‘Our eyes are only glass windows; we see with our imagination.’ – William Gilpin, 1792.

Anne Brodie went to the Antarctic. Such a simple statement for such an epic journey. Yet Brodie’s work is all about the understated, the humble, the just enough, and these photographs, taken at the Antarctic, are no exception. Brodie says she felt overwhelmed by the Antarctic, that it was too much and here we see her response. By covering up the windows at the base camp with tracing paper and taking photographs through this barrier the artist reveals little of the landscape beyond — its excesses are healed over. However, Brodie could not leave this scab alone, returning to the site of the trauma as Freud would have it, scratching and picking at the surface of the paper with the end of a compass so that we are left with the raw wounds of her work. Faced with such vastness and subsumed by the environment, Brodie makes a negative mark, an abstraction. The photograph perpetuates the process, allowing the image to be taken away from its reality and relocated. She leaves us with a partial view or residue: the site of the activity is denied to us, and whilst two of the images seem to refer to the very landscape that is being held back, the others are more akin to images of self-harm in a medical journal.

Brodie spent eleven weeks working amongst the community of scientists at Rothera, subverting scientific rationalism by subjectively experimenting with the detritus at the base to see what she could make with it. Brodie’s fascination with science underpins her work. In Where Did this Air Come from?, air-filled plastic bags, the type used as protective packaging, have been hung up, each one labelled with a word from the title sentence. The bags, rearranged in this way, take on a quasi-scientific authority whilst the wording hints at unease or disquiet about what is actually at stake. Brodie questions what matters through the repositioning of matter. Filtering out the environment by literally focusing on the plastic packaging bags, Brodie challenges us to see that despite their apparent transparency, things are not what they seem.

The alchemical possibility of being able to turn something dull and undervalued into something shiny and significant seems to drive forward Brodie’s diverse practice, and photography plays an important role. Brodie utilizes photography’s ability to transform by playing with scale and cropping in a theatrical way until we are no longer sure of the boundaries of the world in which she is operating. Photography can democratize the image, reconciling the unfairness of life by making the unloved things beautiful. Through the transformation of her base materials Brodie allows us to see what the world could be if we let it.