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GOST 2022
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Hardback, 1st edition
- New
The photographs in Gli Isolani (The Islanders) by Alys Tomlinson, inhabit a hinterland between fiction and reality. Over a period of two years, Tomlinson documented the traditional costumes and masks worn during festivals and celebrations on the islands of the Venetian lagoon, Sicily and Sardinia. The images will be published for the first time in this new book, Gli Isolani (The Islanders), and exhibited at Hacklebury Fine Art, London from 7 September – 29 October 2022.
Working with a large format 5×4 camera, Gli Isolani draws upon the visual language of Tomlinson’s previous projects, lending the black and white photographs a veil of timelessness. At the project’s genesis, Alys researched the literature and poetry connected to the history and culture of the islands of Italy, exploring tradition and identity, ancient myths, folklore and fairy tales. Set against crumbling stone and rural fields, the images depict the elaborate and uncanny costumes and masks worn for Holy Week, and other events and festivals, often inspired by pagan ritual and beliefs. The fantastical tales and precious costumes have been passed down many generations within these communities where customs run deep. The gestures and the costumes depicted in the photographs draw on the relationship between man and the land, the sacred and the profane, and good and evil.
‘Looking into them, I see ordinary people in extraordinary habits. Pagan and religious. Masked and exposed. Collapsing time, in front of your camera. Within this present-past continuous, devils and saints, hunters and creatures take hold of my rooms. Inhabit them, tacitly. I try to listen to the tales their eyes and gestures tell, to the timbres of the light reverberating in all of these pictures.’
– Sabrina Mandanici
Signed copy.
