Close is delighted to present a new body of work by Anna Mossman. This new exhibition includes ‘Shivers’, ‘Shifts’ and ‘Overlays’ alongside selected works from the ‘Imagined Legacy’ series. These large works on paper continue an ongoing fascination with repetition and the trace of activity over extended time. They follow earlier, large-scale line drawings taking up to 3 years to make, such as ‘Diagonal Lines’ (2011-12) and ‘Curved Lines’ (2012-15). A particular focus on duration and process relates to work Mossman produced from the 1990s to the 2000s where time, film and the nature of the camera are explored in depth. 

‘There is a history in Anna Mossman’s work of deploying the camera to respond to non-visual stimuli such as smell, sound, or a complete absence of light (more a receptive subject than an impartial instrument, it smells flowers, listens to confessions, or is ‘buried alive’ in the ground). This direction of photography to the seemingly un-photographable has more recently been paralleled by an application of the rules of photography to non-photographic practices (specifically, drawing and writing), in turn subjecting photography to their tactics’* 

‘Aspects of time, light, surface and focus are now transposed to the drawn and painted surface and an apparently mechanistic means of production is countered by the tangible presence and evidence of the hand….an emphasis of received photographic properties is detectable throughout the production process, including the devices of copying, repetition, and positive/negative transcription.’*
*From The Drawn and Written Photograph – John Hilliard, catalogue essay for the exhibition ‘Hands On’, curated by John Hilliard, Galerie Raum mit Licht, Vienna, 2010.

Anna Mossman’s new body of work explores optical and perceptual space through geometry, line and colour, playing out within a range of parameters. Similar concerns are found in the ‘Imagined Legacy’ series (2015-16), where spatial, layered works are inspired by a range of references including geodesic structures and disrupted, patterned floors, the latter initially seen at Herculaneum, Italy, during Mossman’s residency at The British School at Rome.

These form a basis for the ‘Shivers’, ‘Shifts’ and ‘Overlays’, works on paper on a much larger scale. Engaging specifically with disorientation through optical and spatial uncertainty, the works are made by hand and rather than being preconceived, involve a process of discovery, unfolding during the making, producing the unexpected while echoing and revitalizing elements of the photographic such as light, focus, exposure and duration. Mossman is interested in the coming together of overlapping readings experienced when these works are encountered, where different histories such as modernist geometrics, pattern and structural explorations found in textile and design, coincide or collide with each other. 

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