Gemma Anderson in conversation with Stephen Brown, writer of ‘Future Me’

Since graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2007 Gemma Anderson has been combining research, drawing and printmaking. She was artist in residence in Ireland, France and Japan where she collected imagery from both her personal surroundings and formal archives with an immediate need to record, and lay bare her mnemonic devices.

 

Anderson exhibits her journey from Ireland to France to Japan in her recording of the people and their natural history, combining botanical and geological studies, portraits and landscapes, which are recorded straight onto her etching plate. During her time in residencies, Anderson created an archive of the natural phenomena of a particular time and place. Her works display a remarkable convergence between “a scientific eye searching to intimately know a face, a leaf, a rock, animal or insect” and “an imagination that plays jovially with the hurdles of reality” (Juliette Giudicelli, Art Writer, Paris 2009). “Gemma Anderson’s work is transparently fabulous – like a good fable, it seems to run through a series of ‘as ifs’: as if we could start again – observing, possessing the world for the first time” (Francisco Lobo, Artist and Writer, London 2007)