Polly Tootal: #90719, Window Pylon Foliage

Edition of 10

50x 40cm

Giclée print on Hahnemühle Pearl paper, 2021.

The liminal zones of East London are constantly changing and appropriated, and as such they show clearly how contemporary geopolitics and economic factors shape the environment. The landscape here is dominated by boundaries and borders, and kept under constant surveillance, it exists on the fringes of what we interpret as place, where alienation and control rule. These images investigate the nature of the ‘periphery’, deliberately using non-specific locations to conjure unsettling anxieties and hint at both our fragile contemporary condition and dystopian possible future.

Polly Tootal’s photography has emerged out of a continual exploration of the possibilities of space between a variety of extremes; theatre/reality, the contemporary world mirroring history, transience/ permanence, the bizarre in the banal. Concerned with how contemporary geopolitics restrict and displace different societal groups due to poverty and injustice - her work focuses on liminal zones, the outskirts of cities where urban and infrastructure meet, highlighting the chaos and control that power forces upon populations and the environment.