Pat Brassington's Foreboding

Pat Brassington’s expert manipulation of the image-making process is particularly adept in her 2008 pigment print Forget your perfect offerings. The work, which conjures enthralling imagery that alternates between sinister and sweet, draws from a surrealist influence, the feminine construction and a psychoanalytical curiosity (Marsh 2007, 1). Brassington plays on the viewers humanity and toys with notions of childhood repression and memory (Rose 2014, 16). The deliberate delicacy of Brassington’s distortion creates a suspenseful glimpse into an enigmatic narrative.

Foreboding tension saturates the photograph. The taut fabric stretched brazenly across and embedded into the exaggerated agape mouth creates a tonal duality between homely and horrifying. The vivid pink smothers the grainy sepia image, intensifying the claustrophobic atmosphere caused by the white borders consumption of the images’ cropped frame. The soft

The distorted image of a pillow, photographed for the artists 1994 series In My Mother’s House, is used as the basis for the gags material (n.a 2012, 5). Knowledge of the gags origin in Brassington’s mothers home hints at connections to both the domestic and childhood within this work. The pillows pattern, which reappears throughout Brassington’s extensive oeuvre, has been suggested by Engberg to add a “feminine monstrosity to the muted subject - mostly a child.” (Pat Brassington: À Rebours 2012). The feminine qualities are implied through the use of a soft blooming floral pattern onto a mundane household object. The pillow fabrics evocative references to the mother, the household, and asphyxiation all suggest that the subject is a child being smothered within the home. This idea has been further insinuated by Brassington who stated, in conversation with Alasdair Foster, that her work has been partially influenced by, “…aspects of my life as a child and as a mother.” (Foster 2007,