The curatorial and editorial project for systems, non-objective and reductive artists working in the UK

Pattern: Holding; Pattern: Ascending | Anna Fairchild

An exhibition of photographic works by Anna Fairchild - an ATELIER MELUSINE project, curated by John Stephens, 29 May – 19 June 2026

A review by John Stephens

In the spring of this year, 2026, Anna Fairchild took a much-anticipated trip to one of the world’s oldest existing Neolithic sites: Göbekli Tepe in Türkiye’s south-eastern Anatolia, close to the border with Syria. Designated a world heritage site in recognition of its cultural and historical significance, it dates back to 9500 BCE, with archaeological evidence suggesting that it remained in use until about 8000 BCE. There are the remnants of a well-organised complex of stone structures, laid out in a grid, their function the subject of ongoing archaeological debate. As a sculptor Anna was interested in the massive stone megaliths, which although not having any explicit depiction of human forms, nevertheless allude to them alongside a plethora of animal and symbolic content. But she was also interested in their existence in the context of the arid landscape of southern Türkiye, with her interest in psychogeography; place and location are equally important to her.

In the numerous conversations I’ve had with Anna over the years about the way her work reflects her profound interest in psychogeography in place and location, it’s clear that her fascination isn’t merely in the things that she sees there; structures, buildings, objects etc., but the ‘feel’ of the place – it’s her psychological and emotional experience of the place that’s important. For a fuller picture her own words explain that:

“For me, this is a cartographic approach which views mapping as a broad set of spatial practices: movement; gesture; art. I often arrive at a place through reading, association of ideas, and journeying to and from locations. This may be re-visiting places approached from a different physical direction each time to get exactly a ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ of a place from a personal perspective. That said, I do not always set out with a specific location in mind, and this is where my interest in psychogeography comes into play, particularly within urban spaces. I have termed this approach ‘Brutal Foraging’ in my recent chapter ‘Drawing Luton Narratives with Camera-less Photography’ in ‘Drawing as Placemaking’, published by Bloomsbury (2026). ‘Brutal Foraging’ is rooted in the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist Derive (1958), which I believe has great relevance today with its core political ideas and philosophy of opposition to the status quo within urban environments. This means that often, I will deliberately avoid GPS mapping (as we are more and more often ‘managed’ through every space in this way), preferring to have local conversations or use paper-based maps for directions, although being mindful that these maps also have their own hierarchical ‘heavy’ systems, of course.”

Talking about her experience of Göbekli Tepe and the way it relates to her work as an artist, she has this to say:

“In reference to Göbekli Tepe, Türkiye, in spring 2026, I took this non-GPS approach which I believe embeds a connection to the location, landscape and local knowledge within the investigation. In this case the investigation centred on how this location was related to or might provide insights and context to develop my recent work. I am interested in this ‘back to front’ way of working because it can disrupt linear and pre-conceived idea about the influence of places and structures on some of the more intuitive aspects of my work. It avoids illustrative ways of working and can reveal more about how the actual process of thinking through making and materials can create knowledge. I found that the structures at this site and its apparent function appear to be deeply rooted in viewing the sky and the great rift of the Milky Way; the terrain and structures are all interconnected. Ideas of pattern and a kind of universal symmetry started to share a context with my ongoing work.”

Two years earlier, in summer 2024, Anna Fairchild visited my partner and me in the small French town of Montmorillon in the Vienne, a rural département in the central south-west. As in Anatolia, Anna sought a connection with the place and the history of its peoples here, stretching back to Palaeolithic times. She’d wanted to visit some of the numerous dolmen and menhirs that stand solid and silent in the hot summer fields and woods. She saw other relics too; the solid, hewn granite sarcophagi that lie scattered in the 6th century Merovingian cemetery at nearby Civaux. Then there was the 11th century Romanesque architecture and fresco wall paintings of the abbey at St. Savin, also a world heritage site and one that Ellesworth Kelly was keen to visit during his stay in France in the late ’40s and early ’50s, the early years of his career. In 2025 Sally Annett, director the ATELIER MELUSINE, and also a friend of Anna’s, invited me to curate an exhibition of her photographic work for the 2026 summer programme. This resulted in the exhibition Pattern:Ascending; Pattern:Holding.

Continuum. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper

French Stone. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper

However, Türkiye remains a country that is for Anna a spiritual home. Her long relationship with it goes back to the 12 years she spent in Istanbul in the ’90s, following her graduation from art school in 1988. She has returned frequently over the years, making art that is the outcome of each visit and of her long personal association with the country and the city.

