On Reflection 1/4 Photograph

Kathryn Sawbridge is an experimental fine artist with a background in photography. During her first degree in Photography at the University of Wolverhampton, her work explored identity and how this can be obscured, and yet at the same time how semiotics can be used to give clues to that obscured identity. Her pieces examined her own identity, but the final piece for her degree used layering to add ‘personality’ to a set of family portraits, with images of animals imposed on top in order to identify personality traits which had been removed by the impersonal posing used by the photographer in the original photographs. During her studies for her Masters in Fine Art, Kathryn continued her exploration of the building up of layers of personality, but used dress patterns and materials to create life size installations to show the impact of families and other relationships, as well as surrounding, on personality development. Since then, as an Artist in Residence, and working on her own practice, Kathryn has gone on to develop her work within the field of collage. She has been keen to expand her work beyond the examination of her own personality, in order to make her work more accessible to the viewer, looking more at the interaction between people and their environment. She has been influenced by the surrealist work of Richard Hamilton, and has begun to specialise in Photomontage within the wider area of collage. Her approach to photomontage is impacted by her photographic background, in that she creates a new piece which broadly follows the composition rules of photography. Whilst collages tend to explore things that you generally wouldn’t see in real life, they typically build up a picture with items added in order to create a new ‘fantastical’ person or image, Kathryn’s work takes components from real photographs and brings them together in a recognisable scene. The finished photomontage may at first appear normal, but with the elements being taken from one context and reassembled in a new context, on closer examination the new scene becomes very surreal, albeit having the outward look of photographic reality. Most recent work has evolved to develop hand torn collages which create the same surreal scenes.