CULTURAL CENTER OF CAPE COD

THIS WEEK’S MUSE

“I aim to pitch my images just off the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry.”

PAT BRASSINGTON, ARTIST

Pat Brassington is an Australian artist, primarily working in digital art and photography, known for blending the familiar with the fantastic through a filter of surrealism, feminism and psychoanalysis.

Brassington was born in Hobart, Tasmania in 1942 and continues to live and work there. Marriage and children came ahead of a career in art and she only attended the Tasmanian School of Art as a mature student in 1986 to study photography and printmaking.

Unlike many artists who embrace the concept of Australianness—the idea that Australian artists look to their own backyards for inspiration—European fine art has been her foundation. Goya, Giacometti, Fuseli, Magritte, and Ernst are all quoted as inspiration, and although these figures aren’t overtly seen in her work, they sit under the surface as guardians, guiding her.

She attributes the intensity and drama in her work to that broad European tradition. “There is a European look or feel about my work,” she says. “Perhaps it’s because I’m attracted to Anglo-European ideas, theories, histories.”

Whatever her inspiration and whatever its source or origin, Brassington’s artistic language is emphatically her own; the visual themes she develops and stories she tells are not rehashes of those inspirations. The endless possibilities of our complex inner states—narratives of sex, memory and identity—run quietly wild. The phallic tongues, erotic suggestions, childhood toys, supine torsos, and distorted faces are from her own visual dictionary.

“My work could be described as organic…I will have an agenda or thoughts in mind to begin with, of course, and proceed to make what I would call preliminary sketches or triggers. A finished work may evolve quite quickly but more often than not it’s a slow process with a lot of trial and error involved.”

Her images have a way of compelling us to look again. They can contain visual elements that are at once charming and menacing, intriguing and disturbing. As a result, we are drawn in, wanting to know more about what is happening in the images. They rouse a sense of disquiet as they subtly, and often humorously, scratch at a darker side of the human condition. In her unique way, and with those European inspirations, Brassington creates haunting, dream-like images that lead us to the edges of our imagination.“I know that my work doesn’t appeal to everybody, but I don’t make excuses and I don’t compromise.

HAPPENINGS

YOGA