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The Photographers’ Gallery
Portfolio Room,
12 July – 7 September 1991 |
Lala Meredith-Vula’s compelling black and white photographs
focus on the extraordinary architectural and sculptural forms of haystacks
in Yugoslavia. The haystacks are built around precarious wooden frames,
and as the hay is gradually removed for use, they take another life,
reshaped into haunting and strangely anthropomorphic structures. In
order to highlight these qualities Meredith-Vula’s approach
is straightforward yet dramatic. Using a uniformly frontal viewpoint
with a low camera angle, she has emphasised outline while disguising
the haystacks’ true scale. In reality they vary in size, but
in these photographs they invariably loom large and tower-like, dominating
idyllic rural settings glimpsed only in the background. Meredith-Vula’s
fascination with the seemingly endless variety of haystack forms,
with their combinations of disfigured clumps of hay and fragile wooden
poles, has led her to compile what amounts to a bizarre typology –
one that brings to mind the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Like their
gas tanks and blast furnaces Meredith-Vula’s haystacks are ‘anonymous
sculptures’ and she documents them like works of art. But, they
are also functional elements of a seasonal landscape, destined to
disintegrate and disappear, and these photographs record a temporary
beauty that seems to encapsulate the severe but rich character of
a traditional way of life. Lala Meredith-Vula was born in Sarajevo
in 1966, moving to England in 1970. She studied art at Trent Nottingham
University and at Goldsmiths’ College in London where she graduated
with a degree in 1988. This work was completed between 1988 and ’90
with the aid of a Yugoslavian Government Scholarship. This is the
artist’s first solo exhibition in London.
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