Dolores de Sade

ARTIST STATEMENT

Dolores de Sade’s work is primarily focused on the landscape, but concerned with human intervention and the Anthropocene. Dolores questions what landscape means to us today, exploring our experience of such as observers and colonisers. Influenced by eighteenth and nineteenth-century book and periodical illustrations, she is interested in ways that information is given the authority of knowledge and how knowledge is transposed through memory, nostalgia and archetype.

In her series of exquisitely detailed etchings, the twisting, rooted growths she depicts are bound and tethered by structures that push up and pull down, that protect and constrict.

de Sade also collects botanical specimens – in this case mainly broken branches and driftwood. In a group of dioramas, she recombines these gathered elements with other found objects into imagined settings and hybrid landscapes that contain new meanings and insights.

BIOGRAPHY

Dolores de Sade is from London and now lives in Southern Thailand. Dolores studied MA Fine Art and Printmaking at the Royal College of Art and holds a PhD in History from the University of York, UK. She has work held in the royal collection in both UK and Thailand, as well as several major institutions, including the British Government Collection, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the British Library and the Royal Shakespeare Company. In 2011 she was the recipient of the Birgit Skiöld Memorial Trust Award and the Royal Academy’s British Institution Award. She was Chair of East London Printmakers for several years and is a fellow of The Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers.