With a heavy emphasis on the handmade, Molly Pemberton’s practice explores the notion in which the escalation in digital technology composes our understanding of reality. She aims to convey the way in which we can utilise craft-based activities to emphasise tactility and materiality, for it is this, she believes, that separates the handmade from the digital.
Taking inspiration from science fiction and dystopias, its imagery, colour palettes and themes emerge throughout her practice. Typically, her work materialises as durational objects of the colour red which aim to highlight the mundanity and monotony as well as, by contrast, the fascinating and formidable extraordinariness of this digital age.
Pemberton’s recent work questions the impact of deteriorating images and information disseminated online and the transformation reproductions may cause to the meaning of originals. Every day, we consume hundreds of images thanks to the availability of the Internet. Images are obtained, distorted and appropriated before being shared and redistributed by digital technology. The result being the proliferation of unfaithful reproductions which become so familiar they begin to compromise our understanding of the long forgotten original. Pemberton’s practice demonstrates that in the over-saturation of imagery, we allow the imagery itself to eclipse and replace the real. Reality is thus mediated by images.
This series of handmade books demonstrates how a single image becomes increasingly deformed as it deviates further and further from the original. Each day presents a new page with a new drawing – a copy if the previous drawing. Chinese Whispers, as it were, but with drawings. With each iteration, the image alters marginally, perhaps undetected at the time however it often results in the final image being unrecognisable from the first.
“Every day, we consume hundreds of images thanks to the availability of the Internet. Images are obtained, distorted and appropriated before being shared and redistributed by digital technology.”