Photo Oxford Festival 2023

Meakin + Parsons x Hannah Payne hosted Into the Woods,  a solo exhibition by Aliki Braine, curated by Rodrigo Orrantia, from 14 April – 6 May.

Part of Photo Oxford Festival 2023, the exhibition celebrated the festival’s theme ‘‘The Hidden Power of The Archive’, considering the portrayal of woods throughout art history, from the depiction of forests in historical painting as a space for battle or confrontation, to a space for memory, and its connectionsentation of landscape in contemporary photography today.

Into The Woods draws upon Braine’s studies of both fine art, and western history of art, especially of 17th Century landscape painting, and her explorations of mechanical processes in photography that act as conversation between the past and present. The exhibition took people on a journey from the gallery to the museum, looking specifically at the connection with Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt, a painting in the permanent collection at the Ashmolean, Oxford, that has inspired the artist’s oeuvre. 

“Uccello’s trees seem just as regimented and equally theatrical, and despite the hunts and battles in progress among them, they provide a smoothly organised and calm backdrop, whereas by contrast the jagged edges of Aliki Braine’s renditions have a more dangerous and unsettling feel. Impolite and ill-mannered indeed, she breaks the spell of the enchanted forest, yet perversely undermines a destructive intent by casting her own spell to conjure up an equally bewitching woodland tale.”

John Hilliard (b. 1945), Artist. Excerpt from exhibition text, Disenchanted Forests, January 2023

“ I am interested in exploring the photograph as a physical object. I want to engage the viewers of my images in the fact that these images are not just pictures, they are also physical, three-dimensional objects with a front and a back and sides. I'm also interested in landscape as a subject for my work. And lastly, my work wants to highlight the debt that photography owes to the history of Western European images, and I'm very keen that my work should conduct an informal conversation between itself and the past. One of the ways to think about my work is to say that I make photographs rather than just take photographs.”