Grey Mountain

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Downing Street

A monochromatic image of clouds floats beneath an overlaid floral pattern, as if viewed through a decorative screen. This is a double-layered image combined to form a composite picture. Henna Nadeem uses found photographs which she hand-cuts into intricate motifs, and superimposes them over images from books, calendars and magazines. Motifs derive from Islamic and Asian decorative patterns, some of which she magnifies or alters.

By re-interpreting images from discarded ephemera, Nadeem creates imaginary landscapes. Growing up in rural Yorkshire, she cites an uneasy relationship with nature as an early influence on her work. Combined with childhood memories of horror movies, her images evoke fairytale forests and landscapes.

Ex-Royal College of Art graduate, Henna Nadeem lives in London. Many of her works use found images sourced from old books and National Geographic magazines which she hand cuts into intricate patterns and layers one over the other. This ‘lo-tech’ process involving scissors, scalpel and tweezers creates imaginary landscapes from small, often fragile images. Landscape and pattern define her work and distinguish her Cockspur Street designs. Entitled Heaven n Earth, they occupy the sixth and first floor meeting rooms. An Islamic symbol of heaven, the divided circles on the top floor create a star-burst sky in colours inspired by London sunsets. The first floor design will incorporate landscape forms in earthier colours. This is one of Nadeem’s larger-scale projects: others include a Platform for Art commission for Piccadilly Underground station; and a decorative gate for a community project in Brick Lane, east London.

Places

Subjects

landscape C20th, mountain

Materials & Techniques

paper (as artists material), collage, photograph (as object name)

Artist

Henna Nadeem (1966 - )

Title

Grey Mountain

Date

2000

Medium

Collage

Dimensions

height: 29.00 cm, width: 23.30 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from the artist, March 2005

Inscription

none visible

Provenance

the artist

GAC number

18008