‘Retreat quickly across difficult ground’ presents a body of work by Natalie Trofimiuk. This series of drawings discuss the destruction of the image, the interaction of memory and consciousness, and historical documentation.
Using photographs of the Second World War, Trofimiuk uses multiple processes of distortion and degradation to create a complex draft where the subject matter becomes unrecognisable.
Motivated toward a necessity for visual ruin Trofimiuk’s drawings bond to an increasingly convoluted understanding of historical record provided by contemporary observation. It is in this process that a transformation occurs from trauma to oblivion: where figurative elements, faces and people become immaterial and absent via a process of time. A spectral mantel points to a past of individuals.
Sitting alongside this work is a group of paintings, developed from incidental studio detritus. Such common objects exist as an impression of an internal psychic realm. A psychosomatic relationship develops between the two materials used.