Gemma Marmalade’s practice fundamentally describes the relationship between humanity and nature. Humour, pathos and contemporary sexual politics are interwoven to create photographs, films, installations and performances re-imagining historical gestures and appropriating visual material. The process of re-contextualisation creates surreal, complex narratives and visual metaphors.
Appropriating imagery from the historical archive creates a portal for altering contexts when merged with a contemporary agenda, whether making politicised statements or creating poignant visual references of shared social experience. The ‘untimely’ or retrospective, colliding with notions of the contemporary are of particular interest to the artists practice. The paradoxical suggestion of these concepts along with the questioning of authenticity and social memory generates fresh potential in the work through the very nature of its dislocation.
Images 1 to 8 are all part of the body of work, Strange Birds
Strange Birds reappropriates the archive of the 1957 discovery where during extra sensory perception trials pigeons could determine the sexuality of humans by looking at them.
Images 9 to 15 are taken from Fish Wives
Fish Wives is a reenactment of the Linosian tradition where women flagellate each other with fish to assert female dominance.
Images 16 to 23 are from the work, Seed Series, part of Green Fingered
Green Fingered explores the possibility that those of homosexual persuasion are more likely to have a visceral impact on plants.
Gemma Marmalade
Gemma Marmalade is a graduate from the MA in Photography at the London College of Communication. Having won numerous awards and acclaim, she has exhibited widely in the UK and overseas, including Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Apulia Film Commission, Bari, Italy; Museum of Gulag, Moscow; and the Photographers’ Gallery, London.
Gemma’s work features regularly in academic and visual art publications and she has an ongoing research practice contributing to international symposiums and conferences on contemporary art debate. Gemma also lectures in Photography, Video Art and Theoretical Studies at the University of Bedfordshire.