In 2016 she initiated an artistic project in Istanbul involving a small number of fellow artists and included explorations around the edges of the city on the Asian side of the Bosphorus. Istanbul has been a fast-expanding city with multinational corporations seeking land to build on. At the same time, refugees from the various conflicts in the Middle East – Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan – have been seeking to establish new lives building makeshift communities on the same edges of the city. The conflicts of emotional, political and economic interests manifested in these ‘edgelands’ was fuel to Anna’s fascination with the psychogeography of Istanbul.

Installation shot; Türkiye series of analogue photographs.

The experiences in Türkiye, in France, at home in England and elsewhere, comprise the substance of Anna’s art; it is important to understand that the process of its coming into being starts the moment she engages with whichever location attracts her attention. In Pattern:Holding, one of the two elements of this exhibition, shown in the lower gallery, the photographic work embodies time and temporality, whether of thought and contemplation or of the time taken between the taking of the photographs and their development months or even years later. But her responses are not simply photographic records. Working with analogue cameras, either a 35mm point-and-shoot Olympus Mju or an inexpensive plastic Holga medium-format camera, she has recorded her experiences on film rather than digitally.

Edgelands 1. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper

Edgelands 2. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper

For Anna, the act of taking photographs becomes the starting point of her creative process. Using photography in this way allows her to take better control and to intervene creatively in the image making. Rather than merely looking and recording, she brings chance into play, enabling the resulting photographic image to assert itself in a way that seems to declare an independence from its indexicality.(1) She values intuition, and sees the thinking process and emerging images as manifesting a kind of artistic knowledge which she may then draw upon later; an attitude that has been inspired by her reading of Michael Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge.(2)

Green Mountain. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper

Incirli Crossing. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper

A few of the photographs depict scenes and objects as they are, but the majority reflect a more experimental approach. Through multiple exposures of one frame, she may shift the camera slightly, or rotate it by 45º, 90º or 180º between shots. As a result, landscapes and the objects within them become inverted, blurred or repeated. They may also be affected by the distinctive aberrations of the camera used: skylines appear at the top and bottom, or along the sides of the image, while objects and buildings may appear upside down or be interrupted by light leaks or vignetting caused by the cheap plastic lenses used in the cameras; they become visual entities rather than immediately recognisable objects.

These images have been printed as squares or rectangles, depending on the camera format, on A3+ Ilford photographic paper. No printed image exceeds 20 centimetres in any dimension, therefore each is isolated on the printed sheet with large margins of white paper around them. Doing this invites closer scrutiny; you really need to peer at them closely to be able to pick out the various elements of Anna’s perceptual experience. While these images stand as photographic works in their own right, they may also provide the basis for development into other work in other formats.

Primarily a sculptor with a long-established practice in which she also uses an experiential approach, Anna’s sculptural work exploits the outcomes of pouring fluid material (Jesmonite plaster) onto arranged or constructed fixed, flat surfaces. The resulting forms incorporate planned structures as well as amorphous elements, and there’s a balance between an intuitive approach and a rational decision-making one, with the emergent works not entirely anticipated. Despite the element of chance, the forms relate to places and things that she has seen or experienced.

While the photographs in the lower gallery invite close scrutiny, the work in the upper gallery, with its divergent scale, asserts an even more powerful visual presence. The creative processes evident in the lower gallery are key to the photographic work in the second element of the exhibition, Pattern: Ascending, as is an understanding of the essence of Anna’s recent sculptural work, which is, as already mentioned, driven by an abiding interest in psychogeography and in environments both organic and urban. This work has been made in response not to ancient sites but rather to examples of brutalist post-war architecture found around her home town of Hitchin in Hertfordshire. Stevenage, Luton, Letchworth, Welwyn, all satellite towns in the area just north of London, have been subject to extensive town planning projects and development, and they offer Anna rich readings of utopian visions and dystopian futures. Despite the time difference of thousands of years between the sites of her interest, there are parallels between concrete and stone, of materiality and proportion.

