Anna H Geerdes
Contact details
Website: www.annageerdes.com
Email: anna@annageerdes.com
Statement
The surface is the landscape,
a landscape in fragments,
a place with the illusion of timelessness.
What hovers above and
what hides beneath
the surface?
The land is shifting underneath our feet.
Stitched up, named, numbered and overseen.
Places that are torn up, surveyed, abandoned, fragile in existence.
Places without names or solid foundation.
Places with a stark horizon, the gap between heaven and earth, the gap where the unexpected can happen.
The paintings centre on landscape. Landscape as a representation of place, but the question always is: what exactly does it represent? Landscape itself is full of cultural references and often formed by the expression of political and economical power relations. In that sense landscape is already a representation in its own right, and to represent landscape by means of painting, without acknowledging this, is somewhat problematic.
In this world and this time themes like contested landscape, displacement, and global control and surveillance are main motifs.
For someone who has left their country of origin, place is always a question mark. In this context the other viewpoint is one of introspection; landscapes of the mind. Both of those approaches come together in questioning Place and Space and express themselves in the work as (imaginative) landscapes, maps and surfaces.
History
Studied Fine Arts at Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen. Received BA degree (first) in 2010.
The work won several awards, amongst which the RSA Landscape Award 2011 and the MSD Young Painter Award 2014.
