Lesson 56-Wales
FINNEMORE, Peter (Peter Finnemore graduated in 1987 in Fine Art Photography at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. In 1994 he received an MFA in Photography at the University of Michigan, USA. He lives and works in Llanelli, west Wales. His recent exhibitions include, University of Michigan Galleries, USA, Street Level Gallery, Glasgow and Cambridge Darkroom Gallery, England. In 2005 he represented Wales at the Venice Biennale of Art and was awarded the Gold Medal for Fine Art at the 2005 National Eistedfodd.
Peter Finnemore’s poetic and multi-layered art draws upon his close attachment to his home place in rural west Wales, and tests the boundaries of the ordinary. Finnemore locates his practice within and around visual explorations on the themes of Welsh identity; it’s history, culture, landscape and it’s psychological and spiritual nuances.
Finnemore’s films have evolved from his stills photographic works for which he is well known and which in themselves synthesised performance activities, tableaux and the photographic document.
The site of his films is his family garden and home space. Although these are ordinary spaces they are infused with theatrical and transformative possibilities and a number of different ideas are explored including ritualised and existential movement, the creation of visual koans, cultural enquiry, cosmology, humour and pathos.)
Lesson 56-Wales was made in the months following the devolution referendum in 1997 that voted for the creation of the Welsh Assembly. The work is based on photographs of schoolbooks studied by Peter Finnemore's grandmother at her school in Carmarthenshire. The books, published at the height of the British Empire, undermine the autonomy, language and culture of Wales, telling the story of the nation from an exclusively British perspective. Finnemore explained that the work represents “the state’s role in the colonisation of the mind and imagination through education, and the perpetuation of stereotypical assumptions and impotent mythologies”.
Creation/Production
Date: 1998
Acquisition
Gift
Given by The Contemporary Art Society for Wales
Measurements
Height
(cm): 61.4
Width
(cm): 83.6
Techniques
photograph on aluminium
photograph
Fine Art - works on paper
Location
Currently on loan
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