Pattern: Ascending includes three large black and white photographic works, which do not emanate directly from the camera; instead, they are constructed images using both digital and analogue photographic processes. Each is a composite of numerous sheets of Ilford Pearl photographic paper, 11 inches by 14 inches (28 x 35.5 cm) machine-stitched together to make a coherent whole. Each component sheet is the product of a complex process involving making analogue photographs of elements of her sculptural moulds which are then digitised. Along with images appropriated from websites showing samples of building aggregates, she uses a digital collaging technique to create new images which are then printed on photocopy paper. These are then in turn used as paper negatives to contact-print and develop in a photographic darkroom onto the photographic paper. These individual sheets are then machine-stitched together using cross stitch. The constructed results might in fact be seen as large photographic hangings rather than just photographs. And hanging just off the wall, with a few millimetres of space between them and the wall, they encourage engagement with them as tangible physical presences; the slight curl of the photographic paper with its reflective satin surface and the very visible machined cross-stitch that holds them together as a grid-like structure, suggest a shallow relief rather than a flat photographic surface. They appear as both object and image.

What’s notable about all three works is their structure as images; they’re symmetrically organised within a grid of the component photographic sheets. And in the case of the specific photographic works: Ascend, Descent and Hold, Anna had this to say about the rationale for how she wanted to organise the elements within them:

When I am considering how the elements are organised, or often ‘organise themselves’ within the work, I tend to work quite intuitively, so that the viewer is drawn into the spaces/structures. I see this as very much aligned with how I connect with sites in the broadest sense because for me this is the whole space, not simply one structure or aspect of it. This is something which is often quite hard to do and this is where the analogue photography and patterns created come into the developing work. For example, rather than trace an indexical image in one shot, I often disrupt this by rotating the camera once, twice or even four times. Again, this relates to the broader ideas of mapping I mentioned earlier; looking cartographically at space, rather than in a fixed idea of top bottom left, right etc., more like a four-point compass approach. The results of these might then suggest pattern or symmetry within the large black and white works.

All three of the large works hold strong architectural references reminiscent of the Brutalist architecture that has interested Anna for some time. The aptly titled Ascend, a composite of 36 printed sheets in a portrait orientation, spatially suggests an architectural structure with converging (perspective) lines ascending into the centre of what suggests a lofty vault. In terms of its flat pattern, there’s a dynamic rhythm of lines zigzagging and bursting towards the edges; a distinct suggesting of early British Modernist architecture that you might see in the cinema or public architecture of new towns.

Gold Mountain Digital print on Ilford photographic paper.

Urban Dream. Digital print on Ilford photographic paper.

Ascend (installation shot). 36 hand-printed black and white photograms, stitched. Printed on Ilford Pearl paper.1.68m x 2.13m

Descent, a larger image configured with 63 separate sheets on the other hand has a landscape orientation. Rather than architecture it suggests engineering structures, possibly bridges set in a somewhat dystopian landscape. Its general symmetrical arrangement is broken by the appearance of diagonal areas of harsh light; its title too is apt in that your eye level is somewhere aloft and you appear to be swooping down into some urban environment.

Descent (Installation shot) 63 hand printed black and white photograms, stitched. Printed on Ilford Pearl paper. 3.20m x 1.95m

Descent (Detail) 63 hand-printed black and white photograms, stitched. Printed on Ilford Pearl paper.

The physicality of the pieces is particularly emphasised in the smaller Hold, a slender vertical piece made up of 16 individual sheets in two columns, stitched together. It hangs from close to the ceiling and runs out onto the floor, thereby drawing awareness to its ‘objectness’. The image is less spatial and, in its blurred quality, more abstract, less suggestive of architecture, softer but nevertheless still retaining the grandeur of the other two pieces.

Hold (Installation shot). 16 hand printed black and white photograms, stitched. Printed on Ilford Pearl paper. 0.56m x 2.84m

In the same room, on the opposite wall, in stark contrast of scale, are six postcard-sized images printed on brushed aluminium. They’re small but very intense, and have a quality similar to 19th century tin-type photographs, where the underlying metal reflects the light, contrasting sharply with the deposits of ink which sit in very slight relief on the surface. Like the photographs in the lower gallery, they too invite very close scrutiny. There are two sets of three, each relating to different landscape projects.

The first is the Iceland Series, made as a submission to an international postcard project commissioned by the Icelandic government. Artists from around the world were invited to submit works of art on postcards. The results were exhibited in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland, and later at the Icelandic embassies in Copenhagen, Denmark and London.

Close scrutiny reveals suggestions of wide, arid, stony landscapes rendered largely in black and white but with very subtle nuances of colour. Set in these landscapes are strange geological forms and structures, imbuing the images with a distinct Icelandic feel.

