Ed of 5
2022
Victoria Ahrens
Artist info
Victoria is an artist, writer and researcher who grew up in Argentina, now living and working in London. She holds an MA and PHD in Photographic Theory and Practice from Birkbeck College, University of London, and a BA and MA in Fine Art /Printmaking from Camberwell College of Art and Central St Martins, University of the Arts London.
Victoria works with photographs, prints, sounds and videos of places that hold a multitude of historical, geological, and ecological narratives. Her photographic and print interventions explore the interstices between the historic and the contemporary to create photographic images and installation pieces, as well as print editions.
Her work looks at the contemporary translation of photographic aura and our perceptions of memory in landscapes of disappearance, ecology, geology and cartography. She has exhibited extensively in the UK and internationally. Her work features in private and public collections in the UK, France, Italy and China.