N E W E X H I B I T I O N
This exhibition will include the new series geometria as well as unnatural histories and the covid posies. The exhibits in different ways respond to ideas from geometry, botany, and zoology.
This exhibition is part of the Oxford Science + Ideas Festival 2024
“ A refined and visionary photographer, Paul Kilsby transcends the confines of different epochs in his exploration of our common cultural past. Graced by the magic of his perfect technique, these highly original photographs fuse their sources to yield new hybrid images which sustain our fascination by their visual logic.”
Paul Kilsby is an artist, writer and lecturer specialising in fine art photography. After completing a PhD at the Royal College of Art he continued working there for many years as a tutor; he is currently a senior lecturer in Fine Art at Oxford Brookes University and a tutor at Abingdon & Witney College. He has work in public and private collections in France, America, Russia, Italy and the UK; both his photography and his writing have featured in magazines, journals and books internationally and he has exhibited extensively throughout the UK (including solo exhibitions at Modern Art Oxford, the University of Oxford, Oxford Brookes, The North Wall Gallery, Oxford, the University of Newcastle on Tyne, the Royal College of Art, and Hooper’s Gallery, London) as well as in France, Russia, Spain, Bulgaria and Turkey. In 2023 he organised a symposium at Oxford Brookes exploring the influence of AI in current fine art, music and fashion.
As the writer James Attlee has observed of Kilsby’s photographs, 'nothing is necessarily what it seems'. For example, the photographs of nocturnal encounters between predators and their prey in the series unnatural histories are, in fact, staged tableaux using taxidermy specimens, gentle parodies of the hypervisual natural history documentaries we see on our television screens which always require Nature to be seen at her very most spectacular. Similarly, the flowers in the series flora nova are in fact fabrications, each stem bearing blooms of different species as impossible hybrids, a reference to genetic modification as Nature is ‘improved’ upon by Culture. In a recent series, geometria, Kilsby explores the ways in which beliefs in the fundamental and stable structure of the universe as essentially mathematical has, perhaps, yielded to fresh uncertainties. In this series, objects linked to Plato’s celebrated solids become the precarious locus for scenarios in which vulnerability and jeopardy seem to undermine stasis - oblique allusions to the Anthropocene, perhaps. Throughout all the photographs, facilitated by various trompe l’œil strategies, there is also a continued fascination in this oscillation of object/image status : the bonsai trees in the series bonsai, are, after all, real trees but also images of trees; a taxidermy bird is both a real bird and an image of a bird; Culture masquerades as Nature. Nothing here is quite what it first seems.
The two photographs below are recreations of paintings by Carel Fabritius and Jacopo de’ Barbari. They exemplify Kilsby’s fascination with art history, particularly the Renaissance and Baroque periods. The homage to Fabritius’ famous painting was described by the writer Donna Tartt as ‘very beautiful’.
the goldfinch (after fabritius)
the sparrow hawk (after jacopo de’ barbari)