The Türkiye Series is more recent and comes from the recent Göbekli Tepe visit, exhibited here for the first time. These too are ‘landscapes’ with distant skylines created from the analogue photographs taken in Türkiye, also containing geological/sculptural elements.

These two sets, printed professionally, were nevertheless made in a similar way to the larger works; digital collaging of photographic elements that were then made into photographic negatives.

Iceland series (3 works) Postcard series comprising analogue film and digital photographic collages, printed directly onto brushed aluminium, 14.8 x 10.5cm

Türkiye series (3 works). Postcard series comprising analogue film & digital photographic collage, direct printed on brushed aluminium, 14.8 x 10.5cm

What struck me at my first meeting with Anna, some 16 years ago, was the way in which her work consisted of rich deposits not only of materials, workings and markings but of ideas, thoughts and processes. It’s been an abiding feature of her work and continues to manifest rich layerings. The term palimpsest seemed to me to be an apt way of describing it. This is very much a quality of the current exhibition; it encourages the viewer to negotiate the works and the process of their making in a way which evokes and reveals Anna’s approach to the places and locations that inspire their making; namely; approaching “… from a different physical direction each time to get exactly a ‘feel’ or ‘sense’ of a place from a personal perspective…” and an “…investigation centred on how (this) location was related to or might provide insights and context to develop her (my) recent work.”

This was a quite unique and thought-provoking exhibition. It represented not just a high degree of originality, with a repository of artistic thinking and making relating to ideas about space and location, but it also seemed to present us with a range of images that challenge the conventional concept of photography. For me, Anna’s photographic work asserts a very loose relationship to its indexicality. In doing so, she seems to invoke Rosalind Krauss in establishing a new kind of photography in an expanded field,(3) which she exploits with profound artistic intelligence to articulate a complex layering of artistic ideas. Consisting entirely of two-dimensional works, this exhibition can perhaps be seen as a counterpoint to Anna’s earlier exhibition in March this year, when she created ‘Desire Line’ a sculptural installation of equal complexity, for Sunday Salon 39 at Saturation Point, Acme Studios, The Propellor Factory, Deptford, London. Like that show, this one embodies strata of visual richness, along with a strong physicality, to provide a very powerful visual manifestation of Anna’s creative mind and artistic intellect.

Anna Fairchild is a UK-based artist and researcher working with sculpture, photography and audio-visual work. She has exhibited and curated in the UK, Turkey and Europe.

Anna graduated from Kingston University in 1988 with a degree In Fine Art with first class honours. In 1990 she moved to Istanbul to live and work as an artist and teacher. Returning to the UK in 2001, she established a permanent studio, and in 2012 completed a master’s degree in research in fine art at the University of Bedfordshire. In 2019 she was awarded a professional doctorate in fine art from The University of East London for her body of practice-led research: The Fluid and the Fixed; Materiality and Place.

Over the last 15 years or so her practice has benefited from her involvement in postgraduate and doctoral study, which have allowed her to draw extensively on the emerging methodologies of practice-led research, methodologies to which she herself has made a significant contribution. For Anna, they rest on a belief in the role of intuition and the significance of tacit knowledge, linked with experimenting with and testing materials and processes. These processes have involved working primarily in three dimensions but also in two dimensions, such as drawing, photography and contemporary cartography.

Footnotes

1. ( See Rosalind Krauss; Notes on the Index; in ‘The Originality of the Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths’).

“In the category of the index, we would place physical traces (like footprints), medical symptoms, or the actual referents of the shifters. Cast shadows could also serve as the indexical signs of objects…” Photography might be deemed to belong in such a category too in as much as the photographic image is a kind of shadow made by the projection of light through a lens that is then fixed chemically. It encourages the notion of a kind of truth because the (analogue) photographic image is immutable. While Anna’s work derives from analogue photographs, the way she constructs her images seems to want to shake off this relationship to photographic truth (the index).

2. I’m referring here Michael Polanyi’s The Tacit Dimension (University of Chicago Press) and the notion that artists can user their intuition and sensibility to pursue ideas through artistic investigation and, in its realisation, a work of art can embody a form of knowledge.

3. I’m invoking here the idea that Rosalind Krauss, in Sculpture in the expanded field in The Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths, establishes in which she redefines contemporary sculptural practices to include a much wider range than those of traditional sculpture.