These images are from an ongoing body of work.
Fable
‘Fable’ is a body of work that negotiates the fine boundary between artifice and reality; simultaneously exploring the relationship between internal experience and that of external actuality. As a means of addressing these boundaries and correlations the project deconstructs the notion of Pathetic Fallacy through the fabrication of fictitious environments.
Pathetic Fallacy, a concept coined by John Ruskin in 1856, is “The anthropomorphic projection of human feeling or volition on to nature” when strong emotions “produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things”. It is a false appearance induced by an overpowering state of feeling that makes us, for a time, irrational.
The project focuses on the artist’s own interpretation of Pathetic Fallacy, visually referencing the weather as the signifier of nature. The notion of artifice is expressed through the construction, whereas reality is represented through the use of actual weather. It is essentially this conflict between the interior and exterior, imagination and reality that are encapsulated by pathetic fallacy that ‘Fable’ desires to achieve.
‘Fable’ further aspires to denote the concept of emotion as fallacy. Due to its indefinable nature we are unable to quantify emotion, there is no way of knowing whether two people ever share a singular feeling therefore it becomes a fictitious knowledge. Something we recognise, share and group under one title, yet individual perception fluctuates. In the past a spiritual connection was established with the atmosphere, the weather considered an intermediary between heaven and earth and therefore interpreted with moral significance. Today our relationship to weather has radically changed, due to our ever increasing scientific knowledge nature no longer holds metaphysical relevance; defences have been developed in an attempt to protect against natural phenomena; rendering the weather little more than an inconvenience.
Weather is used within the imagery not only as a tangible example of reality, but also as a vessel with faint traces of past emotional significance to create a distorted vision as suggested by pathetic fallacy. The environment is constructed with multiples of broken and damaged umbrellas; chosen for their unwavering affiliation to human interaction with weather. Though through the imagery their function is rendered useless, their decaying state only provides failed protection as they transforms from practical paraphernalia into sculptural objects. This fabricated scene is affected by the weather allowing artifice and reality to collide. The work hinges on different interpretations, as the images are not created utilising an explicit emotion, but using varying weather conditions to interact with a staged scene of umbrellas. Any interpretation of emotion by the viewer is a fallacy as it was not intended by the artist; their perception aids the artifice that the project wishes to explore.
To return to the interplay between reality and artifice, weather is a signifier of reality, the material world, as it has always been in existence. However our interpretation of it has evolved over time, this changing state becoming representative of artifice. Much like a dream, the work appropriates previously seen and recognised imagery. It uses something real, for example the umbrella, to construct an artificial fiction but at the same time it works in reverse; making the artificial real when presenting it as a photographic image. In this manner, ‘Fable’ references the very nature of photography when considering the construction of an image, whether it denotes reality or complete artifice.
Louise Gibbs, born in 1986, is a final year student studying Photographic Art at the University of Wales, Newport. Gibbs predominantly photographs physically constructed, fictitious scenes as a means of exploring the boundaries between reality and artifice that are also inherent in Photography.
