With her multimedia practice that includes photography, sculpture and video, Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada) raises questions about the experience of three-dimensional sculptural form in an age of digital dissemination, inviting her audience to decelerate observation. Shirreff’s interest in the relationship between an object and its representation explores fine art photography as part of a wider culture of images, which exposes the slippage between an understanding of an object in real space and its mediation in two dimensions. Shirreff’s documentation of existing sculpture – both her own forms and the work of other artists – exposes equivalences and anomalies in the viewer’s perceptual experience. For Shirreff the power of photography is in its inherently unknowing nature: a sense of scale, materiality, of physical space and dimensionality, are all excavated in her photographs, which shift fluidly from image to object and vice versa.
With her multimedia practice that includes photography, sculpture and video, Erin Shirreff (b. 1975, Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada) raises questions about the experience of three-dimensional sculptural form in an age of digital dissemination, inviting her audience to decelerate observation. Shirreff’s interest in the relationship between an object and its representation explores fine art photography as part of a wider culture of images, which exposes the slippage between an understanding of an object in real space and its mediation in two dimensions. Shirreff’s documentation of existing sculpture – both her own forms and the work of other artists – exposes equivalences and anomalies in the viewer’s perceptual experience. For Shirreff the power of photography is in its inherently unknowing nature: a sense of scale, materiality, of physical space and dimensionality, are all excavated in her photographs, which shift fluidly from image to object and vice versa.
Shirreff’s studio practice is equally concerned with the mythologising of art history. In her ongoing series, Figs, the artist constructs small objects from coloured plaster that evoke modernist sculpture, in the manner of a ‘figure’, or illustration, in an art historical textbook. Each object is photographed and the resulting print subjected to a process of editing and printing, ultimately referencing the catalogues that inspired them. Yet Shirreff’s Figs are imperfect representations of the original object, each image bestowed with new meaning in the process of reproduction. Video also plays a part in Shirreff’s continued interest in the life of objects via image. In durational video works such as Roden Crater, 2009, she photographs printed pictures of her subjects hundreds of times under a range of artifical lighting conditions before digitally transforming the stills into a seamless film. At first glimpse these films seem to be static shots of the subject in real time but under close observation reveal the dynamism of their making, granting the still image with a sense of perspective and form that is present in the original object.
