Stephen Inggs Botanical Legacies

HackelBury is pleased to present Botanical Legacies, a solo exhibition by South African artist Stephen Inggs. Inggs’ work focuses on material objects which become symbols of transience and history. His images of flowers are beautiful but belie more sombre themes around colonialism and migration. Inggs is interested in the ‘archaeology of identity’ and how ‘the emblems of cultural history and the circulation of objects’ are given new meanings.

Inggs creates his large-scale black-and-white artwork by hand, using silver gelatin emulsion on cotton rag paper to create a painterly effect giving the work a timeless quality. The soft tactile nature of the watercolour paper acts as a trompe l’oeil, blurring the boundaries between photography, drawing and printmaking. This reflects his concern with the ‘dematerialisation of the digital age’ and his need to be involved in the physical making of an image, not simply reproduce one.