Braine’s primary impulse is in exploring how a photograph can be transformed into an object. Often cutting, drawing with ink, punching holes or overlaying the negatives with adhesive labels, she violates the pristine surface of the photograph forcing the viewer to look towards the texture of the photographic paper and opens up a new understanding of the photographic process and image making. Through her methodology of blocking, erasing and obscuring parts of the image she unsettles our understanding of what is familiar. She teases us with recognisable symbols and visual references that appear to provide us with a certainty of what we are looking at. But we are left to ask; is this a landscape? ls this a photograph? The series The Hunt looks back at Paolo Uccello’s The Hunt in the Forest. The deep black holes create a vigorous dance of a fox and hounds moving across the image. As we peer at the grey and black we begin to fill in the blanks, instilling the black holes with our memories of the countryside.
Aliki Braine is a photographic artist and a lecturer in History of Art at the National Gallery in London. Her work is held in numerous public and private collections, has been the winner of several awards – most recently the Matt Roberts Salon Art Prize – and has been featured in publications including HotShoe and Photoworks. She is represented by Troika Editions and lives and works in London.