"I aim to pitch my images just off the verge of normality, into those dense patches where the commonplace goes awry."
Pat Brassington is one of Australia’s most significant and influential artists. With a career spanning four decades, Brassington has become well known for her incisive ability to infuse the familiar with the fantastic. Her practice is informed by an interest in surrealism, feminism and psychoanalysis.
Seemingly innocent, her enigmatic photomontages open up like a flower, gorgeous and suggestive, then morph into a psychological Rorschach. In her work the endless possibilities of our complex inner states - narratives of sex, memory and identity - run quietly rampant.
Her images are at once charming and menacing. They rouse a sense of disquiet as they subtly and humorously scratch at the underbelly of the human condition. In her unique way, Brassington is able to present haunting, dream-like images which lead the viewer to the edges of the imagination.
Pat has won the prestigious Australia Council Award for Visual Arts, inaugural Don Macfarlane Prize and the Bowness Photography Prize. In 2012, Brassington was honoured with a major nationally touring survey of her work, A Rebours, by the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art .
Pat Brassington’s work is held in all national, state and many regional institutions in Australia, as well as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart; Buxton Contemporary, Melbourne; Artbank, Sydney; Heide Museum of Modern Art, Melbourne, Ian Potter Museum of Art, Melbourne, and the Cologne Museum of Contemporary Art, Germany.