Inevitably, after finishing the series of twelve small portraits, each sold for four pounds, it felt only natural to conclude that series of paintings with a triptych that essentially posed the question… who was the person originally receiving the four pounds?
For this triptych, I worked with three images from the photographic archive of Julius Popper, the most prolific and infamous murderer of Patagonian indigenous people, who in 1886 documented one of his expeditions through Tierra del Fuego with photographs. From this archive of over thirty images, I selected three in which he appears alongside the bodies of murdered indigenous individuals. To compose my painting, I extended the sky beyond the original framing of the archival photographs. In doing so, I sought to explore the concept of landscape from a non-traditional perspective: landscape as a silent witness to human events — hence the title “The Sky as Witness.”
Gallery
