Carolyn Bunt – CFPR Editions

Carolyn Bunt, through the discipline of photography, is engaged intensely with the act of looking. Bunt concentrates on a kind of visual scrutiny, into which the viewer is drawn, generating a particular quietness and strength. Significant events lie hidden in her seemingly empty, but quietly powerful, photographs and prints. These wounded landscapes hide the dark truths of secret histories. Turbulent clouds prevent these locations from existing solely as beautiful places of natural innocence. Their power lies in the withholding of their stories. Conceptually they drift away from documentary photography into a phenomenon of discovery.In the words of Roland Barthes, ‘(a work’s) unity lies not in its origin but in its destination’.

Carolyn Bunt’s prints, And when I looked up it had gone 1, and, And when I looked up it had gone 2, present the viewer with what seems to be an obscured or imagined science-fiction setting, as the pulsating neon framework of a Soviet fuelling station is surrounded by the white-washed landscape of infinity. It is intangible, an interior world. The photographs assume a performative quality as the viewer is invited into the work, ushered to complete it within the confines of their own imagination.

Selected Exhibitions: Hidden Impact, Various Locations, Bristol (2009); Limited Editions, Room, Shoreditch, London (2006); Map, The loading Bay Gallery, Brick Lane, London (2003); New Directions, Miskolc Gallery, Miskolc, Hungary (2004); Surface Noise, Jerwood Visual Arts, London (2011). Prizes include: Residencia Corazon, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2008).