Imogen Mansfield

Encounters of Acute Proximity

A spoken word performance with accompanying photographs that dissects ‘the locale of self’, testing how we view the concept of place through the imagination.

Series of 17 x 35mm photographs
Spoken word audio recording
13:00 MP3 Player

about imogen

Through writing and photography, Imogen Mansfield’s practice encircles notions of intimacy, proximity and duplicity. Her work questions how we can come to view the concept of place as a junction, a confluence of input and information; not only of physical location, but also of abstract, non-local and fictitious environments. Articulating and dissecting the locale of self in response to shifting, unstable experiences of landscape and inhabitance, she depicts a complex and intangible logic of relationship, mind and place.

Encounters of Acute Proximity

Extract from audio work

We are sitting at the water’s periphery, on stones each of an intricate design. I am watching how you hold the object in your hands, wrapped around the body, secure and subtle at once ~ index finger long and poised on the shutter, spiralling knuckles a composed and agile frame. It is the first time that anyone has so sincerely interrogated me, captured such a violent honesty, pulling tighter on the complicated knots of friendship and romance. I was afraid that I wouldn’t like the way that you see me, and that this would come between us, creating a dissonance in the delicate qualities of what it means to come to know one another. We cannot break free from the ammunition of this act; to satiate a dark appetite, to stabilise the elusive nature of the strings which stretch between us.