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- Niamh Porter
Niamh
Porter
Capital: Icons of Modernity
Niamh Porter’s work examines the innovative architecture that forms European cities. Her documentary field research records the legacy of Modernist design, the forms and materials that construct the city’s distinctive identity. Monumental in scale, these buildings, designed from 1960 to 2014, exhibit the realisation of Modernist ideology and technology. Using photography to document what is seemingly indestructible; the corporate headquarters, residential buildings, public squares of Berlin, London and Rotterdam, Porter translates the tension between permanence and transience into painting. The landmarks depicted have been rebuilt from wreckage, demonstrating the unexpected fragile state of the built environment.
The work engages with what prodigious architecture signifies; wealth, power, ambition, transformation and dominance. It is in these power structures that political and social realities are shaped. In availing of a specific vantage point, Porter adopts the position of the voyeur; investigating from a height or the flâneur; immersed in the experience of walking in the street. Influenced by Constructivist photography, this work aims to express the dynamism of the city and relationship between photography and painting, a balance between digital and manual manipulation is achieved. The near exclusive use of metal and glass in urban space, the bleaching of historical architecture and the significant photographic processes used throughout the work inspires the provisional form and colour.