Dolores de Sade
Primarily focused on landscape, Dolores de Sade’s work is concerned with memory, nostalgia, myth and narrative. In the context of modern industrialisation she questions what landscape means to us today and how it is distilled through popular media and cultural artifacts.
This body of work explores the human connection to landscape, and the views and objects that are held as examples of such. Romantic landscapes are deconstructed as authoritative models of beauty and sublimity. Yet, these are uncanny visions of low life elevated as high art. Dolores de Sade’s Arcadian views are not set in the classical past; they represent prosaic modern subjects: motorway and A-road verges, public parks, front gardens and windowsills, concrete edifices and steel totems.
Made during a period of intensified Nationalism and immigration debates, this work is coloured by thoughts of who the land belongs to, what we think of as ‘the land’, the notion of borders and which part of the land is owned by whom. Why is it important who belongs to the huge areas of wasteland in the suburbs or the tiny cracks in the concrete centres that are seemingly unloved and unowned around every city and town? Do we belong to this land or does this land belong to us? How do we show our connection to or appreciation of this land - flags waving claim to vast tracts of wilderness, or social media rants over walls? Dusty book illustrations of arcadian views of the past or elderly trees and rocks preserved in miniature?
This work reflects on those thoughts, looking at landscape as a series of temporary borders. Landscapes with borders to be lived in or outside of, stopped at, observed, fetishized, commodified, preserved, worshipped, meditated on and appreciated for all their barrenness and seeming lack of possible ownership.
For more information about the artist, please visit her website.