Gallery: Photography: Gillian Mann | clivejames.com
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Gillian Mann

Gillian Mann started her career with the camera when she was an air hostess for British Caledonian Airways. Flying all over the world on her professional duties, she moonlighted as a photographer of landscapes and people. Later on, with her children grown up and off to university, she did an A level in photography, moved on to an HND at West Kent college, and is now completing a degree at the University of Kent. Her current main interest is in macro work, viewed from different perspectives with a Mamiya RZ 67 medium format camera, fitted with a macro lens. (I feel wonderfully techno-savvy as I transcribe these details: all I really know is that the results are hauntingly poetic.) She generally uses Fuji transparency ASA 100 film. (And ideally precise, so that even a curve, in the resolutely four-square context of a website like this, looks thoroughly meant.) Her first major project was exhibited at Truman’s Brewery, Brick Lane, where it attracted intense interest. Open books continue to be a central theme, and as a bookman myself — one who has always loved the actual look and feel of his working materials — I salute her as a current visual artist who realises the inherent sensuality of paper pages ruffling apart. (Fantin-Latour's portrait of his sister holding a book conveys the same thrill, but in a different medium.) A visitor from a planet designed by Bridget Riley, Gillian Mann encountered my assistant at a Brixton arts fair and was kidnapped for this website, where her new and strange lyricism is very welcome. Russian constructivists and suprematists, were they able to travel through time along with their work, would recognize a direct descendant.

Gillian Mann can be contacted at <jilly_mann [at] hotmail.com>