Layla Curtis

14th March 2008 – 3rd May 2008

Ormeau Baths Gallery is pleased to show recent work by Layla Curtis. The UK based artist explores in her installations, drawings, prints and collaged maps ways in which we perceive, navigate and consume space. By doing so, we define territories and determine places. Producing and using maps we create a sense of be/longing, develop identities and express collective affiliations and values.  Beyond abstractly displaying topographical understanding and political, historical and cultural facts, maps serve first and foremost as means of control and power.

The majority of work in this exhibition is related to a trip to Antartica the artist undertook in 2005. In tension to the direct and sensational(ised) ways in which the natural worlds is often brought to viewers through documentaries and glossy photography, Curtis searches for other means to communicate her own embodied experience of this challenging journey / voyage and amazing place by juxtaposing the view of the dangerous ocean and expansive landscape with reminders of the confined and protective space of the ship.

In Polar Wandering the movements of the artist from leaving her London home, all the way to Antarctica and back have been tracked and recorded using GPS and made into an interactive website and select prints.

In her collaged maps Curtis uses the standard categories and abstract language of cartography to wittily generate enlightening frictions between recognisable landscape features and real places on the one hand and cultural allusions, psycho-geographic associations and political comment on the other.

Layla Curtis’ imaginative work challenges the ways in which we picture and make meaning of our surrounding world.

The work was originally commissioned by Locus+, Public Art Agency in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, for Walsall Museum and Art Gallery. We are grateful to both organisations for their support in bringing this Layla Curtis’ exhibition to Belfast.