Figuration & Negation 2013 | Fried Contemporary Gallery Pretoria

Artists have throughout the centuries chosen either to represent the world as it is or represent it through observed perceptions through a negotiated view of society.

Carla Crafford‘s digital photographic prints on wood criticize pioneering landscape painters who negate who owns the land by portraying the landscape as unrealistically empty.

Her South African landscapes from Etosha Pan and Buffelsbaai aim to portray a land that does not belong to anyone. Her Artist Book: Floor of the Land, consisting of hand printed 53 pages, hand bound and annotated with South African Silk, looks at the landscape from a different point of view.

We as viewers, look down at our own human interference of the land and how we have negatively changed it. In essence we leave behind our figuration.