Flowers Gallery in London opens exhibition of works by Scarlett Hooft Graafland

LONDON.- Scarlett Hooft Graafland’s surreal, dream-like photographs provide
the lasting record of her carefully choreographed, site-specific sculptural
interventions and performances in some of the most isolated corners of the earth.
The exhibition Discovery draws together more than a decade of exploration, from the
salt desert of Bolivia to the desolate Canadian Arctic, the island of Madagascar and
the remote shores of Vanuatu, where her interactions reflect an exchange between
the boundless realm of nature and the relative confines of culture.
This is her first solo exhibition with Flowers Gallery.

Hooft Graafland’s images emphasize the ‘natural strangeness’ of the landscape
with uncanny juxtapositions of everyday objects and materials. Local customs and
stories are interwoven throughout her work, re-interpreting and re-imagining
mythologies related to the landscape. Rich, earthy pools of spices gather within
blinding white salt flats in Carpet; balloon-clad figures stand against striking azure
skies in Burka Balloons and Salt Steps; and bare, surrealistically detached legs
wrap playfully around a giant, spiked desert cactus in Discovery.

Hooft Graafland’s sculptural arrangements exist only briefly, or for the duration of
the photograph, anchoring each image to the time and place of its execution and
dispersing back into the environment without trace. Marked by an economy of
means, (each photograph is produced with only a handful of local materials) her
images, with their otherworldly beauty and gentle humour, nonetheless evoke
broad global topics touching on cultural and environmental issues. In Turtle, a nude
female figure crouches beneath the shield of a turtle on the island of Madagascar,
its protective arc mirroring the rhythmic undulations of the volcanic backdrop and
accentuating the fragile nature of survival on the planet. In the pastoral desert
scene of Still Life with Camel photographed in the United Arab Emirates, two men
and a camel swathed in candy-coloured pink cloth are surrounded by tyre tracks
and scattered debris. The same pink cloth binds a solitary figure seeking refuge
within a Swedish forest in Touching Base, directing attention towards contemporary
global issues of displacement.

Philosopher Maarten Doorman has described her working process as an attempt
to seek “maximum authenticity” in a world where “everything is forever being
photographed”. He says: “Hooft Graafland, with her analogue camera and
anthropological patience, reclaims landscapes and fleeting civilizations from an
indifferent visual culture.” Central to this process is a sense of exchange and
collaboration; Hooft Graafland often works with local assistants, inviting mutual
trust and cooperation with unknown people who share local knowledge, participate
in the process of production, or perform for the camera.

One of the most recent projects to be included in this exhibition involved a journey
to the South Pacific Ocean nation of Vanuatu and the South American city of Lima,
following a path set by 18th Century British explorer Captain James Cook and his
progeny. In Resolution, the narrative shifts fluidly between past and present as a
descendent of the chief of the tribe that welcomed Captain Cook onto Malekula
Island centuries ago holds a yellow replica of Cook’s ship the HMS Resolution.