Artists Access to Art Colleges: Home

University of Bedfordshire   2008/2009

Caitriona Dunnett

Caitriona’s main area of interest is the undefined line between the fabricated and the real. In Portrait Miniatures, she explores her fascination with photography’s historic relationship with painting and the shifting boundaries between the suggestiveness of the ‘constructed image’ in painting and the definitiveness of the ‘captured moment’ in photography.

Traditionally, portrait miniatures were commissioned to commemorate family ties or proclaim social status in the same manner as photography portraits today. Portrait miniaturists were the first group of artists to feel the effect of photography’s invention. To ensure survival many found a renewed occupation in colouring photographs.

The series consists of five small digital montages, assembled from photographs of dolls, props, backgrounds and paintings. The constructed images have been digitally painted over to reference western portrait miniature paintings.

Names, dates, costumes and mementoes have been planted by Caitriona to loosely guide the viewer and summon familiar narratives. She playfully invites the viewer to gradually substitute the stories of the people in the paintings with their own. The existence of the portraits depends upon the viewers will to project their own memories and fantasies on her characters.

Caitriona would like to use the access period to further explore the boundaries between the fabricated and the real, by crossing alternative photographic processes with digital technologies. She is keen to create a series of carte-de-visites, daguerreotypes and a stereograph in the college’s facilities. Her aim is to produce and a body of work for exhibition.

Caitriona believes that university environments encourage cross-fertilization of ideas and knowledge between students, helping to shape projects. She would value the opportunity of developing her work in the University of Bedfordshire.