Tip Toe: Elizabeth McAlpine, Laura Bartlett Gallery

Elizabeth McAlpine’s new works at the Laura Bartlett art gallery use the craft of photography to create a physical impression of the visual image

The Artist

The British artist Elizabeth McAlpine is interested in the space between things, those fleeting experiences that go unnoticed and unremembered. She finds in them the tools with which to make the everyday a little bit more poetic. McAlpine is also interested in photographic process and the steps and stages traversed in order to make a photographic image. 

The Exhibition

In Tiptoe McAlpine makes rubbings of paving concrete which are then made into photographic objects. Retaining a 1:1 scale, the rubbing is painted with photographic emulsion and exposed to light – essentially making it into a photograph. But it is a photograph of a physical, sensual impression rather than a traditional visual image. It is a case of seeing through the memory of touch. The pavement is presented as an echo, a memory of our own experience of its surface - falling down, scraping our hands as children, or summer days spent without shoes. There is a subtlety and a delicacy to this work that is both too beautiful and fleeting to be missed.