EXHIBITION
HANNAH COLLINS
Camden Arts Centre, NW3
IN THE London art scene of the late Eighties and Nineties, Hannah Collins’s photographs were everywhere. She showed at key contemporary art venues such as Matt’s Gallery, the ICA and the Chisenhale and was shortlisted for the Turner Prize in 1993.
Born in London in 1956, she lived in Barcelona before a recent return and hasn’t been shown widely here for some years; this exhibition is something of a homecoming.
The Eighties works are vast and pinned to the wall, unframed. They’re architectural, with everything on a human scale — you feel you could walk into The Violin Player (1988) and dance on the mattresses she stands on. The mattresses, like the big speakers in Family (1988), also evoke the units of minimalist sculpture, but thrust into the shabby, unregenerated world of Eighties East London. Two recent projects reflect Collins’s subsequent wanderlust. Richly poetic photographs capture the extraordinary recycled junk sculptures made by the AfricanAmerican artist Noah Purifoy in the Mojave desert in California.
Collins’s journey into the Amazon with the Cofan and Inga peoples prompted The Fertile Forest (201315), 100 photographs of plants. Beautiful and enigmatic to us, they’re of medicinal and spiritual value to the tribes, vital to their existence and culture — looking at them is like trying to interpret a beguiling foreign language.
A huge, unconnected black and white photo, The Road to Auschwitz, seems shoehorned in next to them, out of context with the plants’ Amazonian heat. But otherwise, the show is a powerful reintroduction to a quietly important artist.