Kadie Salmon is a visual artist based in London, UK. She graduated with an MFA from Edinburgh College of Art in 2009. Her practice utilises a variety of media, but she often uses photography at some stage in the creation of her work. Frequently she draws on notions of romance and eroticism, both historical and contemporary as a key concept of her work.
Kadie Salmon uses photography and sculpture to explore the nature of story telling and image making. Referencing historical and contemporary depictions of romanticism such as that found in cinema, novels, folklore and art she constructs enigmatic narratives that provoke sensations of idealism, desire and personal fantasy.
Folded or scrunched paper boulders sit balancing next to human-scaled, architectural models; sculptures act as essential characters to the intimate scenarios depicted in her hand-painted, tableaux photographs. Walking through her fragile, paper landscapes the viewer unravels a narrative that acts a little like the still from a film or the middle of a book; offering no beginning or end.
Using a combination of digital imagery and traditional post-production techniques, Kadie Salmon creates large scale photographs and sculptures that explore notions of image manipulation, story telling and romantic landscapes. With an interest in the history of post-production and applied surfaces and its vital role in contemporary imagery and social media, Salmon often returns to traditional methods of manipulation. Using Victorian hand-tinting to physically add/remove colour or by forcing the image into a sculptural form, the ‘hand of the maker’ is ever-present in her work.
Drawing on the stories, histories, architecture and landscapes belonging to various countries and cultures, Salmon constructs narratives that explore the role of romanticism in art. These narratives are often the result of a performative process, through which the artist attempts to experience in person these romanticised scenarios from the past. However in doing so and placing them within a contemporary context their original language and interpretation is often lost and instead replaced with notions of idealism, desire and personal fantasy. Kadie has recently completed a year long residency at the Florence Trust and will be exhibiting at New Art Projects, London 31st Aug – Sat 28th Oct 2017.
In 2016 Kadie received funding from The Henry Moore Foundation for the touring project Strange Loop as part of artist collective Captain Lightfoot. Recent exhibitions include Strange Loop, Babel Gallery, Norway and Gallery EX14, Dresden, Germany.
