GHOSTSCAPES
AVA Gallery Cape Town
15 October - 20 November 2020
While exploring the concept of belonging, Philippa Allen began by looking at the indigenous landscapes that surround her. Working with familiar local scenes, Allen tried to imagine the view untouched by human hands before any settlements existed. Working both with historical and current reference photographs, Allen draws out the original landscapes from underneath the existing built environment. Then, by either layering more chalk on top of the image or removing charcoal from the surface, Allen creates a ghostly blueprint of the city over the landscape.
By playing with, adding to, and removing from these concrete representations I am making the built environment less permanent and powerful, turning it into something more ephemeral and fleeting. I want the marks over the landscape to seem like a latticework, a pattern which in some cases covers up so much space that it threatens to choke the ground below it.
- Philippa Allen
Allen describes charcoal as a strong medium, steadfast and clear, which, much like the nature around us, is multidimensional and enduring. For Allen, rocks and plants always surpass human development. Despite the chokehold of the built environment, nature survives.
The lines used to draw the buildings are one-dimensional and changeable. The natural landscape was here long before any structures were built on it and it will continue to remain the same as buildings and people come and go. The drawings are a palimpsest of these landscapes, the scene reused and altered but still showing traces of its earlier form, the structures effacing the natural setting.