Pat Brassington
Australian photographer
born 1942 in Hobart, Tasmania
Pat Brassington is an Australia’s contemporary photo-media artists in surrealist photography and digital collage.
Her practice is deeply informed by an intersection of surrealism, feminism, and psychoanalysis, creating imagery that stands right on the edge of the familiar and the deeply unsettling.
Brassington builds her images from a massive personal archive of found imagery, everyday objects, and her own early black-and-white photographs. Rather than presenting "straight" photography, she uses digital manipulation to crop, bend, and alter these elements to explore the complex undercurrents of the human condition.
She frequently creates disjointed, dream-like narratives by isolating body parts (lips, limbs, pointed feet) or placing fetishized objects into drab, unidentifiable domestic spaces. Brassington aims to pitch her images "just off the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry."
Her work effortlessly contrasts beauty with the abject. An image might look ethereal, charming, or flower-like at a distance, only to reveal a visceral, menacing, or Freudian psychological subtext upon closer inspection.
Her signature aesthetic leans heavily on muted whites, beiges, and fleshy tones, routinely pierced by sharp, subcutaneous pinks. Brassington has famously remarked on her use of the color: "It is not my intention to feminise the image by using pink. It is nastier than that. Pink smothers."
Brassington studied printmaking and photography at the Tasmanian School of Art in the late 1970s and early 1980s, graduating with a Master of Fine Arts in 1985. She continues to live and work in Hobart.
She has received some of the country's most significant visual arts accolades:
The Bowness Photography Prize (2013)
The Redlands Konica Minolta Art Prize (2016)
The Inaugural Don Macfarlane Prize (2017)
The Australia Council Visual Arts Award
Her work is held in major state and national institution in the country, including the National Gallery of Australia (NGA), the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV), the Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW), and a dedicated room at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart.
wikipedia entry
Pat Brassington exhibitions
Museum of Australian photography's collection of Pat Brassington
National Gallery of Victoria has 10 works
National Gallery of Australia has 8 works listed online
The Art Gallery of NSW has 28 works listed
Queensland Art Gallery (QAGOMA) has 21 works listed
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